We have received many calls, emails, and walk-ins this last week with questions, concerns, and feedback regarding the latest national recall of iceberg lettuce. If you’ve managed to avoid every news outlet for the last couple weeks (lucky you!), then just search for “Iceberg Lettuce” and your search engine of choice will happily get you up to date. The numbers alone for this event are staggering.
By the Numbers
1,947 people were confirmed infected by the CDC across 9 states. Distribution was across 27 states spanning the width of the country. 35 product lines containing lettuce across 9 different brands. 2 primary buyers of these product lines, namely Walmart and Taco Bell. 1 “farm” in Central Mexico supplying 27 states with one of the most fragile and susceptible food products. The parent company, Taylor Farms, is based in California, which makes this whole ordeal equivalent to buying cheap plastic toys from overseas. Interestingly, the label on their bags of iceberg lettuce say “fresh from the field”, which is, of course, impossible for 1 farm to do across 27 states, from another country. There’s a reason we don’t offer iceberg lettuce at Box of Good!
FDA Recalls
Unfortunately, all the excitement around that lettuce recall drowned out another recall last week for 19 million eggs across 5 states, from 2 “farms”. Of course, when an outfit produces nearly 10 million eggs in 1 month, it’s more like a factory and less like a farm. A lettuce company growing greens for 27 states is a machine, not a farm. Another recall happened shortly before that, for 180,000 cans of lentil soup. Before that, there was a recall for breakfast burritos labeled “vegetarian”, which contained sausage. Before that, Peter Rabbit fruit pouches for kids were recalled for having plastic in the finished product. And this is just the last week! Fortunately, or shockingly, the FDA publishes a list of every product recall on their website, and a recall is issued roughly once per day on average. Let that sink in. Imagine if you were friends with the FDA on Facebook and you got those updates every day? Would you unfriend them? Or opt-out and eat differently? Most recalls are related to salmonella, listeria, E.coli, nut contamination, or plastic/metal in food.
Avoid the Recalls
We spend a lot of time at Box of Good preaching about the advantages of local food, and how one simple choice has a cascading effect on all sorts of other connected systems. Eating local results in: better health. More nutrients. Less pesticides. Less plastic. Less preservatives. More seasonality. Less transportation, storage, refrigeration, warehousing. Less brokers and markup. More flavor. Less pollution. Less processing. Fewer pills, surgeries, medical issues. Less time navigating parking lots and sitting in traffic. Less waste. Less time waiting in lines. But you know what almost never happens with local food? Recalls. Why is that?
Eat
The systemic conditions that produce recalls are incompatible with local food, since recalls are directly related to 1) food from far away, 2) food from long ago, or 3) food from people you don’t know. This is not our first rodeo with food recalls, and our quick answer to anyone that asks if our food is part of a recall is, “Local food, by nature, is nearly always exempt from national recalls.”
Eat local, eat whole, and you’ll eat safe!