Zapping Germs Off Your Food

  • Researcher Kevin Keener has been working on a device that turns the air inside food packaging into ozone (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

Researchers are working overtime to find ways to kill dangerous bacteria in food such as Salmonella and E. coli. Rebecca Williams reports one researcher has found a new way to kill bacteria:

Transcript

Researchers are working
overtime to find ways to kill dangerous bacteria in food such as Salmonella and E. coli. Rebecca Williams reports one researcher has found a new way to kill bacteria:

Food processors expose produce like lettuce to ozone for a few seconds or minutes to kill bacteria.

Kevin Keener has been working on a device that turns the air inside food packaging into ozone.

Keener is a food process engineer at Purdue University.

He attaches the device to the outside of food packages – like a bag of lettuce – and applies electrodes that send high voltage through the bag.

“Visually it’s very Frankenstein-ish. It’s a safe process, there is a high voltage, but it’s similar to a spark you’d get with an electric fence.”

Keener says the ozone spends more time with the food so it kills more bacteria.

There’s a problem though – in some of their tests the device turned green spinach white.

So there are a few kinks to work out. But food companies are interested and we might see this commercialized in a year or two.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Leafy, Irradiated Greens

  • The Food and Drug Administration has now approved irradiating iceberg lettuce and spinach to kill the bacteria. (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

The government has cleared the way
to irradiate some produce. Lester Graham
reports if produce companies do use radiation,
it might reduce contamination of leafy greens:

Transcript

The government has cleared the way
to irradiate some produce. Lester Graham
reports if produce companies do use radiation,
it might reduce contamination of leafy greens:

The last few years a lot of people have gotten sick from salmonella and e.coli
contamination. The Food and Drug Administration has now approved irradiating
iceberg lettuce and spinach to kill the bacteria.

Dennis Olson is a scientist at Iowa State University. He says like irradiating meat,
people will accept this too.

“There are a lot of consumer activists groups that are opposed to the technology and
they get a lot of media attention that says consumers hate it or don’t want it. And yet, in
fact, when we’ve introduced the products – with some education – consumers are very
willing to accept it.”

Olson says the FDA should okay irradiating other produce too. It’s expensive, but it
might mean fewer costly recalls for produce companies, and means longer shelf life for
lettuce and spinach.

For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

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Color Changing Bacteria Detector

  • A team at Tufts University is working on sensors that could change color to tell you if a bag of lettuce has dangerous bacteria in it. (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

Researchers are working on a tool
that could tell you if your food is safe
to eat before you break open the bag.
Rebecca Williams has more:

Transcript

Researchers are working on a tool
that could tell you if your food is safe
to eat before you break open the bag.
Rebecca Williams has more:

A team at Tufts University is working on sensors that could change color to
tell you if a bag of lettuce has dangerous bacteria in it.

The special ingredient is silk. They boiled silkworm cocoons. And made a
thin silk film out of the proteins. The silk film has color changing properties
– like a butterfly’s wing.

Fio Omenetto is the lead researcher. He says it could be possible to activate
the film so it detects the presence of E. coli. Then the film could be put in a
bag of spinach.

“So immediately by looking at color change you will be able to tell whether
the spinach is good to eat or not.”

Omenetto says this is still pretty futuristic at this point. He says it’ll
probably be at least five years before you might see this at the grocery store.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Safer Bags of Salad

There’s growing concern about the spinach and lettuce in your crisper. There have been
several recalls of bags of salad produce after they hit the grocery stores. The federal
government recently noted that food safety has become one of the biggest ongoing
problems facing agencies responsible for inspecting food. The result is a debate among
growers, food processors and conservation groups over how to better protect the food
supply. But environmental groups say some of the safeguards can harm wildlife. Chuck
Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

There’s growing concern about the spinach and lettuce in your crisper. There have been
several recalls of bags of salad produce after they hit the grocery stores. The federal
government recently noted that food safety has become one of the biggest ongoing
problems facing agencies responsible for inspecting food. The result is a debate among
growers, food processors and conservation groups over how to better protect the food
supply. But environmental groups say some of the safeguards can harm wildlife. Chuck
Quirmbach reports:


During the last year, people have died and hundreds of people have gotten sick because
of E. coli bacteria contamination of some produce. Farmers and food processors are
fighting in court over what officially caused the contamination. But in the Salinas Valley
of California, an area known as the nation’s Salad Bowl, the food processing industry is
trying to show consumers they can be confident about the safety of commercially-
produced leafy greens. Even processors who were not linked to last year’s E. coli scare
suffered a drop in sales. They’re anxious to show off their facilities and the safety
precautions they’ve taken.


