E. COLI BEDEVILS PRODUCE INDUSTRY

Sep 24, 2006
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Elizabeth Lee

In the rich earth of the Salinas Valley, known as the Salad Bowl of the World, pale green baby spinach plants cluster thickly on fields that stretch toward distant hills. The climate is so welcoming that more than half of all lettuce and spinach grown in America comes from this California valley. Baby greens spend less than a month in the fields, where different contractors may seed, irrigate, fertilize and harvest them before they pass through a broker's hands and on to a processing house.

The fields are laser-leveled for precise cutting. At harvest time, mower machines go through the spinach fields, where as many as a million plants an acre grow in wide beds, cutting the leaves close to the soil and lifting them onto a conveyor belt. But this week, farmers are plowing under the crops as spinach growers, processors and health authorities search for answers to an E. coli O157:H7 epidemic that has sickened 166 Americans in 25 states and killed at least one. Something is wrong in the growing fields of the Salinas Valley and elsewhere. Something that even after 20 outbreaks traced to lettuce and spinach in 11 years, nobody has solved. And observers worry this case will be no different: Theories, but no definitive answers.

By the time people get sick and E. coli is confirmed, the trail is already cold. The fields are long since harvested, processing facilities, trucks and totes cleaned, supermarket produce cases refreshed. Yet figuring out why a small quantity of leafy greens keep coming in contact with the deadly bacteria is critical. Mike Doyle, director of the University of Georgia Center for Food Safety in Griffin, was quoted as saying, "If the industry contaminates it, it's too late. Even if we wash the heck out of cut lettuce, if it's in the tissue, in the stem, we're not going to be able to remove it except for cooking it. Until the fresh-cut produce industry fixes the problems, I would not eat bagged salads."

Typically, the sheared leaves go into harvest totes that are stacked as the mowing machine moves down a row. Then they're placed into refrigerated trailers and trucked to food processing plants where the temperature stays below 40 degrees. They'll be washed in chlorinated water, a cleansing that eliminates up to 99 percent of any bacteria clinging to them, and finally nestle in plastic bags with special gases that keep them fresh for up to two weeks. But investigators acknowledge that at any point, things can go awry.

Fields can be contaminated from cattle waste and flood waters that could harbor E. coli -- or by field workers who don't have or don't use hand- washing stations or toilets. Cut salad greens might spread bacteria to other leaves as they are harvested. Contamination could spread among the knives, totes or trailers. Processing plants also could be suspect: The water that cleanses leaves is chlorinated to prevent cross-contamination, but if there isn't enough disinfectant, germs could spread. The good news is that virtually all the time, food safety systems do work. California's Monterey County, which lies partially in the Salinas Valley, produced 125,000 tons of spinach last year on more than 10,000 acres.

The trouble is, just a tiny amount of E. coli can cause serious illness, lifelong kidney damage or death, especially in children and the elderly. Fresh cut salads are now a $3 billion industry in the United States. Fresh spinach consumption has risen from a half-pound per person annually to 2.2 pounds in the past decade. Romaine lettuce, ubiquitous in bagged salad blends, has shot up from 5.8 pounds to 12.2 pounds. The FDA's Sept. 14 advice to stop eating fresh spinach could cost the industry $50 million to $100 million a month, estimates the Produce Marketing Association, a Delaware-based trade group.

That potential impact was lessened some on Friday when federal health officials declared spinach grown outside the Salinas Valley safe for consumption. Still, it could be days before the leafy green returns to stores. Natural Selection, which packages dozens of brands of spinach under such names as Earthbound Farm and Dole, has been linked to the outbreak. Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney representing more than 30 people sickened by E. coli in this outbreak, was quoted as saying, "To go back to the farm at this point to try to figure out what the problem is and how it happened is not even like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It's like trying to find a needle on the moon."

Kathy Means, a spokeswoman for the Produce Marketing Association, was cited as saying, The industry wants more than anything to find out what's causing the problem." Trade groups are considering testing for bacteria in soil and water and imposing more stringent hygiene standards for processing plants and field workers in hopes of getting the FDA to lift its ban on spinach. The story goes on to say that the beef industry has learned some hard lessons about E. coli -- starting in 1982, when 47 people got sick from eating undercooked hamburgers at a fast food chain.

But it wasn't until 1993, when undercooked burgers were blamed for hundreds of illnesses and four deaths in children who ate at Jack-in-the-Box restaurants, that government food safety officials imposed new standards for processing meat. Pressure to clean up packing plants, where cattle feces could contaminate huge amounts of meat, also came from restaurants and grocery stores that tightened contracts with suppliers to guard against the bacteria. Meatpackers turned to technologies like steam pasteurization and acid sprays of carcasses, as well as trimming out and throwing away cattle parts that had come in contact with feces.

The last major recall of contaminated ground beef was in 2002, when a ConAgra plant in Greeley, Colo., asked consumers and retailers to throw out 19 million pounds of meat produced over three months. UGA's Doyle was further cite as saying it's going to take similar pressures to get the produce industry to address E. coli, adding, "The produce industry has not done much to develop creative approaches to reducing this risk because it's not cost-effective for them to do this."

Treating salads with mild heat just above body temperature and low levels of an organic acid would kill E. coli and other dangerous bacteria, he said. The downside: The taste and texture of the lettuce might be affected. Nobody, Means said, wants to eat limp leaves.