Some romaine lettuce is safe to eat again. The FDA and CDC announced on November 28 that they have narrowed down the recent E. coli outbreak to lettuce grown in fields (not greenhouses) in California. That means that lettuce from Florida or from most local farmstands is probably safe to eat. But romaine’s problems aren’t over.
What is it about romaine lettuce?
There was another E. coli outbreak in romaine lettuce earlier this year, and there have been others in the past. There will probably be more in the future.
Vegetables, including lettuce, are a major source of foodborne illness. A few of the factors working against romaine here:
Lettuce isn’t (usually) cooked before eating. Cooking kills bacteria, so raw veggies are riskier.
Romaine and other greens are hard to effectively wash. You’re as likely to spread the bacteria as to remove it.
Lettuce requires a lot of water as it grows (each bite of lettuce contains very few nutrients and a lot of water). Pathogens can come in on contaminated water.
Romaine is really popular. Kale probably has its outbreaks too, but more people are eating romaine. That just means outbreaks are bigger and more noticeable.
Packaged salad greens have an additional problem: they get washed, often mixed together with other farms’ greens. Personally, I give bagged salad greens serious side-eye, even if I do get lazy and use them sometimes.
Is the answer to buy local?
Small, local farms are great in many ways, but they’re no insurance against foodborne illnesses. The reason you never hear about huge outbreaks coming from small farms is simply that they’re small. If a few people get sick, that might not be enough data for anyone to track down which food made them sick. (Remember, most food poisoning reports come from people who were so sick they needed to seek medical care. For every reported case, there are likely many more that flew under the radar.)
For now, we know that there’s an outbreak related to California lettuces, so if you’re buying something from a farmstand in Tennessee you can at least know it’s not involved in the California outbreak. But is it safer in general? Probably not.
Can we blame politics for this?
Sort of, but maybe not in the way you think.
One rumor goes that the FDA, under President Trump, stopped requiring farms to test their water for pathogens. The truth is that the water testing rule was proposed in 2011, and keeps getting delayed. It would have taken effect this year, but has been pushed back to 2022, Wired reports.
So, water testing would be nice, but disease-causing bacteria can show up occasionally, never registering on tests, and still be present often enough to make people sick. Testing alone isn’t going to stop lettuce-borne outbreaks.
Sarah Taber, a scientist and food systems strategist, noted on Twitter that many lettuce producers already do this testing. But she says there are likely problems on several levels that make lettuce outbreaks more likely to happen.
She points out that food safety requires a well-trained staff, good procedures, and a solid sick leave policy. “Neither of those things are compatible with a workforce that’s terrified, broke, has no access to healthcare, no workplace bargaining power, and is kept on desperation wages by the threat of being reported to ICE.”
Stopping immigration crackdowns would probably make our food safer for everybody; so would other policies and practices that benefit farm workers.
How do we know where our lettuce comes from?
It’s not always labeled well enough to be traceable, but that will change soon. When this outbreak was first announced, the warning was that all romaine was suspect. Florida romaine growers had to destroy thousands of pounds of perfectly good lettuce.
Fortunately, the FDA is starting to require that romaine be marked with the place it was grown. By now, they’ve figured out the lettuce that made people sick was from certain parts of California. (There is a list here of counties to avoid.) Different parts of the US grow lettuce at different times; back when the spring 2018 outbreak hit, Yuma, Arizona was supplying most of the country’s lettuce. Here’s hoping that better tracking can help outbreaks be traced faster.