Inside this large processing plant a million pounds of lettuce come through every day.
It’s washed in chlorinated water, some of it is mixed in with other raw vegetables and
packed into bags that are sent to grocery stores across the U.S. This plant is operated by
Fresh Express, a company owned by Chiquita Brands. Plant manager Phil Bradway says
the plant is sanitized daily:


“You generate organic material buildup and its extremely important on a regular and
consistent basis to remove that organic material before you continue to process a food
safe product and that’s why we’re rigorous about the seven-day-a-week sanitation activities in
our facilities.”


Fresh Express vice president Bill Clyburn says this salad bagging plant ships out a
product that is better protected than vegetables that are sent unbagged to the grocery
stores:


“We’re taking the precautions to wash the lettuce and make it clean. You take commodity
produce of any type, go into a grocery store and watch how many people pick it up,
breathe on it, put it back down and take another head of lettuce and how many people still
don’t wash that. You never hear about people getting sick on commodity lettuce ’cause
there’s no label to go back at.”


And Fresh Express says it’s not just conditions at the plant that they and other processors
are trying to control. In the last year, California growers came up with a voluntary
program to try to develop better agricultural practices. Things such as protecting farm
fields from contamination from animals. Fresh Express insists that its growers exceed the
standards so that no wildlife urine or fecal matter come into contact with the produce, but some farmers say the food processors have some unrealistic ideas.


(Sound of sprinkler)


A sprinkler waters crops at an organic farm. Grower Andrew Griffin says some food
industry giants want more fences around farms to help keep wildlife out of the fields. But
he says those won’t make a difference:


“Absolutely not. It’s ridiculous. You can’t fence out the birds. You can’t fence out the
sky… I mean I don’t know what they’re thinking.”


Griffin says a better solution would be reduce the growing concentration of agri-business
and not send so much of the Salad Bowl’s leafy greens through just a few processing
plants:


“So, if there’s a contamination of say the blade on the cutting machine, you have an
opportunity to contaminate salad that’s gonna feed a whole nation. Whereas if it was
diffuse, if we had a diffuse system and you had small farms in different places, you
wouldn’t have that same broad spectrum problem.”


And the skeptical farmers have allies in groups such as The Nature Conservancy.
Spokeswoman Chris Fischer says the new restrictions in the farm fields are affecting
wildlife habitat along streams and river. She says people across the nation who eat salads
should care about what happens to the environment of the Salinas valley:


“As both a consumer and a conservationist the sustainability of our farming and
watershed health and ultimately our water quality and public health is all wrapped up
together and unsustainable, unhealthy farm practices ultimately aren’t going to serve us
well.”


Fischer says some of the new restrictions on growers are based on the best available
research, but she’s concerned food processors are adding extra requirements that aren’t
based on good science. Recently news reports added to the debate about safety of leafy
greens that end up on your table. The Associated Press reported federal inspections of
both growers and processors of salad greens only happen about once every four years.


For the Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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Migrant Workers: Still Harvest of Shame?

