Should we be eating lettuce?

I’ve been following the Cyclospora outbreak with riveted interest because it so exemplifies what’s wrong with our food system: not enough safety effort from producers and not enough government oversight.

So here is Washington Post writer, Tamar Haspel, asking Why we should stop eating lettuce, cyclospora or not.  

“Lettuce,” she says, “makes us sick, wastes resources and has minimal nutritional value. Why are we still consuming it?”

Her arguments:

• Waste: “The Agriculture Department estimates that we waste as much lettuce as we eat. Roughly, we eat 3 billion pounds and we toss 3 billion pounds every year.
• Low nutrient value: Lettuce is mainly water. You have to eat a lot of lettuce to get nutritional value.
• Carbon emissions: “CarbonCloud estimates that lettuce’s carbon cost is 0.56 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of lettuce, a number that’s right in line with Our World in Data’s estimate of the “other vegetables” category. That means our 6 billion pounds of lettuce generate 3 billion pounds of carbon dioxide. That’s 2.7 million metric tons, more than half a million cars’ worth.”
• Land use: “The U.S. generates all that carbon dioxide by growing lettuce on 375,000 acres. (We also import lettuce.) That’s an area bigger than Cape Cod….”
• Cost/Benefit: “So, on one side of the ledger we have 1.7 million annual cases of food poisoning, $3.7 billion and 3 billion pounds of rotting lettuce. On the other we have, basically, an excuse to kid yourself into eating blue cheese dressing….”

Well, the Cyclospora outbreak has caused lots of people to follow this advice.  As food safety lawyer Bill Marler writes: Six and a Half Million Households Quit Buying Salad in a Single Month. Eighty-Two Percent Say They Will Come Back When This Is Contained. The Industry Cannot Message Its Way to Contained.

More than 6.5 million American households stopped buying salad mixes and kits in the month ending July 26, against the month before. Eighty-seven percent of produce shoppers know about the Cyclospora outbreak. More than a quarter of households say they have quit salads and fresh greens entirely and another one in ten has cut back, which Numerator puts at roughly $280 million in consumer produce spending at risk for every month this continues…Salad trips at quick-service restaurants fell more than 16 percent.

He also points to the irony: We are not substituting other vegetables for lettuce; we are eating fewer vegetables overall—at the same time the government is urging us to Eat Real Food.

As he puts it today, Shoppers Are Walking Past the Produce Aisle. Telling Them We Have the Safest Food Supply in the World Will Not Bring Them Back (check out the New Yorker cartoon, if nothing else).

Comment

So I’m not opposed to eating lettuce.  Haspel’s arguments can be made for any vegetable.  I like it in salads and sandwiches and just about anything else.  I grow it, buy it at farmers markets, and buy whole heads at grocery stores.  I just avoid bagged salads.

Here’s what I think are the real issues raised by the Cyclospora outbreak.  We need:

• Better oversight and enforcement of existing food safety rules
• Pending food safety rules (traceability!) to be implemented, despite industry lobbying.
• Vegetable growers to insist on better standards (an outbreak like this hurts all vegetable growers, not just those growing lettuce in Mexico)
• Consumers to insist on our right to safe food
• Food safety to be taken seriously—by government, industry, and eaters.

Food safety is a major, major issue in food politics.