Let Us Eat Lettuce

Don’t forget to bust some silos! And let us know how you’re doing it!

And now…. Lettuce!

So, as you may have guessed, the title of this piece has both a global and a local angle, as is the norm for this column. First, of course, is the global (or at least hemispheric) — the recent cyclospora outbreak plaguing Texas, Nebraska and Iowa predominantly, but scattered other cases as well. The outbreak seems to be tied to lettuce served in some chain restaurants, although that assessment is so far limited to the cases in Nebraska and Iowa. The source of this lettuce is a company in Mexico, and highlights the impact that a global food chain can have far from the growing site.

In the meantime, we have moved past lettuce season at the local Farmer’s Markets in Baltimore, not because there is no longer lettuce available, but because so many other things are! I still buy lettuce every week (since I keep forgetting to reseed my own after the last batch got fried to a toasty, lettucy crisp in that one week of terrible heat), but it doesn’t excite me in the same way it did in May. It’s the same as the leaves on the trees, isn’t it?

May: “Oh wow, stop the car, everybody pause, look, a leaf-colored thing!”

July: “If there weren’t so many leaves, it might not be so humid. When is Fall starting?”

Anyway, lettuce is still great, but there are also fresh peaches, tomatoes, beets, string beans, and corn, so you’ll have to excuse me if lettuce is no longer as exciting. Still love it, less excited. Don’t be mad, lettuce.

The FDA and the CDC are in the midst of working out the route of transmission of this outbreak, but it’s more than likely that this episode is now in the past for those who were infected (although several dozen needed to be hospitalized). If they are lucky, they may be able to trace it back to a single worker in the facility in question, but again, this is already moving toward Old News, and by the time that information comes out, even the folks infected with the parasite will have begun to put the experience behind them. Probably.

Cyclospora causes a pretty unpleasant condition with symptoms that include the full range of gastrointestinal ickiness, as well as some flu-like fatigue and aches. Washing pre-bagged greens goes a long way toward preventing infection, though.

My thoughts about the global food/local food issues this story raises fall into a couple categories.

1. Local vegetables may sometimes be more expensive, but they also support your neighbor, so that’s good.

2. Scale is important in this issue. The scale of global food producers demands an amazing amount of labor and process, and that means that despite careful systemic controls, there are simply more cooks in the kitchen, so to speak, and any one of thousands of workers could potentially introduce a parasite into the process. Local, small scale farms may not be able to address the needs of a national or international restaurant chain (in the current model of doing things, anyway. Check out Big City Farms for an example of small scale local ‘industrial’ farming that supplies restaurants, or Farm Alliance for a farmer’s collective model), but the owners are often the workers, drivers, and bookkeepers, or share the responsibilities with a very small group of coworkers. This doesn’t prevent the possibility of infection, but it does mean that one or two people can know just about everything about the entire product cycle, from dirt to dinner table.

3. The global food chain is an essential component to almost all of us, especially in intensely urban or suburban regions. On the East coast, it’s pretty challenging to grow, hunt, and wildcraft all the food you need for your family, and if you do, it’s not an option for everyone. In fact, sub/urban resources would tap out very fast if more than a fraction of a percent of the population followed such practices. A safer, more accountable global food chain is something that society is struggling with right now. Perhaps this is due to cost?

4. Cost. You know that cheap, fast, good tri-chotomy? It can’t be all three, and maybe can’t even be two out of three. Maybe global food has been cheap, and gets to us fast, but continued examples of preventable food-borne illness should cause us to question if it is still good. If global food is to continue to fill the vital role it holds at the moment, it will need to continue to be fast (lettuce doesn’t have a long shelf life, and Mexico to Maryland is a long trip). We want it to be good (I have no desire to have two months of diarrhea for the sake of some inexpensive arugula). Maybe it’s time to consider that it should not be quite so cheap. The cost of transport has gone up significantly in the past decade, and we don’t pay full price for that increase. Corners get cut elsewhere to maintain profits, and bam, Red Lobster is on the news.

5. (Last one, I promise) Finding a balance in this context should be a food system that is healthy, economically viable, and safe. Local producers should be given incentives that would allow them to play a greater role in their local food economy, and international producers should be rewarded for delivering goods that are safe and nutritious.

No problem, right? Any ideas?