Spinach!?

Chez Pim has a special guest blogger today, his name is Andy Griffin. Andy and his wife Julia operates Mariquita Farm in Santa Cruz county, growing an amazing array of delectable vegetables including rare and heirloom varieties.

Andy was the original owner of Riverside Farms, a pioneer in the bagged baby greens market. Ten years ago he sold Riverside Farms to the company which later became Natural Selections, the company at the very center of the current fiasco. Needless to say Andy has both the knowledge and the perspective to offer a commentary about the situation, and he's agreed to do that here on Chez Pim.

Read it in its entirety. This is the best and most informative piece of writing about this mess I've seen since this whole thing began. It certainly explains a lot of things for me, and I hope it will for you too.

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Spinach!?
by Andy Griffin

Deborah Schot, a reporter from the L.A. Times, called me to ask for an opinion about the e coli outbreak in prepackaged fresh spinach that has killed one person and sickened hundreds more. And yes, I have an opinion. I think the F.D.A. employee that I heard on the radio yesterday urging people to play it safe and not eat fresh spinach is ignorant. Although the victims got sick by eating spinach from a sealed bag it’s wrong to seize on spinach as the culprit in the controversy; it makes more sense to look at the processing and handling of pre-packaged greens in general. Put another way, it’s the harvest procedures that were followed, the pre-washed claim made for the greens, and the bagged environment the greens are in that are the relevant issues, not the specific variety of leafy greens that were actually contaminated at some point during the harvest and post harvest handling. By fingering any spinach as suspicious, even bunched fresh spinach, the F.D.A. isn’t educating anyone, or solving the problem. They’re just spreading fear on a national scale.

The L.A. Times called me because I’m a farmer and I’m quick with a sound bite, but also because I have a background in the baby spinach and salad business. Back in the dark ages when I started farming organically people bought their spinach in bunches and their salad as heads of lettuce. My first career in farming was in the production of the then new baby salad greens and baby spinach. We harvested the crops by hand, washed them, and packed them loose in unsealed bags. In 1996 my partners and I sold our company, Riverside Farms, to the company that became Natural Selections, which happens to be the company at the heart of the current controversy. Their packing plant was once the packing plant for our farm, though it was a lot smaller and less sophisticated back then. Our former label, Riverside Farms, was one of the labels pulled from the shelves this week. Ready Pac and Earthbound Farms, two of the other labels pulled, were labels that I once grew and harvested raw products for so, for me, this bad news has a personal angle.

When we harvested baby greens by hand at Riverside Farms the workers dipped their knives periodically in buckets of antiseptic solution to clean them. We were unsophisticated then, compared to the way the industry is today, but we knew that any bacteria on the knife could contaminate the wound in the leaf where it was severed from the plant at the moment of harvest. We also knew that baby salad greens that were harvested by dirty knives were far more likely to break down quickly in the cooler, even after being washed, because the wash process, no matter how good, can’t really remove bacteria that has been introduced into the leaf by a dirty blade.

Riverside Farms had a state of the art wash line for 1995 .but we went the way of the dinosaurs in part because we couldn’t afford to pay the escalating labor costs of a unionized crew of hundreds of salad cutters when our competitors were going to be harvesting tons of product cheaply with machines. Not long after we went out of business harvesting machines became the industry standard. All in all, an argument can probably be made that the big harvest machines probably cut the product even cleaner than individual workers can , especially if some individual harvester is sloppy and careless. But, by the same token, if the cutting blade on a harvesting machine isn’t properly cleaned tons and tons of product can be contaminated by a filthy blade during the course of the day—not just tons and tons of baby spinach, but tons and tons of ANY PARTICULAR LEAFY GREEN VEGETABLE, ORGANIC, CONVENTIONAL, OR OTHERWISE, that is being harvested.

Let’s say some contaminated product makes it out of the field into the shed. The equipment in the large salad plant wash-line is all stainless steel, and the wash water that has been chlorinated to reduce bacteria levels. If the factory puts so much chlorine in the water that even potential bacteria pockets in the damaged tissue along the cuts of the leaves is killed the “fresh” salad greens will have been chemically contaminated into a swampy mess that smells like a municipal swimming pool. (Actually, when I smell the odor of ammonia that comes out of the sealed bags of those nasty little carrot plugs that are so popular I want to gag. When the day comes that someone gets sick from eating them and the F.D.A. tells people not to eat any carrots I’m going to sue! Think of all the bunched spinach growers losing their shirts because some fool at the F.D.A. doesn’t distinguish between packaged spinach that’s “conveniently” been “pre-washed” and a bunch of spinach that needs to be cut from the stems and cleaned in the sink before being eaten. I heard another) If the wash line procedures manage to kill 99.9% of all the offending bacteria, but due to the tons and tons of greens being processed over a short period of time a significant amount of contaminated product goes out to consumers there is still a real problem.

A psychologist might be able to do a better job than I in telling you why so many people feel comforted when they see their food coming to them in sterile looking sealed plastic bags covered in corporate logos, nutritional information, legal disclaimers and “use by” dates. “It’s convenient,” they say. It is true that the open piles of washed baby greens that were once the norm in supermarkets and farmers markets were vulnerable to post harvest/ post wash contamination. Those sneeze guards over the pizza parlor salad bar aren’t there for nothing. But I’ll tell you that every sealed bag of pre-washed greens is like a little green house. The greens inside are still alive, as are the bacteria living on them. If the produce in the bag is clean, great, but if it isn’t the bacteria present has a wonderful little sealed environment to reproduce in, free from any threat until the dressing splashes down and the shadow of a fork passes over. Frankly, I think convenience is overrated.

