Clean, Neat, Ready to Eat
When I was pregnant, my dad stopped greeting me with a simple “hello” when I went home for a visit. Instead, before I even got through the door, the ever-diligent grandfather-to-be/ infectious disease specialist would ask something like: “You haven’t been eating South American raspberries lately, have you?” Or soft cheese or processed meat or some other, random food item. Because in those glory days when we had a robust public health system, Dad would get notifications about various outbreaks of food-borne illness around the country, and he didn’t want me taking any unnecessary chances. I learned pretty quickly that to avoid family tension, the answer should always be no, I hadn’t eaten the offending item even if, in reality, I had no idea. (Do raspberries list their provenance?) Food safety was a serious matter in our house. So, it goes without saying that I’ve been following the news on the recent cyclospora outbreak very closely and cooking all my produce. Because simply washing it isn’t enough to kill the parasite. And because even without Dad’s warnings, weeks of “explosive diarrhea” sounds like something to be avoided.
Early reports linked at least some of the cases in the current outbreak to shredded iceberg lettuce produced by Taylor Farms. As a result, iceberg lettuce was oddly at the forefront of my mind this past weekend when my son and I visited the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and—weirder still—discovered iceberg lettuce mentioned prominently in an exhibit titled FOOD: Transforming the American Table.
In the section titled “System for Abundance,” the exhibit appears to celebrate America’s “abundant, affordable food supply” but uses oddly robotic language to describe the industrialization process involved:
Agricultural researchers developed new ways to control pests and weeds, fertilize crops, manipulate genetic material, and stimulate the growth of livestock. Food companies centralized and automated production in modern factories, transforming the raw materials of agriculture into higher volumes of canned, frozen, and processed foods in less time and with fewer workers.
As if quickly producing highly processed, pesticide-laden, genetically modified food was undoubtedly a good thing.
The exhibit goes on to offer iceberg lettuce—a “seasonless vegetable”—as a prime example of this transformation. Grown year-round on “large, centralized farms in California’s Salinas Valley,” iceberg lettuce had been shipped nationwide since the 1920s, but with improvements in refrigeration and packing, by 1950, it “was consumed more than any other vegetable in the United States.” As a 1957 ad highlighted in the exhibit emphasized, with special cellophane packaging, iceberg lettuce was “clean, neat, [and] ready to eat.”
The FOOD exhibit did point out that “large-scale, centralized production” not only “detached most consumers from the growing, shipping, and packaging of their food,” it raised concerns about food safety. In discussing that topic, the exhibit highlighted a prototype system that, “using GPS, was able to pinpoint the exact spot in a field where a particular head of lettuce or crown of broccoli was harvested” so that, “in the event of a food-borne illness outbreak, public health officials could use this information to help them identify the origin of the produce and possibly the source of the contamination.”
“Possibly” being the operative word. Because even with advances in technological systems, public health officials still need adequate resources to find the source of any contamination, and the Trump Administration has been actively reducing those resources.
Although the FOOD exhibit only opened in 2012, to some extent the museum’s approach to America’s post-war food story already seems dated. Even if they started in a more limited way, concerns about mass-marketed, mass-produced food as well as health, hunger, and the environment are no longer restricted to what the exhibit calls “countercultures” or a gourmet movement that emerged out of the counterculture. Certainly, it’s not just hippies who are worried about food safety now. While I wrote this post, news broke that the initial test result for the source of the cyclospora outbreak was being withdrawn as a false positive, and other reports indicate different potential sources in different jurisdictions. Apparently, all these weeks after the outbreak began, we still can’t figure out (or are unwilling to identify) the cause. Or causes.
As the FOOD exhibit states so dryly, as if we weren’t doing it to ourselves: “Contamination is still a significant concern in the American food system.” Which turns out not to be so neat and clean after all.