Food Safety In Tree Fruit Is A Priority

As 2009 shapes up in the Pacific Northwest, a couple issues are taking growers’ minds off this unusually beneficent spring and the potential for mega-crops of apples, cherries, and pears.

One, of course, is the 2008 crop. Cherries are a distant, difficult memory — too many cold nights, too few fruit. Pears trundle along, not great, not bad, but still too many small fruit and underproducing old orchards. Apples started well but now struggle with way too many small sizes. Target fruit, 88s and larger with good condition, are still very profitable. The rest, even organic, is problematic and of no great service to our consumers or our long-term future.

Our 2008 apple crop was woefully underestimated. Way too many undersized, physiologically immature fruit were brought in. Hopefully every grower is serious about crop load management this season. We have provided our customers with an increasingly higher quality product and have the tools to continue that trend from orchard to packinghouse, if we choose.

Delicious, Affordable, And Safe

This year, another issue has rapidly arisen. We now seem to have yet another quality requirement — a guarantee our products are safe, whether from chemical or microbial contamination. We are well familiar with chemical residue issues, exemplified at its worst by the Alar Apocalypse (or more recently, by a series of odd maximum residue level restrictions imposed by Taiwan authorities, threatening current and future shipments).

No! Not that! Food safety? For tree fruits? Can anyone seriously claim human pathogens on U.S. fruits pose the slightest risk? Certainly, there have been a couple cases. In 1996, Odwalla marketed apple juice contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7 that caused some very serious intestinal illnesses. Early this year, Listeria contamination found in some fresh-sliced apple lots prompted a quick recall, but no reported human illnesses.

Hooray. Two cases of microbial contamination, and neither involved fresh whole apples. We are one produce item that can claim very low risk. But is that enough? Given proposed Congressional legislation, the potential of a food safety super agency, and most importantly, the perception of the public that our food supply has become increasingly dangerous, can we rely on what we only think is true?

I don’t think so. Food safety is an issue that should unite specialty crop producers. We want our products to be delicious, affordable, and safe. We need to communicate about how safe our products actually are and what we are doing to ensure that. If you have followed American/Western Fruit Grower’s online coverage on their website, you know that many industry organizations, led by the Produce Marketing Association, are properly out in front here.

We also need research and outreach. Fortunately, another industry-wide entity is out front. A new public-private partnership, the Center for Produce Safety (http://cps.ucdavis.edu) has created a focal point for our industry, one that will provide leadership, high-quality technical information, and funding to ensure our consumers have no doubt that tree fruits are really safe, backed up by state of the art science and effective outreach. That leaves our producers with one less worry, so they can focus on ensuring our products are delicious and affordable for at least one more season.