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Cooking
Ensures Safe Vegetables
Contaminated scallions linked to a deadly
outbreak of hepatitis A shouldn't scare most people away from
eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, experts say.
But the only way to ensure total
safety is to cook everything.
"Once produce is contaminated,
it's difficult to ensure that it is completely decontaminated.
But washing is important because it reduces contamination," said
John Painter, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention in Atlanta.
When vegetables have grown in contaminated
soil or are irrigated with dirty water, they can absorb pathogens
like hepatitis and E. coli. That may be what happened with the
onions, and washing would do no good.
Still, experts say washing is a
first step that can remove many surface contaminants that are
often the source of illness.
And they say all fruits and vegetables,
whether grown domestically or imported, should be thoroughly washed,
and the damaged parts removed. Fruits can be peeled and the outer
layers of leafy vegetables can be removed, Painter said.
"If you're healthy and don't have
any particular ailments that make you susceptible, there are probably
more important things you could spend your time worrying about,
like the mortgage payment," said Jerry Gillespie, director of
the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security at the University
of California, Davis.
Concerns about food safety have
grown since three people died and hundreds were sickened from
hepatitis A in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina.
The usually non-fatal virus has been linked to raw scallions from
Mexico.
The Mexican government shut down
four suspect companies located just south of the U.S. border for
failing to "comply with good agricultural and manufacturing practices,"
and U.S. and Mexican food safety officials are inspecting their
fields.
The CDC estimates that overall,
unsafe foods cause an estimated 76 million illnesses and 5,000
deaths a year in the United States. But while consumers tend to
worry more about meat, fish and poultry, fruits and vegetables
should be just as much a cause for concern.
"You can't neglect taking care
of it properly just because it's a vegetable," said Jay Kenyon,
the operations manager at Greens, a renowned vegetarian restaurant
in San Francisco.
In 2000, there were nearly as many
cases of food-borne illnesses linked to produce as from poultry,
beef, fish and eggs combined, according to the Center for Science
in the Public Interest.
Gillespie blames our voracious
appetite for cheap produce, year-round.
"We're changing our food system.
We're increasingly dependent on sources outside of our country
for food," he said. "If we're going to do that and we want to
have food that is equivalently safe as food in our country, then
we're going to have to insist that those foods go through the
same certification that foods in the U.S. go through."
Hepatitis A — a virus that
attacks the liver and can cause fever, nausea and diarrhea —
can be spread through unsanitary water used to wash or store fresh
fruits and vegetables. It can also be spread by poor hygiene among
food handlers from the farm to the table — a journey that
now stretches around the world.
There are no fast reliable tests
for the diseases that lurk among the many millions of tons of
produce consumed in America each year. Random tests are performed,
Gillespie said, but by the time results are in, the produce has
already reached consumers.
"At the moment, we don't have the
technology that would allow one to scan all foods to make sure
they are not contaminated," Gillespie said.
In Mexico, restaurants and consumers
routinely soak vegetables in disinfectant. The U.S. Food and Drug
Administration discourages such practices in America, in part,
because of concerns about ingesting soaps and disinfectants. The
FDA simply recommends washing with cold water. But while thorough
washing does help, there remains no way of making sure that green
onions, alfalfa sprouts or leafy vegetables are disease-free.
That's why the FDA in 1977 established
voluntary guidelines for suppliers that include ensuring the use
of clean water, supplying field toilets for workers and tracking
the use of pesticides and fertilizers.
The largest restaurant chains can
demand that their suppliers, both foreign and domestic, follow
those guidelines — or lose their business. Smaller restaurants
and consumers have no such leverage.
Still, the benefits of eating fruits
and vegetables far outweigh any risks, particularly if consumers
take precautions, said Kenyon.
At Greens, those precautions include
washing everything several times with cold water. Soap, Kenyon
said, is pointless, but cleanliness is essential.
"Each kind of vegetable requires
a slightly different treatment. With green onions, you take them
physically with your hands and run them under the water. But if
you're dealing with two gallons of broccoli flowers, you set it
in a tub for a few minutes," Kenyon said.
As for fresh produce sold in packages
claiming it's washed and ready to eat, wash that too, Kenyon advises.
He also believes in knowing the source of the food.
"We buy from a network of people
locally that we've used for years," Kenyon said. "A lot of these
people are not part of the agribusiness production chains. They're
small business people and they take a great deal of pride in what
they do."
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On the Net:
CDC on hepatitis A:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/diseases/hepatitis/a/index.htm
Reference
Source 102
For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
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