When my partners and I sold our salad washing company we sold the assets, the equipment, the leases, the receivables etc. but we also sold the right to compete. For five years I was contractually obliged to seek a way in agriculture that didn’t have anything to do with my previous experience in baby salad greens. I wasn’t sad to leave the big farm and the salad factory behind. Those years were fascinating for me, but stressful, and the more sophisticated everything became the more alienated I felt. I was out of my league. I turned to farmers markets and then, when that way of business didn’t prove to be sustainable Julia and I turned to the c.s.a. format, later joining forces with Steven and Jeanne. Maybe giving people a mixed box of seasonal vegetables that they have to wash and prepare isn’t “convenient” the way shipping thousands of cookie cutter boxes of salad out of a factory door is, and maybe it isn’t “convenient” for our supporters to have to wash their carrots or trim the coarse stems off their chard but that’s cooking, and cooking is a happy, healthy, balanced and therapeutic chore. I will be curious to follow the news and see what the inspectors discover in their search. If it turns out that I’m wrong and it was the spinach that was what gave shelter and sustenance to the e coli and the problem is not due to a slip-up in harvest or post harvest sanitary procedures on the factory farms I’ll be the first to admit to ignorance. But for now I’m going to call my seed dealer and order some spinach seed; it’s probably on special today, and it grows well in Hollister in the fall.

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Andy writes a newsletter called The Ladybug Letter, with musings about sustainable agriculture, news from the farm, and special recipes from Julia. You can subscribe to it here.

Comments

[Mem]

Thanks to Andy for the straight dope on bagged greens. When will the supermarkets wise up to the fact that a lot of us consumers don't want so much packaging?

[David]

That was a great letter, thanks Pim & Andy...

[J. Bo]

Thank you, Andy... and thank you, Pim, for bringing Andy's sane and comprehensive story to us.

[sam]

thanks pim and andy for this perspective.

[Bux]

Marrion Burros in the NY Times today, suggests buying local as one of the ways to reduce the chance of getting contaminated produce. Buying local to the NY Times would, I assume, mean from northeastern area farms, particularly New York and New Jersey. It would also mean buying loose or bunched spinach. It would certainly point to buying at famer's markets.

Dr. David Acheson, chief medical officer of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the F.D.A., is quoted as acknowledging that local spinach is less of a risk. "'Clearly the risk is significantly reduced if you know the farmer and know his farm,' he said, "particularly if you are on the East Coast,' far from the suspected source of the contamination."

That's less solace to small local producers in California, but it's some indication that even the F.D.A. is acknowledging the the potential of greater risk in the industrial scale agribusiness.

Times article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/dining/20greens.html?n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fE%2fE%20Coli%20%28Bacteria%29

[Catherine]

fascinating and very educational -thank you.

[cen]

Thanks Andy-- the first sensible voice I've heard about this. It's just good, old commonsense advice: know where your food comes from, do your own processing (washing and cooking, that is), and treat the gifts of the land and those that nurture them with care with respect. Why is it that as a culture we just can't see how important this is until someone dies from contaminated spinach? Obviously, starting with the FDA, we don't even get it then. The fault isn't with the spinach, and it's not just with our agriculture-- it's with our culture. Time to re-read some of Ed Espe Brown's meditations on salad making. Best to you, Andy! Thanks for inviting Andy, Pim!

[Yishay]

Sorry, couldn't resist the temptation:

http://www.jonco48.com/blog/Fresh_20Vegetables.jpg

[Bill Garnett]

A great read -- and thanks for bringing some balance to this issue.

[Kim U]

Thanks for sharing your perspective, it was very informative.

It's disappointing that there isn't more discussion in the media about how much eating locally and seasonally would improve this type of situation.

[Owen]

Nice piece - my local CSA has a newsletter that also covered the controversy from a similar but different angle - IMHO worth a read:

http://www.terrafirmafarm.com/092006.html

[Leila]

I tend to buy head lettuce (organic) and wash it, because I'm too cheap to pay for "yuppie lettuce." But I had been springing for tubs of organic baby spinach when shopping at the supermarket, for "convenience." No more.

We also have baby carrots around for the children, and I have wondered about that water they sit in, and that odor in the bag. No more of that, either. It's easy enough to peel a big carrot.

[Desertbitch]

wow. I am the consumer of bagged lettuce. I am the target. I don't think I am a buyer of it anymore.
Thank you for a good and informative (gag) read.

[Kelly]

Thank you for that informative post.
In all honesty, I think the media loves to send the general public into a scare frenzy, whether it be over spinach or terrorist attacks.
I even heard one day (on the radio) that they don't suspect the spinach incident to be terrorist related. Give me a break.
Thank you for being a reasonable voice among all of the chaos.

[Julie O'Hara]

That was really enlightening. Thanks, Pim and Andy.

[Richard Newquist]

This whole spinach affair is certainly unfortunate from the death and illness but also from the commercial point of view.

I'm a consumer living in Florida who is unable to get ANY spinach because of the FDA ban. It is totally rediculous that all spinach has been condemned rather that pre-washed and bagged spinach from Natural Selections in California.

The FDA doesn't have any sense at all condemning all spinach without any qualification. They have hurt the industry and I'm thinking about suing if I ever get colon polyps.

Richard Newquist
Jacksonville, FL

[Frank]

We have been trying to alert the agricultural and legislative entities here in California about their use of recycled water to irrigate spinach and lettuce in the Salinas Valley.

The URL's below with direct you to some of my articles on this issue and the connection to the E. Coli 0157H:7 outbreaks.

http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/2006/10/e_coli_why_mont.html

http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/2006/10/e_coli_is_there.html


Frank