If You Want Safe Food, Know Where It Comes From
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 07.14.08
According to Sylvain Charlebois of the Kenneth Levene Graduate School of Business, writing in the Globe and Mail, “Food-crisis investigators in the U.S. are in the dark. With more than 1,000 cases of illness reported in 41 states (and two deaths reported in Texas), officials from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention now believe tomatoes may not be the only culprits in the national salmonella outbreak. Some hot peppers are suspect, too.”
Charlebois notes that “Tomatoes are a logistical nightmare because of the complex channel they follow from farm to fork. Because tomatoes are perishable, suppliers usually depend on more than one grower to fill orders. Once the tomatoes arrive at a processing facility, they are usually sorted according to consumption readiness, size and grade but rarely according to origin. It has been reported that Florida-grown tomatoes are shipped to Mexico for packaging before being returned to the U.S. for sale to American consumers. Once tomatoes are cut, diced and assorted for use in products such as salads, guacamole and spaghetti sauces, tracing their provenance becomes unfeasible.”
Yet in the low-key, hippie-infested and technically unsophisticated organic sector of the marketplace, we can see a number printed on the shell of every egg we eat. We can go to our computer and plug that number in at the dreadfully named eggsactrace.ca and find out who raised it, what the chickens were fed, and who graded it. If it can be done for eggs, why can’t it be done for tomatoes?
And while we will always suggest that it is better to make your own food from scratch, if a manufacturer is chopping up tomatoes for a sauce, why can’t there be a system that tracks the bar code on the side of a tomato, its case or even its shipping container and connect that to the lot number of the batch of sauce. C’mon, guys, it’s not that tough.
Charlebois says “ The FDA has said it may never find the culprit of the current outbreak. Without pointing fingers, the time has come to adopt a new transversal food-traceability strategy that will predispose agricultural supply chains toward flexibility. The notion of shared responsibility through the food-supply chain cannot be evaded: It is high time to design a continentally based food-safety scheme for North America.” Good idea. ::Globe and Mail
More on Food Safety in TreeHugger
They are Playing With Our Food Again
Do You Know Where Your Banana Has Been?
Supermarket Secrets: Be Careful Where you Shop
Tracking food with your Cell Phone
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No one is mentioning the potential of packing houses to be vectors for the disease.
Not only are fruits and veggies mixed and sorted in "packing houses": there they are washed in multiple baths containing combinations of sterilants, detergent, fungicide, wax, rinse water, etc. All this before a sticker gets attached.
All it takes is one rotten tomato, an unsanitary worker practice, someone not changing the bath appropriately, or whatever.
The point is that how a food is raised may have less to do with contamination potential than how it is harvested, and managed post-harvest.
For basic causal analysis we need one simple fact from FDA. We need to know whether organic produce is segregated fully from traditional produce for post-harvest? If it is, the agency should study the difference in practices, management systems, subcontracting, labor policies, etc.between the two types of packing house operations.
If You Want Safe Food, Grow It Yourself
Once again someone has a bright idea that isn't being implemented. A few years back there were trial runs in Japan of RFID tags tied to a 2D barcode on fruits and veggies so when the housewife went to the store she could take a picture on her kai-tai (mobile) and that would hook into a web database and in real time provider her with the farm the food was grown on, the history and family of that farm and the handling chain all the way to the store. This would have been 2003-2004. I do not know if there has been widespread implementation of this within Japan or if it died due to cost (not too much once it's up and running). Wishin for this here, now that our cell phones have caught up, sort of, with Japanese ones....