This summer, Michigan had the highest recorded numbers in the country of cyclosporiasis, a gastrointestinal illness caused by a parasite. Experts said the high numbers in the state might be due to better surveillance and testing. But nationally, this summer’s cyclosporiasis outbreak highlighted safety issues in our food systems.
Cyclospora doesn’t behave like other contaminants that the large scale food system is built to destroy. It isn’t killed by chlorinated water, a common sanitizer used on industrial food. Parasite contamination can also be difficult to track, particularly with a globalized food system and federal government cuts in the U.S.
The mystery of exactly how the outbreak started has yet to be fully solved. But the recalls have been limited to imported lettuce from Taylor Farms, a huge international company. And just last week Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services put out a press release that stated, “The majority of the contaminated produce is likely no longer available for consumption.”
A boost in lettuce sales — locally
So how are local farms faring under the stress of all of this?
People operating several stands at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market said they were selling unexpectedly high quantities of lettuce and other greens.
Mohinder Singh, the owner of Seva Farms in southeast Michigan, explained that lettuce is one of their main crops.
“A week before this outbreak, I couldn't sell all the lettuce I had. I had ended up calling Food Gatherers. They brought a semi truck out to the farm. We gave them 12 boxes of lettuce and even harvested some out in the field fresh for them because we just had too much. It was getting too big and it just wasn't selling," he said. "And then all of a sudden, the opposite happened. And now I'm completely out. I've been selling it like crazy."
“In the beginning, I don't think we were really aware like how much this was going to change. So we were selling out [at] like 10am, of all our lettuce and then our greens after that, like bunched greens like kale,” said Violet Flores, a farm hand at Green Things Farm Collective, based near Ann Arbor.
But are local farms at a lower risk for contamination, generally speaking?
“There's some sense going around of people being like, well, local’s somehow magically always going to be better. And you can get outbreaks of things on small farms and things like that, but it would be much more contained and much more traceable….So the shorter the distribution chain, just the shorter, fewer hands have touched it,” said Emma Hardy. She has a PhD in the philosophy of food and food systems from the University of Michigan.
Eating local can mean smaller scale production and distribution. Our food is vulnerable to contamination at every step of processing, so more steps, more farms, bigger chains, can mean more opportunities for mistakes.
The other possible benefit of a smaller, local farm can be more transparency.
Flores from Green Things explained it like this, “We’re harvesting the food as well. We’re working in the washing rooms where we wash and sanitize our vegetables. You can come ask us questions about what’s happening to the food you’re buying and you can do that to a lot of different people selling here, and at different markets as well.”
Transparency can benefit the farm workers as well as the consumers.
“So as we're thinking about resiliency, thinking about how do I get my stuff from closer to home as supply chains are more and more likely to be disrupted for all sorts of reasons,” said Amanda Edmonds, the lead of the University of Michigan’s Sustainable Food Systems Initiative. She said smaller food systems can also be more nimble and resilient during a crisis.
Unfortunately, this will not be our last hot contaminated food summer. Cyclospora in particular is a tropical and subtropical organism. It likes warm weather. In the U.S., small summer outbreaks are common.
With climate change heating up or extending summers in some regions, we could see more outbreaks like this one, or extended outbreak seasons. Climate change can also make conditions less predictable for farmers and threaten food security.
“The big industrial food system has infrastructure, right? That takes investment. And so, great that in this time of crisis, we're thinking about this. And how do we make sure that these systems, [this] infrastructure is viable in an ongoing way?” said Edmonds.
Edmonds said the burden of addressing this should not fall just on the consumer, and individual choices.
