Robin Boles

I’m awfully grateful that I have access to locally grown lettuce. 

If you haven’t heard, on July 17, Taylor Farms, a large-scale producer and distributor of salad greens across the country, issued a voluntary recall of processed iceberg lettuce coming from their fields in central Mexico, which the CDC and FDA linked to a large outbreak of cyclosporiasis.

This outbreak is one of the largest foodborne illness events to take place in the United States. According to the FDA as of Aug. 13, “The total case count associated with this multistate outbreak is now 9,481 illnesses reported from 17 states with at least 2 deaths.”

Cyclospora cayetanensis is a microscopic parasite that infects the human intestinal tract causing “frequent, watery, and sometimes explosive diarrhea.” It spreads when people consume food or water contaminated with fecal material. The CDC states, “It takes at least one to two weeks in the environment (outside the body) for Cyclospora to become infectious after passing in a bowel movement.”

This outbreak has pulled back the curtain revealing the flaws in our industrial food systems where distance, scale, complexity and opacity create gaping vulnerabilities.

That system has obvious benefits, such as providing Americans with seasonal foods essentially year-round. In fact, it has trained us to expect everything, all the time: Lettuce in January. Tomatoes in February. Asparagus in November. Strawberries in December. Avocados every month of the year.

But there is a tradeoff.

To do this requires an enormous network of production, refrigeration, transportation, packaging and distribution.

Sure, a single producer or processor can feed an enormous number of people across a huge geographic area (and make billions of dollars doing it), but when a giant supplier has a problem, the effects can ripple across an enormous portion of the market.

And, as we have witnessed over the past month, when something in that vast system goes wrong, the contamination can move through distributors and prepared-food manufacturers and into cafeterias, restaurants, grocery stores, and our home kitchens before anyone even realizes there is a problem.

The Cyclospora outbreak was first associated with Taco Bell locations in several Midwestern states, then FDA traceback work eventually linked illnesses to processed iceberg lettuce distributed in multiple ways in multiple locations from food services like hospitals and sports venues to retail locations like Taco Bell and Walmart.

Taylor Farms is a privately-owned, large-scale food production operation with a huge pool of stakeholders. According to their website, in addition to their own fields, which provide roughly 25% of the vegetables they sell, they collaborate with 280 other farms. They own 30 processing plants and employ over 24,000 “team members.” They distribute to thousands of restaurants and retail locations across the country (and the globe), any number of which you or I might be purchasing from.

With this vast array of touchpoints, identifying the problem begins to resemble the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Locally grown food isn't automatically safer. But purchasing from local food producers can make our food system more transparent and more resilient.

If I buy a head of lettuce from a farmer at the farmers market, I can potentially know a lot about that head of lettuce: who grew it; where it was grown; what water source was used; when it was harvested; how it was washed and handled; and who I can talk to if I have a question.

That's a fundamentally different relationship with my food than buying a bag of shredded lettuce that may contain lettuce leaves from multiple fields and passed through multiple businesses and geographic locations before reaching my refrigerator, and which I’m told I won’t even have to spend my time washing (allegedly).

A shorter chain doesn't necessarily eliminate contamination risk, but it reduces the number of links between producer and consumer and the number of potential consumers linked to any one producer.

That means a local food system can provide something that our highly industrialized system doesn’t seem concerned with: accountability.

Know your farmer. Know your food.

This isn't just a feel-good Farmers Market slogan; it's a food-system paradigm that has almost gone extinct. Food safety begins before the food reaches your kitchen. And when the system is too large to monitor, then our safety is compromised.

The current system might seem incredibly efficient and convenient, but efficiency and convenience are generally not concerned with sustainability and resilience.

And eating sustainably urges us to ask whether we really should eat anything, anywhere, any time of year?

Eating locally and seasonally doesn't mean we have to abandon the modern food system, but it does mean we should let nature and geography have a say about what's on the menu.

Doing so can reduce transportation, refrigeration, packaging and storage requirements while also supporting farms that are actually part of our regional ecosystem.

What would happen if more of the food we eat in Pierce County came from Pierce County, St. Croix County, Washington County, and the surrounding region?

Not all of it. Even I know that’s unrealistic. But more of it.

More lettuce in season. More tomatoes in summer. More potatoes, squash and root vegetables in winter. More eggs and meat from local producers. More food preserved when it is abundant. More farmers making a living from the land. More consumers who know where their food comes from.

I’m not suggesting a local food system replacing the entire industrial food system, but I am suggesting we don’t allow the industrial food system to become our only food system.

Just as a healthy ecosystem is stronger when it contains many different species, a healthy food system is stronger when it contains many different farms, crops, producers and pathways from farm to table.

The Cyclospora outbreak reminds us that food safety is less about what happens in our kitchen than it is about how our food is grown, watered, processed, transported and distributed, and how much of that system we can actually see.

Choosing local foods is a simple step toward a food system that is accountable and sustainable. When we choose to support our local growers, each meal becomes an opportunity to bolster our local economy, celebrate the seasons, and deepen our connection to the place we call home.