Foodborne Illness Fallout an Inherited Problem No One Wants

A friend and I grab lunch together every week or two. His one rule lately? No lettuce. Even though he works in ag, he says he has too much going on to risk getting sick. At one restaurant, a sandwich arrived with lettuce on it. He promptly removed it.

I can gently push back. The contaminated lettuce from the highly publicized food safety outbreak was iceberg from a specific source in central Mexico; the leaf on his sandwich was green leaf. But knowing the difference didn’t make him feel any safer. And he represents millions of consumers making their own versions of that same decision.

That’s striking, isn’t it? A food safety outbreak from one source doesn’t stay neatly contained there. Consumer confidence doesn’t work that way.

A grower I’ve known for years recently posted on LinkedIn that he wasn’t sure his family farm would survive this crisis. The farm recently celebrated its 100th anniversary and had gone through a reorganization just months before the Cyclospora outbreak.

Then, during my annual farm tour, this year in Missouri and Kansas, I heard the exact opposite.

Small growers producing lettuce in high tunnels told me they couldn’t keep up with demand. Locally sourced leafy greens offered consumers something they desperately wanted: confidence in where their food came from.

Same food safety crisis. Completely different consequences.

We tend to talk about agriculture in pieces — the lettuce industry, local farms, imports, Western growers, and protected agriculture. But the food system doesn’t respect those boundaries nearly as much as we do.

An outbreak stemming from one production region can change what someone orders for lunch thousands of miles away. Multiply that decision across millions of consumers, and it can threaten one farm while creating an unexpected market for another.

And food safety is hardly the only example. Water decisions in the West matter well beyond the growers whose allocations are affected. Labor policy changes what crops make economic sense to produce.

Agriculture is intensely local. Every grower deals with a particular piece of ground, climate, workforce, and market. But it’s also remarkably interconnected.

We’ve watched food safety outbreaks reshape the produce industry before. We don’t yet know what lasting changes will come from this one. What we do know is that something happening a thousand miles away can become your problem remarkably quickly.

But that interconnectedness works in other ways, too. Markets respond. Supply chains adjust. And growers look for ways forward.

Sometimes that means weathering a problem you had no hand in creating. Sometimes it means recognizing an opportunity you never expected.

Usually, it means adapting. And growers have had a lot of practice at that.