Should bagged, pre-washed salad greens be washed again in the home kitchen?

Many food safety types say no.

During the idle but oh-so-smoothing brand of chat-chit practiced by National Public Radio that preceded a story about E. coli and Salmonella in leafy greens from Salinas, Calif., one reporter said, “I wash it every time but I don’t know if it actually helps.”

Reporter Dan Charles responded, “It says prewashed but washing might help.”

So might a lot of others things not fit for this family publication.

A review paper published in Food Protection Trends in 2007 contained guidelines developed by a panel of food safety types and concluded:

"… leafy green salad in sealed bags labeled ‘washed’ or ‘ready-to-eat’ that are produced in a facility inspected by a regulatory authority and operated under cGMPs, does not need additional washing at the time of use unless specifically directed on the label.”

The panel also advised that additional washing of ready-to-eat green salads is not likely to enhance safety.

“The risk of cross contamination from food handlers and food contact surfaces used during washing may outweigh any safety benefit that further washing may confer."

When washing at home, "there's a risk that is the sink where you just washed your chicken," said Donald Schaffner, Rutgers University professor of food science, in a 2011 interview.

Today’s NPR soothfest revisited what growers in California are doing to enhanced food safety and the 2006 E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in spinach that killed 3 and sickened at least 200.

Will Daniels, senior vice president for operations and organic integrity at Earthbound Farm, based in San Juan Bautista, told NPR, "I was at the center of the investigation and really took it very hard. It was just a real tough time to go through, and something that I don't ever want to go through again."

Investigators found E. coli bacteria that matched the microbes that were making people sick on a ranch that was one of Earthbound's suppliers. But those bacteria were in animal feces a mile from the spinach field, Daniels says, "with no clear indication of what caused the contamination from a mile away to get into the spinach field itself."

"Unfortunately, it looks like every animal is suspect," says Bob Martin, general manager of Rio Farms, in King City, Calif.

Even birds. "Birds are a big issue! They carry human pathogens, and we can't put diapers on them. We can't dome our fields; there's nothing we can do, short of trying to scare them away.”

Lettuce fields now have to be separated from cattle pastures, and throughout the valley, next to lettuce fields, you see white plastic pipes. Inside those pipes are mouse traps.

And the birds? Vegetable buyers won't take anything from the area directly under power lines.

"When it comes to food safety, if it's grown outdoors, forget it, there's no such thing as zero tolerance," says Bob Martin. "And everybody knows that, except for some food safety personnel of the big food buyers."

Daniels of Earthbound Farms was further quoted as saying, "It is a true test-and-hold program, so we have to wait to get the negative results before we put it on a truck. Any positives go to the landfill.”

There still are positives. Not very often, but every five weeks or so, one of these tests catches a sample that's contaminated with disease-causing E. coli or Salmonella.

A table of leafy green related outbreak is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/leafy-greens-related-outbreaks.

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 Woe is the California lettuce and spinach grower.

"It was just more regulations. More inspections. More paperwork. More filings. More fees," said Chris Bunn, part of a four-generation Salinas Valley farming family. Now in his 60s, he quit two years after the 2006 outbreak. "I miss it terribly," Bunn said. "It was a wonderful business."

Deborah Schoch, a senior writer at the California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting, writes in the Mercury News today that five years after their healthy-looking green fields became the epicenter of a national food disaster, farmers in the Salinas Valley are still working to regain something even the most bountiful harvest can't ensure: the public's trust.

They are doing their best to rebound after investigators linked spinach grown and bagged here to a deadly E. coli strain that would kill three people, sicken 206 more and shake the nation's faith in California leafy greens. So far, they have succeeded in avoiding another major outbreak.

Last year, Monterey County produced spinach worth $127.5 million, down from $188.2 million in 2005, according to reports from the county agricultural commissioner's office.

Salinas Valley growers and processors have retooled nearly every step in their industry -- from planting seedlings to harvesting and washing greens. They have rallied to create a state-industry pact on how to protect 14 types of leafy greens that is being held up as a national model.

