At my age, eating habits are hard to change. You settle into your handful of trusted meals the way you settle into a favorite chair, and you do not appreciate the world tampering with either. So I have been watching this year’s parade of food recalls with the wary eye of a man who would like his lunch to remain on his side of the negotiating table.
It started with blueberries. Two separate recalls, as it happened. One batch grown in San Carlos, Chile, and another out of Oregon. The Chilean berries were pulled for contamination with E. coli, of the specific and unappetizing variety that turns up when sanitation has failed somewhere upstream. The Oregon berries had somehow attracted Listeria, and by the sound of it the investigators were still puzzling over exactly how. A mystery for the ages.
Now, I am not much of a blueberry man, so at the time I read all this with the serene detachment of someone whose own plate is not involved. Terrible business, I thought, reaching for my lettuce. Someone should really look into that.
Then came Guanajuato.
Guanajuato, Mexico, a place previously famous, among other things, for its Museum of Mummies, earned itself a fresh notch on the pistol grip when a Taylor Farms operation there recalled iceberg lettuce across twenty-seven states. Twenty-seven. This time the villain was a nasty little single-celled parasite named Cyclospora, spread, I am sorry to report, by the very same route as the blueberries.
W.T.F., I thought, and I mean that with all the precision of a man who has just realized the news is now personal. Because I am a fan of lettuce. Not for its own sake, heaven knows. Lettuce is crunchy and tastes of almost nothing, the cardboard of the vegetable kingdom. But throw in some chicken, or a scoop of tuna salad, a fistful of croutons, a snow of parmesan, and a good Caesar dressing, and you have the makings of a fine lunch on a hot summer day. Wash it down with a cold beer or a glass of wine, and a well-earned afternoon nap follows as the night the day. Tamper with my lettuce and you are no longer discussing agriculture. You are discussing my nap.
Oh yes. The F-bombs. I owe you an explanation of the title.
For that I have to dig, once again, into the dusty filing cabinet of my memory, back to the public health lectures of my youth. And I cannot get to those lectures without first getting past my favorite memory of the whole subject, which has nothing to do with the material and everything to do with the man who examined me on it.
He was a Visiting Professor of Public Health from a neighboring medical school, where he also happened to be the Dean. A kindly soul, I would discover much later, but at the time a figure of pure terror to a lowly medical student. He had, on his nose, a large and deeply unfortunate mole. And he conducted the final oral examinations. Not, I hasten to add, an examination of the mouth. A viva voce, the kind where a terrifying man asks you questions and you attempt to answer them without soiling yourself.
Here was the trap. Our seniors, who were sadists to a man, had taken great delight in warning us that the Dean despised, above all things, being caught staring at the mole. So I invite you to guess precisely where my eyes chose to fix themselves for the entire duration of my examination. I could no more look away from that mole than a compass needle can decline to find north. I answered every question in a cold sweat, gazing at his nose like a lovestruck teenager, silently begging my own eyeballs to behave. To this day I could not tell you what he asked me. I could draw you the mole from memory.
But I digress. Which, come to think of it, is the whole trouble with being my age.
The F-bombs, then. Public health has long taught that the transmission of these unpleasant gut-borne diseases runs along a chain of six links, and by a small miracle of naming, every one of them begins with the letter F. The six Fs:
- Fluids. Contaminated water and drink carrying the infectious agents along for the ride.
- Fingers. Hands that ferry germs from waste to mouth, or to everything the mouth will later touch.
- Flies. Insects running a shuttle service from filth to your dinner.
- Fomites. The unglamorous word for surfaces and objects, doorknobs, utensils, soil, that quietly hold the germs and hand them on. (Some texts swap in Fields here, which will matter in a moment.)
- Food. Sustenance contaminated somewhere along the road from field to fork.
And presiding over all of them, the origin of the whole sorry business, the first F from which the others follow:
- Feces.
There it is. Break any one link in that chain and the food on your plate is safe. Fail to break it, and, well, you get twenty-seven states’ worth of lettuce you would rather not think about.
So what went wrong in the fields? The reports, once you read them, are a grim tour through every F at once.
In Mexico, inspectors found the problem began at the most basic level imaginable. Field workers had been left without working bathrooms, so human waste and used toilet paper turned up in the very fields where the crop was growing and being packed. There was no running water for handwashing, no soap, no clean toilets. Workers had no way to wash before handling the harvest even if they wanted to. And the water used to wash, cool, and spray the crops was itself unsafe, carrying the parasite straight onto the leaves.
In Chile, the trouble came by river. The waterways used to irrigate the crops had been fouled by raw sewage discharged from municipal treatment plants upstream, and by fecal runoff from cattle and other livestock washing down into the same supply. The berries never had a chance.
Read it all in a row and you notice something almost impressive. This was not one failure. It was a clean sweep. Feces, fluids, fingers, fields, food, the whole set, each link in the chain not merely unbroken but actively encouraged.
Which brings me, at last, to my point, such as it is. A hundred years of public health boils down to a chain of six humble words, all starting with the same letter, and the entire apparatus of modern food safety amounts to little more than taking each of them seriously. A working toilet. A bar of soap. Clean water. It is not glamorous. Nobody funds a gala for it. But it is the whole difference between my Caesar salad and a recall notice.
So the next time you sit down to something crunchy and green, spare a thought for the six Fs, and for the unheralded plumbing that keeps them apart.
C’mon, people. Now you know why we need more F-bombs.