  • Most migrant labor camps provide housing only for single men, but the Zellers farm in Hartville, OH allows entire families to migrate and, for those of age, to work together in the fields. (Photo by Gary Harwood )

It might sound obvious, but America needs to grow and harvest food. The problem is
that many Americans don’t want to work on farms anymore. That’s why some farm
owners recruit workers from Mexico and other places. During the growing season,
nearly 300 workers and their children live in migrant camps around the K. W. Zellers
family farm in rural northeast Ohio. Julie Grant spent some time at the Zellers’ farm this
fall and has this story:

Transcript

It might sound obvious, but America needs to grow and harvest food. The problem is
that many Americans don’t want to work on farms anymore. That’s why some farm
owners recruit workers from Mexico and other places. During the growing season,
nearly 300 workers and their children live in migrant camps around the K. W. Zellers
family farm in rural northeast Ohio. Julie Grant spent some time at the Zellers’ farm this
fall and has this story:


For many Americans, just tending a small garden can be too much labor. But the
Mexican workers on the Zellers Farm in Hartville, Ohio are moving quickly down rows
of lettuce hundreds of yards long.


One man crouches down and cuts four heads of romaine. He’s leaning over the plants all
day long. It’s backbreaking work, but he moves spryly to the next row, and the next, and
the next. He’ll only make about 3 cents per head, so he wants to cut as many heads as
quickly as possible. Another worker follows him, loading the lettuce into boxes, then
lifting the 30 to 40 pound boxes and throwing them on to a flatbed truck, one after
another.


Farm owner Jeff Zellers says most people who live around here don’t want to do this:


“No. We can probably hire ten people and one of them will last more than a week, who
will stay here work, and work through it.”


Out in another field, a different crew is working in the harshest heat of the day. They get
a little protection from straw hats and some are wearing rubber pants. They need to protect
their legs from the hot, black, mucky soil. The temperature of the dirt can get up to 110
degrees.


Two generations of the Soto family of Mexico work together thinning lettuce. They
work down the long rows using a hoe, or crouching down and pulling out weeds by hand.
25-year-old Ivan Soto has become an expert, after thinning lettuce at the Zellers farm for
the past nine years:


“We don’t do other jobs, only one job.”


Ivan Soto pretty much taught himself English. He’s gone through the process to become
a US citizen. Now his wife has joined him and his family on the lettuce-thinning crew.
Other crews specialize in growing cilantro, parsley, and radishes. Zellers says the farm
depends on this expertise:


“We have to deliver
product on a daily basis that is as good or better then our competitors. And if we do not
have a trained labor force to do that, we’re not going to long term be in business.”


The Zellers farm pays less then some others because it has set up temporary homes
around the perimeter of the farm. Most of the homes look like small trailers. But they
come furnished and the farm pays most of the workers’ living expenses. Most migrant
farm workers make 11 to 14 thousand dollars a year. Ivan Soto says it’s hard, boring
work, but they make a good enough living that when they return to Mexico they can
afford to rest for awhile.


That’s a big reason their family, including his wife and young son, his parents, four
siblings, an aunt and uncle, have traveled from their home outside Mexico City to this
small northeast Ohio town for going on a decade now:


“When we are here, we say, well, we are now in our second home, because over there is our first home this is our home because here in Ohio is our second home for us.”


While most farms provide migrant housing only for single men,
Jeff Zellers allows entire families to migrate and work together in the fields. He hopes
his own children understand all the labor it takes to provide a meal:


“When we return thanks before we eat dinner, we pray for the people that prepared and produced the food. If my childen do nothing else but understand that their food did not show up in the grocery store because that’s where it was, it just came off an assembly line, I would want them to do that.”


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Obsessing Over Vegetable Gardens

  • Many gardeners feel that there's nothing as satisfying as growing and eating your own vegetables. (Photo by Daniel Wildman)

Not as many people are planting vegetable gardens these days… but the few who do are really passionate about it. And it’s not just because they swear their own vegetables taste better than anything you can get at a store. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams explores the obsessions of vegetable gardeners:

Transcript

Not as many people are planting vegetable gardens these days… but the few who do
are really passionate about it, and it’s not just because they swear their own
vegetables taste better than anything you can get at a store. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams explores the obsessions of vegetable
gardeners:


In Connie Bank’s former life, she recruited attorneys and engineers. She’d be
on the phone until ten every night. She’d spend entire weekends with clients.
She calls herself a true Type A – working at full speed, making a lot of money,
until she just had enough of it all.