"It was the watershed moment for the produce industry," said Joe Pezzini, chief operating officer of Ocean Mist Farms in Castroville.

Too bad it didn’t happen 10 years earlier.

In October, 1996, a 16-month-old Denver girl drank Smoothie juice manufactured by Odwalla Inc. of Half Moon Bay, California. She died several weeks later; 64 others became ill in several western U.S. states and British Columbia after drinking the same juices, which contained unpasteurized apple cider -- and E. coli O157:H7. Investigators believed that some of the apples used to make the cider might have been insufficiently washed after falling to the ground and coming into contact with deer feces.

Almost 10 years later, on Sept. 14, 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that an outbreak of E. coli O157: H7 had killed a 77-year-old woman and sickened 49 others (United States Food and Drug Administration, 2006). The FDA learned from the Centers for Disease Control and Wisconsin health officials that the outbreak may have been linked to the consumption of produce and identified bagged fresh spinach as a possible cause.

In the decade between these two watershed outbreaks, almost 500 outbreaks of foodborne illness involving fresh produce were documented, publicized and led to some changes within the industry, yet what author Malcolm Gladwell would call a tipping point -- "a point at which a slow gradual change becomes irreversible and then proceeds with gathering pace"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_Point) -- in public awareness about produce-associated risks did not happen until the spinach E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in the fall of 2006. At what point did sufficient evidence exist to compel the fresh produce industry to embrace the kind of change the sector has heralded since 2007? And at what point will future evidence be deemed sufficient to initiate change within an industry?

In 1996, following extensive public and political discussions about microbial food safety in meat, the focus shifted to fresh fruits and vegetables, following an outbreak of Cyclospora cayetanesis ultimately linked to Guatemalan raspberries that sickened 1,465 in 21 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1997), and subsequently Odwalla. That same year, Beuchat (1996) published a review on pathogenic microorganisms in fresh fruits and vegetables and identified numerous pathways of contamination.

By 1997, researchers at CDC were stating that pathogens could contaminate at any point along the fresh produce food chain -- at the farm, processing plant, transportation vehicle, retail store or foodservice operation and the home -- and that by understanding where potential problems existed, it was possible to develop strategies to reduce risks of contamination. Researchers also reported that the use of pathogen-free water for washing would minimize risk of contamination.

Yet it would take a decade and some 29 leafy green-related outbreaks before spinach in 2006 became a tipping point.

What was absent in this decade of outbreaks, letters from regulators, plans from industry associations and media accounts, was verification that farmers and others in the farm-to-fork food safety system were seriously internalizing the messages about risk, the numbers of sick people, and translating such information into front-line food safety behavioral change.

Today, according to  Schoch, major food and retail chains, from McDonald's to Walmart, want proof that their lettuce is as clean as any natural product can be.

That means no cattle grazing uphill from a spinach farm, no roaming wild pigs, no farm crews without hairnets or gloves, no missing reports.

Some food chains even send inspectors unannounced.

"They'll be the Toyota Camry with the Hertz sticker on the edge of the field, looking with binoculars," said Mike Dobler, 50, a third-generation grower who works with his family on a large-scale vegetable farm based in Watsonville.

"They're looking to see if you're doing what you say you're doing," Dobler said.

Before September 2006, he said, "we were taken at our word, and nobody asked."

Actually, lots of people asked, including FDA, state public health types, journalists, lawyers and academics. Growers apparently just didn’t pay attention.

A table of leafy green related outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/leafy-greens-related-outbreaks (they didn’t all originate with California produce, but lots did).

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The folks that produce fresh spinach and lettuce are channeling their inner Milkshake, dialing back to late 2003 when weblogs or blogs began to emerge in force, and launched their own blog – last week.

The awkwardly named Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement – LGMA for funksters – is starting a “new dialogue on leafy greens food safety” with at least two blog posts a month.

Lowered expectations is good, especially when LGMA is eight years late to the blogshpere and about 10 years late to the food-safety-in-produce thing. The worst is to start a web page or a blog and then not follow through. Listeria-stricken Maple Leaf Foods hasn’t posted anything new on its Journey-inspired Our Journey to Food Safety Leadership, since Nov. 2010. Maybe they are on other journeys, looking for that small town girl.

