New Food Safety Rules May Do More Harm Than Good

By Jason Mark, Earth Island Journal. Posted May 7, 2008.

Dale Coke has been farming in California's San Benito County for nearly 30 years, and the thousands of days of wind and sun are etched in the deep lines of his long, lean face. His hands are tough, with fingers that are as adept at fixing a broken water pump as they are at handling a freshly cut head of lettuce. Coke, 54 with salt-and-pepper hair, was one of the pioneers of the organic farming industry. In 1980, he started growing salad mix in the valleys of California's Central Coast, and by the end of the 1990s he had nearly 500 acres under cultivation. But then the salad mix market "got too complicated," he says, and so he downsized to 250 acres, and today focuses on specialty crops such as fennel, dinosaur kale, and beets, which he sells to Whole Foods and restaurants.

When talking about the economics of organic farming, a joker's grin flirts with the edges of Coke's mouth, as if he knows the punch line to some inside joke about a business he has seen transform from a mom-and-pop enterprise to a multibillion dollar industry that is the fastest growing segment of the food market. But for Coke, recent changes in the fresh produce industry are nothing to laugh about. A year and a half after an E. coli outbreak traced to bagged spinach killed three people, hospitalized 100, and sickened dozens more, farmers and processors are still struggling with how best to ensure food safety. According to Coke and other farmers, some of the new practices intended to improve food safety are misguided and misinformed, and risk undermining environmentally sound farming practices in the area surrounding California's Salinas Valley. The region produces more than half of the country's lettuce, and is affectionately referred to by locals as "The Nation's Salad Bowl."

"This is all a knee-jerk reaction by the salad marketers to get their market back, because no one would touch spinach," Coke says. "It's a sham foisted on the consumers by the salad processors. ... The farmers are caught between these two things [food safety rules and environmental protection], and now they don't know what to do. Are they going to tear out all the trees?"

It's a chilly December day, and the rolling hills surrounding Coke's fields are just starting to turn from gold to green. We're driving in Coke's mud-splattered Honda Element as he takes me on a tour of his ranch, which is just down the road from the sleepy mission town of San Juan Bautista. We pass a Latino field crew harvesting chard and burdock root, then turn past a shelterbelt of pines. Another turn brings us alongside an irrigation ditch bordered with reeds and native willows. As Coke complains about how "it seems like the new vision of salad crops is bare dirt or lettuce with no room for wildlife to hang out," a great egret steps from the brush. The tall bird stands in the sun for a minute, and Coke and I silently watch the animal. Then Coke puts his foot on the gas and the bird takes flight, a bright white streak against the dark brown fields.

It's a lovely sight -- unless, that is, you work as a food safety inspector for one of the bag lettuce processors, in which case that bird could be considered a risk for spreading dangerous pathogens.

The September 2006 E. coli outbreak dealt a major blow to the $2.5 billion bagged salad industry, as sales dropped 30 percent. To help ease consumer worries -- and to forestall any new federal or state regulations -- the salad packagers created the "Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement" (LGMA). The agreement, which most of the large growers have signed on to, sets up baseline standards for sanitizing equipment, field worker cleanliness, water testing, and restricting wildlife encroachments. To further distinguish themselves among consumers, some processors are demanding even stricter rules -- often called "super metrics" -- from their grower-suppliers. For example, some packagers won't accept lettuce grown within 150 feet of a waterway that attracts wildlife, and are requiring fields to be set back a quarter of a mile from any cattle pasture. If livestock or wild animals do gain access to a field, the grower is expected to "destroy any product potentially contaminated by the animal." According to some standards, Coke's tree-lined canal, the amphibians that live there, and the egret that uses it as a watering hole are unacceptable vectors for disease.

Such requirements are causing frustration and anger among both small-scale organic farmers and larger conventional growers who say that the food safety rules have gone too far, and in the process are rolling back decades of progress in maintaining water quality, establishing wildlife corridors, and protecting biodiversity.

A spring 2007 survey conducted by the Monterey County Resource Conservation District found that 40 percent of farmers on the California Central Coast have removed wildlife from their fields on the recommendation of food safety auditors. About 30 percent have eliminated non-crop vegetation from their farms, and seven percent of farmers have bulldozed in ponds or other waterways to meet processor requirements. One grower lost $17,500 worth of crops because deer tracks were found in his field; another had to halt a harvest because frogs and tadpoles were discovered in a nearby creek. Many growers who participated in the survey expressed concern about the conflicting priorities of food safety and environmental protection.

See more stories tagged with: environment, e. coli, safety, organic, farming

Jason Mark is the co-author, with Kevin Danaher, of Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power. He is researching a book about the future of food.

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