Now vegetable gardening is her whole life.


“You’re controlling a tiny little nourishing world of your own, where the rest
of our world is sort of crazy, politics are crazy, the world is going nuts… it’s
America, it’s fast fast fast fast fast. This vegetable gardening thing is a way to take a
deep breath, slow yourself down, and just watch the garden grow.”


But Bank admits she’s still intense. She throws herself into gardening. She
says if the little plastic labels say to plant things twelve inches apart, she gets
impatient and packs them in six inches apart.


People like Connie Bank are sort of rare. A survey by the National Gardening
Association found that not a lot of people are into vegetable gardening these
days. Compared to five years ago, seven million fewer households are growing
vegetables. You have to weed and water every day and fend off the squirrels.
Most Americans would rather plant flowers or just not bother with any of it.


So these days, instead of recruiting professionals, Connie Bank’s trying to
recruit as many new gardeners as she can. She teaches classes to people on
their lunch breaks. Today, she’s going after daycare kids.


(Sound of watering)


BANK: “Who here likes vegetables? What kind do you like?”


KIDS: “Watermelon! Oranges! Strawberries!”


BANK: “Okay, that’s good you guys, except those are fruits.”


KIDS: “Corn on the cob is good!”


A lot of serious vegetable gardeners got their first taste of it as kids.


(Sound of trowel digging)


Earl Shaffer farmed as a kid in Indiana, and when he left at 17 he swore he’d
never grow anything again. But Earl says twenty years later, his wife Marie
tempted him back into the garden. Today, they’re tending to their lettuce,
tomatoes and zucchini. He says their house is too big for just the two of them
now, but he can’t move and leave his garden behind.


“As you get older, I think some of the things that were a part of your youth
kind of return in importance in some way. I was very fond of my grandparents,
especially my grandmother, and gardening was part of her life, I think that also made it
important to me to return to it.”


Shaffer says farming did give him a feel for growing things, but like everyone
else, he still has to read the plant labels. He says we’re losing the
knowledge of how to live off the land.


For gardeners, growing even just a couple tomato plants can feel like
reconnecting to our farming roots. Ashley Miller curated an exhibit on
vegetable garden history at Cornell University. She says the motives for these
gardens have changed a lot over the last three centuries. Sometimes people have
gardened to make money, sometimes they’ve grown food to support a war effort,
and sometimes people have just done it as a challenging hobby, but there’s one
major thread.


“Growing vegetables is as close as we can get to a seasonal ritual.
There is something primal about putting a seed in the soil and tending it, and
harvesting it and eating it.”


A lot of gardeners agree that growing vegetables is a sensual experience. They
talk about the way the scent of tomato plants fills the whole yard, or the
blue-green color of baby broccoli. Gardener Lee Criss says she can’t wait to
get into her yard in the spring and get her bare hands in the dirt.


“I don’t garden with gloves because I need to feel what the soil feels like, the
texture. You use senses in gardening that you don’t in most everything else
that you do. You feel things, you smell. It’s a different way of sensing the
world around you, I think.”


It’s hard to walk away from these people’s backyards and shake off their
enthusiasm. Every single gardener I talked to told me to call them when I
started my own garden. And if they think you’re considering gardening at all,
watch out: they’ll fill your head with visions of their juiciest cherry
tomatoes, they’ll try to fill your car with seedlings, anything to get you
hooked.


For the GLRC, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Urban Vegetable Farm Takes Root in Brownfield

  • Just outside the Greensgrow compound (photo by Brad Linder)

A farm is a strange thing to see in the middle of a gritty, urban area.
But the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder recently visited a small
farm on what used to be a polluted site in an industrial neighborhood:

Transcript

A farm is a strange thing to see in the middle of an gritty, urban area.
But the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder recently visited a
small farm on what used to be a polluted site in an industrial
neighborhood:


One of the first things you notice about this one-acre plot in
Philadelphia is how out of place the farm looks. About a block away is a
busy interstate highway that jams up with rush hour traffic twice a day.


