California Coast & Ocean

Members of Western Growers in California and Arizona grow, pack, and ship nearly half the nation's fresh fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Giclas estimated that the shutdown cost the spinach industry roughly $100 million and affected other bagged salad produce as well.

On September 20, five weeks after the Natural Selection Foods plant had processed the spinach for Dole, FDA investigators began taking soil and water samples from four of the ranches where it had been grown and harvested. Samples from one ranch in San Benito County had E. coli pathogens indistinguishable from the strain identified by the CDC's DNA fingerprinting system, PulseNet. These were found in soil, river water, and cow and feral pig feces at Paicines Ranch, a large grass-fed beef operation that had leased a small amount of its land to a spinach grower. But these E. coli-infested samples were found nearly a mile away from the implicated spinach field. None were found on the plot itself.

Whatever the origin and pathways of the outbreak, the washing procedures at the processing plant failed to eliminate the pathogens, and its quality assurance protections failed to detect it after the processing. The FDA report was heavily redacted for "proprietary reasons," advantageous to Natural Selection Foods' operators, who were quick to divert attention back to the fields and away from the manufacturing end.

In an October 15, 2006 article in the New York Times ("The Vegetable-Industrial Complex"), author Michael Pollan, who has written widely about food and its production, noted that "a great deal of spinach from a great many fields gets mixed together in the water at that plant, giving microbes from a single field an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant in question washes 26 million servings of salad every week. In effect, we're washing the whole nation's salad in one big sink."

The FDA, which is responsible for safeguarding 80 percent of the nation's food supply, had known about contamination problems in spinach and other Central Coast and Salinas Valley produce for years. Over the last decade, nine other E. coli outbreaks associated with the area's leafy greens had been documented. Prior warnings from the FDA and the California Department of Public Health included letters to Salinas packers, Western Growers, and other industry groups, calling for implementation of safer manufacturing and sanitation practices and, more recently, alerts about wells and irrigation systems contaminated with animal wastes.

However, the FDA has little enforcement authority over the food industry, in contrast with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which monitors and regulates meat, poultry, and eggs. The USDA has onsite inspectors at the nation's slaughterhouses with the authority to shut them down if they fail inspections. The FDA's food safety oversight has been the target of intense criticism from congressional critics, including John Dingell (D-MI), chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and from advocacy groups who complain about its coziness with the produce industry. The FDA's inspection capacity has been decimated by budget cuts in recent years. Between 2003 and 2006, the number of safety tests for U.S.-produced food decreased nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 to 2,455, according to FDA statistics. Last April, Robert E. Brackett, director of the FDA's food safety division, told the Washington Post that he believes manufacturers are better equipped to "build safety into their products rather than us chasing after them."

Industry Shapes a Safety Plan
Immediately following the outbreak, prompted by the FDA and California's public health and agriculture departments, Western Growers began developing a Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, with guidelines that would serve as a standard for certifying the safe handling, shipment, and sale of produce marketed by its signatories. This agreement would be administered by the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), which would use a USDA-designed inspection program that has been applied in other states.

The Secretary for Food and Agriculture, A.G. Kawamura, is a past president of Western Growers. Last February, he appointed an advisory board for the marketing agreement composed almost exclusively of representatives from the bigger "handlers"--those who process, package, ship, and distribute leafy green products. Conservation groups and resource agencies that had been working for years with Central Coast farmers had complained from the outset that the Western Growers' initiative was a closed-door process designed to serve the interests of handlers and big buyers. California Certified Organic Farmers, one of the nation's oldest and largest certifiers of organic produce, criticized the "lack of transparency in the process."