NEW YORK (AP) — It’s OK to eat some romaine lettuce again, U.S. health officials said. Just check the label.
The Food and Drug Administration narrowed its blanket warning from last week, when it said people shouldn’t eat any romaine because of an E. coli outbreak. The agency said Monday the romaine linked to the outbreak appears to be from the California’s Central Coast region. It said romaine from elsewhere should soon be labeled with harvest dates and regions, so people know it’s OK to eat.
People shouldn’t eat romaine that doesn’t have the label information, the FDA said. For romaine that doesn’t come in packaging, grocers and retailers are being asked to post the information by the register.
Romaine harvesting recently began shifting from California’s Central Coast to winter growing areas, primarily Arizona, Florida, Mexico and California’s Imperial Valley. Those winter regions weren’t yet shipping when the illnesses began. The FDA also noted hydroponically grown romaine and romaine grown in greenhouses aren’t implicated in the outbreak.
The labeling arrangement was worked out as the produce industry called on the FDA to quickly narrow the scope of its warning so it wouldn’t have to waste freshly harvested romaine. An industry group said people can expect to start seeing labels as early as this week. It noted the labels are voluntary, and that it will monitor whether to expand the measure to other leafy greens and produce.
The FDA said the industry committed to making the labeling standard for romaine and to consider longer-term labeling options for other leafy greens.
Robert Whitaker, chief science officer of the Produce Marketing Association, said labeling for romaine could help limit the scope of future alerts and rebuild public trust after other outbreaks.
“Romaine as a category has had a year that’s been unfortunate,” Whitaker said.
The FDA still hasn’t identified a source of contamination in the latest outbreak. There have been no reported deaths, but health officials say 43 people in 12 states have been sickened. Twenty-two people in Canada were also sickened.
Even though romaine from the Yuma, Arizona, region is not implicated in the current outbreak, it was blamed for an E. coli outbreak this spring that sickened more than 200 people and killed five. Contaminated irrigation water near a cattle lot was later identified as the likely source.
Leafy greens were also blamed for an E. coli outbreak last year. U.S. investigators never specified which salad green might be to blame for those illnesses, which happened around the same time of year as the current outbreak. But officials in Canada identified romaine as a common source of illnesses there.
The produce industry is aware the problem is recurring, said Jennifer McEntire of the United Fresh Produce Association.
“To have something repeat in this way, there simply must be some environmental source that persisted,” she said. “The question now is, can we find it?”
Growers and handlers in the region tightened food safety measures after the outbreak this spring, the industry says. Steps include expanding buffer zones between cattle lots and produce fields. But McEntire said it’s not known for sure how the romaine became contaminated in the Yuma outbreak. Another possibility, she said, is that winds blew dust from the cattle lot onto produce.
McEntire said the industry is considering multiple theories, including whether there is something about romaine that makes it more susceptible to contamination. Compared with iceberg lettuce, she noted its leaves are more open, thus exposing more surface area.
Since romaine has a shelf life of about 21 days, health officials said last week they believed contaminated romaine could still be on the market or in people’s homes.
Food poisoning outbreaks from leafy greens are not unusual. But after a 2006 outbreak linked to spinach, the produce industry took steps it believed would limit large scale outbreaks, said Timothy Lytton, a Georgia State University law professor. The outbreak linked to romaine earlier this year cast doubt on how effective the measures have been, he said.
But Lytton also noted the inherent risk of produce, which is grown in open fields and eaten raw.
Farmers and ranchers took home only 11.3 cents of every dollar that Americans spent on their Thanksgiving Day feast. That’s according to the Thanksgiving edition of the National Farmers Union’s Farmer’s Share publication. The Farmer’s Share compares the retail prices of food in a traditional Thanksgiving holiday dinner to the amount farmers receive from each item they grow. “We should take the time to recognize the farmers and ranchers that provided our Thanksgiving meals,” says NFU President Roger Johnson. “While consumer holiday prices continue to decline, farm income is dropping at a much faster rate. We’re in the midst of the worst farm economic downturn in generations, and we hope Farmer’s Share illustrates that to the general public.” On average, farmers get 14.8 cents of every food dollar consumers spend throughout the year. More than 85 percent of food costs cover marketing, processing, wholesaling, distribution, and retailing. Johnson says farmers and ranchers play the most valuable role in actually producing the food we eat throughout the year, yet they make just pennies on the dollar for their products. Johnson adds, “The major integrators who control the poultry markets have used their extreme bargaining power to suppress the earnings of the men and women who produce our turkeys while, at the same time, they take in record profits for themselves.” He says those same growers that raise our poultry get about five to six cents per pound of turkey they produce.
USDA recently reduced its forecast for beef production in 2018 by 30 million pounds. The new forecast is 26.9 billion pounds. The slight revision is based on numbers at the end of the third quarter, and from fourth-quarter expectations of slightly fewer steers and heifers to be slaughtered and fewer bulls in the slaughter mix. The industry website Meating Place Dot Com says those slaughter numbers are all found in USDA’s monthly Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook report. Despite the lower slaughter prediction in the fourth quarter of this year, the steer and heifer slaughter rate per weekday in the fourth quarter is expected to remain above the rate for the same period in 2017. The 2019 beef production forecast was lowered by 100 million pounds to 27.8 billion. The adjustment comes from fewer-than-expected cattle placed in feedlots in the third-quarter of 2018, which would reduce the expected number of fed cattle marketed and slaughtered in early 2019. The September Cattle on Feed Report says there were 4.7 percent fewer cattle placed in feedlots, but 3.6 percent fewer cattle marketed than last year. That means there are 5.4 percent more cattle on feed than a year ago, which supports expectations of strong marketings in the first half of 2019.