Try this quiz.

Which food is more likely to make you sick?

A) food from a family farm, grown in home-based, rural conditions, unwashed or minimally-washed, bagged by hand in a back shed and driven to market in an old pickup truck or
B) food from a highly-regulated processing facility in California’s Salinas Valley, where professionally-run harvest crews adhere to strict sanitation standards, processing facilities are “clean rooms” with no outside air coming in, unfiltered wash-water is supplemented with a carefully monitored chlorine level and then removed in multiple rinses, bags are filled by stainless-steel machines, and vacuum-packing seals the food product for the rest of its journey from farm to table?

The answer requires careful examination of fact and fiction, as there are many misconceptions about how our food becomes contaminated. Here in the Southern Appalachians, this month brings the eagerly awaited opening of many of our farmers’ tailgate markets. Spinach and leafy greens are staples of the spring offerings of many produce vendors. Eight months after a deadly E. coli outbreak in 26 states was linked to spinach, spinach sales are still down in all settings. Let’s separate myth from reality as to what food truly causes sickness, and maybe you’ll get your appetite for spinach back.

MYTH 1: DIRT AND WILD ANIMALS ARE TO BLAME
As shoppers, we have come to expect sparkling-clean produce that seems to need no more than a quick rinse, and many of us associate this visual cleanliness with food safety. But, that shiny, sparkling-clean produce may not be as clean as it looks. A rarely spoken FDA guideline tells us we should wash all fresh produce with warm water and soap—a guideline that exists to remove dirt and agricultural chemicals and to reduce the risk of food-borne illness. When it comes to food-borne illnesses like E. coli, dirt isn’t the problem. Almost all of the fruits and vegetables we eat are grown in dirt. Dirt is the good stuff; we should eat more of it. The problem is bodily waste.

If the problem is bodily waste, whose waste is it? Among other sources, National Public Radio reported this winter that “it is widely believed” that the spinach contamination originated from wild pigs that wandered onto a spinach field and defecated there. Not “the FDA has proven,” not “scientists have established,” only “it is widely believed.”

In fact, what scientists have established is that cattle kept near the implicated spinach field tested positive for the strain of E. coli that caused the outbreak. They also found a wild pig wandering around near the field (months after the outbreak) that tested positive for the same strain.

Clearly, somebody’s been playing a careful game of “who’s best to blame.” If we blame the cattle, we’ll raise public awareness about the fact that most of our nation’s pre-cut leafy green produce is grown in close quarters with industrial-scale dairy and beef production. We’ll draw attention to the fact that it is a specific strain of E. coli, the 0157:H7 strain, that causes illness and death. This strain is far and away most often found in one place: the guts and feces of cattle being kept in close quarters and fed grain. If we blame the cattle, we’ll force the dairy and produce industries to incur great costs to build bigger fences and move farther away from each other.

So, it must be the wild pigs, right? Wild animals are owned by nobody, accountable to nobody and generally considered a force beyond our control. If you were to read avian flu news, you’d see the same thing: repeated, vague and unsupported attempts to implicate wild birds as the source of the disease. While, in reality, almost all human avian flu cases have been in workers in industrial-scale poultry plants.

MYTH 2: ORGANICS ARE MORE DANGEROUS
After the spinach outbreak, multiple news stories implied that organic farming is more likely to cause disease outbreaks because of the common use of “contaminant-laden manure” in organic growing practices. This was, at best, misinformation and, at worst a deliberate smear campaign. It is true that organic and small-scale local growers may use manure where conventional growers use synthetic fertilizers. But, conventional growers use manure, as well, and they use it more freely than organic growers, who cannot apply raw manure after ninety days before harvest. Conventional growers may also apply processed sewage sludge (euphemistically called “biosolids”) to their land, organic growers may not.

MYTH 3: FOOD SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY WILL SAVE US ALL
Remember the earlier quiz question? It implied that large-scale food growers and processors spend more money, time and care to ensure the safety of our food than do small-scale producers. This is, on average, true. But, does it make food from these commercial operations safer? When systems work well, maybe it does. But, when systems fail on a huge commercial scale, the damage is more widespread, harder to contain, harder to trace back to the source, more of a news story and, thus, more damaging to the livelihood of all farmers.

THE TAKE-HOME MESSAGE
Local family farms are likely not adjacent to huge commercial dairy operations, not processing products from multiple sources, not passing products through multiple hands and locations, and thereby hold little risk of causing an E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak. When food safety systems do fail on the local family farm selling to local customers, few people are impacted, and the problem can quickly be traced back to the source and addressed.

In other words, buy local as much as you can, but don’t stop buying fresh produce at the grocery store and at restaurants. This is where most of us buy most of our fresh food, and we should continue to do so. Food-safety scares are like airplane crashes: they get obsessive attention, while the 99.99 percent of the time that the product is delivered and consumed safely gets no press at all.

Part of what happens when we all get frightened by contamination scares, like the recent E. coli outbreak, is that the rules tighten for everyone, big and small, and your local family farmer has a harder time staying in business due to increased costs and customer fears. So, next time a food-safety scare hits, be vigilant and raise your voice in protest when small, local and/or organic farms get blamed or hurt by food industry disasters. And, vote with your wallet for a local solution: swallow your fear and keep eating that local, family-farmed spinach, headlines be damned.

Peter Marks is the local food and farm coordinator for Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP). ASAP’s Local Food Guide is available at area retailers and online at www.appalachiangrown.org.

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