|
When Dianne Wyman was raising her young family in Southern California in the 1970s, she and her children often drove into the San Fernando Valley to buy produce straight from the fields. “If we got a stomachache following our trip, we never made the connection that it might have been from the produce,” she says.
 |
Dianne Wyman, of Franklin, Ind., always inspects produce for freshness, whether she’s shopping at a grocery store or a farmers’ market. Wyman stays current on food safety research and credits Purdue Extension with helping educate the public on safe food-handling practices. (Photo by Tom Campbell) |
Now a resident of Franklin, Ind., Wyman still makes forays into the countryside for fresh produce, but the retired educator is more careful about where she gets it. “If there’s a produce farm surrounded by cattle farms on all sides, I’m not likely to stop there.” She uses equal care when buying from her neighborhood supermarket. “I shop at a large store that moves a lot of produce through quickly, so what I get is more apt to be fresh,” says Wyman, who inspects for color, signs of aging and odor. “I also try to buy brand names, because they are more likely to have quality-control programs in place.”
Wake-up call
The need for vigilance with produce was underscored in fall 2006 when fresh, bagged spinach sickened 205 people, resulted in three deaths and culminated in a nationwide recall of the product. Within days, the spinach was traced to California’s Salinas Valley, an area known as “the salad bowl of the world” because of all the produce grown there. The resulting investigation found the leafy vegetable was contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, most likely from irrigation water contaminated with cattle feces.
While this type of E. coli was linked to beef in the early 1980s, it’s only been in the last decade that scientists have associated it more frequently with fruit and vegetables, according to Richard Linton, director of the Purdue University Center for Food Safety Engineering and associate director of agricultural research programs. For most of the ’90s, the produce industry was out of the limelight. Instead, regulatory efforts focused on meat, poultry and seafood, culminating in mandatory Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) programs that minimized risk.
In the aftermath of the 2006 spinach contamination and smaller regional outbreaks, HACCP or other food safety initiatives are now recommended for fruits and vegetables. “There’s been a big change in the last decade as to what kinds of contaminated food products cause illnesses,” says Linton, whose research focuses on solving food safety problems through applied research. “More people are eating fruits and vegetables for the health benefits. If you look at a graph line of increased consumption of fruits and vegetables and the line of increased foodborne illnesses associated with them, they’re almost parallel.”
Linton is among the nation’s leading food scientists who are helping the produce industry and federal regulatory agencies grapple with reducing contamination in fresh-cut, ready-to-eat fruits and vegetables, one of the fastest-growing segments in the food market. Accomplishing this, he says, will require a combination of science and education, from developing breakthrough technologies that are up to 1,000 times more effective in reducing microbial levels to establishing standardized agricultural practices for both domestic and imported food (go to www.foodsci.purdue.edu/outreach).
|