The farm itself is surrounded by rowhouses, a steel galvanizing plant, and
an auto detail shop.


Chino Rosatto runs the auto shop. About 8 years ago, he first met his new
neighbors – a small group of farmers.


”It was weird at first, you don’t see no farm in the city.”


But Rosatto says he got used to the farm started by Mary Seton Corboy
pretty quickly.


“It was an empty lot. Nothing there. Just fenced up, and that was it. She
came up, did something with it.”


Before it was an empty lot, this city block was a steel plant. In 1988
the building was demolished, and the EPA declared the site hazardous.


It was cleaned up, but Rosatto says it was nothing but concrete slabs
until Mary Seton Corboy and her small group of volunteers came and started
the farm they call Greensgrow.


Corboy moved to Philadelphia from the suburbs nearly a decade ago. With a
background as a chef, she’d always been concerned about how hard it was to
find fresh produce. So she decided to grow it herself.


“The question that just kept coming up over and over again was, is there
any reason why you have to be in a rural area to grow food, given the fact
that the market for the food, the largest market for the food, is in the
urban area?”


Corboy says usually food travels an average of 1500 miles from its source
to wind up on most Americans plates. And she says when it comes to flavor
– nothing is more important than how fresh the food is.


“If you eat strawberries that are commercially available,
you have no taste recognition of something that people 40 years ago would
say is a strawberry, because of the refrigeration, because of the way they
are picked underripe, because of the things they are sprayed with to give
them a longer shelf life.”


Corboy says her first choice for a farm wouldn’t have been an abandoned
industrial site. But the rent was cheaper than it would be at almost any
other spot in the city.


And even though the EPA and scientists from Penn State University
confirmed that there were no toxic chemicals left, Corboy doesn’t plant
anything edible in the ground.


She grows some plants in greenhouses. Others are planted in raised soil
beds. And she grows lettuce in PVC pipes that deliver nutrients to the
plants without any soil at all.


Corboy still regularly sends plant samples out for testing. The results?


“At one point Penn State sent us back a report, we talked to
them on the phone about it, and they said your stuff is actually cleaner
than stuff that we’ve seen grown on farms. Go figure that. We feel very, very comfortable
with the produce that we grow. Because, you know, I’ve been living on it
myself for 8 years.”


And restaurant owners say they’re happy to buy some of the freshest
produce available.


Judy Wicks is owner the White Dog Cafe, a Philadelphia
restaurant that specializes in locally grown foods and meat from animals
raised in humane conditions. She’s been a loyal Greensgrow customer for 8
years.


“As soon as we heard about Greensgrow, we were really excited
about the idea of supporting an urban farm on a brownfield – what a
dream! To you know, take an unsightly, unused block, and turn it into a
farm. It’s just a really exciting concept.”


Wicks says she’s never had a concern about the quality of the food,
because of the care taken to prevent it from touching the soil.


In addition to its restaurant business, Greensgrow sells fruit and
vegetables to Philadelphia residents at a farmer’s market twice a week.
The farm also operates one of the only nurseries in the city, which begins
selling plants this spring.


Mary Seton Corboy says running the farm has taught her a lot about food,
the environment, and waste. She says she doesn’t look at empty lots the
same way anymore. She’s learned to squeeze fruits, vegetables and flowers
out of every space of this city block. And she sees value in the things
other people throw out.


On a recent night Corboy was driving home with her farm manager Beth Kean,
and they spotted a pile of trash beside a building.


“But what they had dumped were all these pallets. And Beth
was with me in the car, and we both turned and looked at them and went,
Look at those pallets! Let’s come back and get them, they’re in great
shape!”


Urban farming is tough. Corboy originally had lofty goals for her farm.
Greensgrow was going to be a pilot project, something she’d expand to
include 10 farms throughout Philadelphia.


8 years later, Greensgrow is still anchored on its original one-acre site.
But by keeping her costs low and selling to loyal customers, Corboy sold
200-thousand dollars worth of produce last year. That was enough to make
2004 the farm’s first profitable year.


For the GLRC, I’m Brad Linder.

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