Romaine Lettuce, Immigration Enforcement, and Food Safety

My favorite Twitter follow these days is Dr. Sarah Taber, a self proclaimed “crop veterinarian” who works as a consultant across the US. In particular, her specialty is food safety audits, including on-farm, and so as it happens she sees a lot of corners of agriculture — not just one farm, but farms across the US. She seems to love history and systems and has generally collected a goodly share of arcane trivia. So she’s full of knowledge, war stories, and ties together a lot of ideas in creative ways. 

I’ve been watching the news of the Romaine e. coli outbreak with some bemusement. First, I’m wondering about why the vaunted traceability we’re supposed to have isn’t working, or if that means that in fact 32 people getting sick from millions of servings of romaine lettuce over 6 weeks is maybe not the right story. Second, I watched a story from Wired about a rollback in FDA regulations created by the Obama Administration and postponed by the Trump Administration go viral with a speed pathogens only dream of. It’s a good story and I want it to be true, but if you read to the end you see that in fact voluntary testing was in place for the last outbreak, as it is now, and didn’t seem to stop it. So I didn’t share it. But I hoped Dr. Taber would weigh in. Why can’t we trace any of this lettuce, at all, such that we are basically condemning an entire farming sector for what is likely one entity’s mistake?

So here’s her thread:

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It's been interesting to watch the "it's because Trump canceled FDA rules" narrative congeal. Like. Don't get me wrong, that DID happen.There are also OTHER rules in the produce industry that require water testing, field bathrooms + handwashing stations, etc. THOSE failed too. https://t.co/GJMqXcHrN6

— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) November 26, 2018

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If this lettuce is in the mainstream commodity markets, then it should be coming from fields & harvest crews that are getting 3rd party food safety audits.Which ... guess what, require water testing! Even if the FDA doesn't!

— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) November 26, 2018

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Here's why.Who works on farms & in packinghouses? A lot of undocumented immigrants.

— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) November 26, 2018

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Neither of those things are compatible with a workforce that's terrified, broke, has no access to healthcare, no workplace bargaining power, and is kept on desperation wages by the threat of being reported to ICE.

— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) November 26, 2018

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Do you think the kind of folks who are down to use threats of violence, sexual assault, & wage theft to keep workers obedientare gonna suddenly go "oh but hang on I gotta get my water sample in on time just in case someone comes & asks for it"?

— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) November 26, 2018

She’s talked earlier this year about an environment where all the workers run from “every gringo with a clipboard,” including her, and how that is a problem for a safety audit.

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But this year, dang near every farmworker is clammed up. Funny enough, these ICE purges have everyone freaked out. The last thing they want to see is a gringo with a clipboard.It makes it really hard to tell if the farmer's doing their job or not.

— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) October 1, 2018

(click through to read the whole thread)

And water testing alone isn’t enough.

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And it sure won't solve our traceability problem. There's no way in hell we're having this much trouble tracing the lettuce to its source, unless there's massive supply chain fraud going on.We should be worried about THAT.

— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) November 26, 2018

And I really recommend this thread also:

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Japanese internment was a land grab by white farmers. Full stop.

— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) January 20, 2018

The truth is that most agricultural jobs are done by skilled labor. It might not be skills you learned at university (or it might; if you want to major in agriculture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo you’re going to need a 4.0+ and a 90th percentile SAT score), but part of the reason we import this labor, and have been importing this labor for hundreds of years, willingly or not, is because we need to import the skills. 

Here she discusses the sophisticated rice growing techniques used in Sierra Leone… and how the architects were captured and auctioned in Charleston.

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In the modern United States, we've become very comfortable thinking of slave labor as brutish, unsophisticated manual work.It was not.Carolina rice was built on stolen engineers.Something to think about, if you're educated and think that's going to save you.

— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) November 8, 2018

So here we have an industry, leafy greens, with two major outbreaks in a short time. My social media is full of jokes about how the FDA never recalls cake, and I’m laughing. But I also can’t imagine how wrenching it would be to be a romaine farmer right now, plowing under a crop and taking a total loss not only on current sales but the natural reduction in future sales as people wonder if lettuces should remain on their personal menu. Without traceability, which we’re supposed to have, one bad actor can take down this entire sector, which is a shame, because romaine lettuce (along with other leafy greens) is really a pretty great food.