LGMA chairman Jamie Strachan wrote in the inaugural blog on April 14, 2011, that it’s been four years since this “first-of-its-kind program began. It hasn't been easy, but the very fact that the LGMA exists today is proof that the challenges of implementing a comprehensive food safety system for an entire commodity can be overcome.”

LGMA didn’t invent it. Lots of groups have marketing orders. We did the whole food safety thing with the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Marketing Board – as it was called back then – in 2000.

Chairman Strachan also writes, “I'm often asked, ‘How do you know the LGMA is working?’

“The answer to that question is simple — the LGMA is working to establish a culture of food safety on leafy greens farms. Most farmers will tell you that leafy greens were safe before the LGMA came along, but what is changed today is the high level of attention food safety on the farm now receives. Everyone involved in operations, from the farmer to the harvesters, know and understand that food safety considerations are ALWAYS top of mind.”

That’s not verification. And people who write in all caps are YELLING to get attention, maybe because their writing sucks.

They’ve got the rhetoric; where’s the reality?

There have been many reinterpretations of history regarding fresh produce and microbial food safety. We have argued the tipping point was 1996, involving both the Odwalla E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in unpasteurized juice, coupled with the cyclospora outbreak which was initially and erroneously linked to California strawberries (it was Guatemalan raspberries). This led to the first attempts at comprehensive on-farm food safety programs for fresh produce because, these bugs ain’t going to be washed off; they have to be prevented, as much as possible, from getting on or in fresh produce on the farm.

For the growers of leafy greens, things apparently didn’t tip until the 2006 E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in bagged spinach from California that sickened 200 and killed four, despite 29 previous outbreaks and years of warning from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

A table of leafy green foodborne illness outbreaks is available at:
http://bites.ksu.edu/Outbreaks%20related%20to%20leafy%20greens%201993-2010

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided proposed to take LGMA national.

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) is requesting comment on the creation of a voluntary National Leafy Green Marketing Agreement (NLGMA) that would assist all segments of the leafy green industry in meeting commercial food quality and safety requirements.”

Full justification for the proposed rule is available at http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/getfile?dDocName=STELPRDC5077207

When we were hanging out with greenhouse tomato growers, the joke we got familiar with was:

“What’s the worst thing you can say to a farmer?”

“Hi, I’m from the government, I’m here to help.”

If the government needs to be involved, things have really gone bad.

Should a federal food safety program be based on LGMA, a group that was dragged to the food safety party and is always behind?

 

Stop waiting for government. And stop channeling Kelis. Make test results public, market food safety at retail so consumers can choose, and if people get sick from your product, be the first to tell the public.
 

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As we all recover from the flu, our appetites are only mediocre. In the spirit of things, I cooked an Archer Farms spinach and goat cheese pizza for dinner tonight. I added olives because that's one of the few things Sorenne currently loves. When looking at the cooking time and temp I noticed detailed directions that seem straight from this blog:

"For food safety, cook to an internal temperature of 165F as measured with a food thermometer.

Ovens vary: adjust baking time accordingly. Refrigerate or discard leftovers immediately."

This prompted me to play 100 questions with Doug, which he enjoys.

Me: "There's no meat on this pizza. Is 165 the temperature for killing salmonella?" 

Doug: "Yes."

Me: "How do I put a thermometer in a pizza?"

Doug: "Do you think mere mortals know where to put it? Why don't you try it?"

So I did (exactly as pictured). After cooking the pizza at 400F for about 18 minutes, I took it out and tried to eye the thickest part. Then I tried to put the thermometer in somewhat sideways being careful not to poke through the other side. To take the picture, I had to prop the thermometer on my spatula. The process made a big gash in my pizza toppings and the cheese stuck like glue on the thermometer, but it was easy to see the pizza was well above 165F.

The pizza was tasty but the outside crust overly crunchy and the inner crust still a bit soggy. Sorenne picked off the olives and ate them all, and I enjoyed a Boulevard Nutrcracker Seasonal Ale with mine. 

 

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