Looks like guacamole and salsa from restaurants are key vehicles for transporting foodborne pathogens. From a CDC press release yesterday:
“Fresh salsa and guacamole, especially those served in retail food establishments, may be important vehicles of foodborne infection,” says Magdalena Kendall, an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) researcher who collaborated on the CDC study.
As it turns out, “nearly 1 out of every 25 restaurant-associated foodborne outbreaks with identified food sources between 1998 and 2008 can be traced back to contaminated salsa or guacamole, more than double the rate during the previous decade.” According to the study, failing to properly store product at proper temperatures, or for too lengthy a time, were likely contributing factors, and food workers themselves were sometimes a source of the contamination.
But this rings off-key to me, actually. More than doubling the number of outbreaks in a decade? That seems to me a broader, more systemic problem with how our food is made, not simply a massive training fail for workers.
After all, to skew numbers on an epidemiological level — that is, on the level of whole populations — the “retail food establishments” that the CDC is talking about aren’t local dinner clubs and sandwich shops, but national fast food chains: McDonald’s and Subway and Taco Bell (oh my!). Or, to be even more exact, it’s the highly centralized food prep system that so efficiently distributes guac, salsa, the ingredients that comprise them — and food-borne microbes riding along — that tilt the scales for these two products. To quote Kendall again:
“Salsa and guacamole often contain diced raw produce including hot peppers, tomatoes and cilantro, each of which has been implicated in past outbreaks.”
Right. So it’s really the gathering of problematic, fresh ingredients on an industrial level, not the finished products of guac and salsa, that are at issue here.
To show you what I mean, take the e.coli outbreak back in September 2006. California’s Ready Pac, which is coincidentally recalling spinach in three states right now, was fingered along with several other brands in an outbreak that killed 3 people and sickened more than 200 in 26 states. So massive and confusing was the 2006 outbreak(s) that investigators thought people were being sickened by green onions, initially. Then spinach. Later they concluded lettuce was to blame. In large part, this confusion came because the national produce distribution companies like Ready Pac were too big to quickly and effectively investigate their distribution streams. For example, Ready Pac distributed to Taco Bell in New Jersey — 86 stores in all — where the outbreak was particularly intense with 33 cases.
Think about that for a second. One produce distributor to 86 high-volume fast food restaurants in just one state. And investigators were looking fo rone batch of tainted green onions? I mean, spinach? Er, lettuce?
Let’s assume Ready Pac trained its employees well and they responded perfectly in that outbreak. The sprawling system that this one company created nevertheless made it a perfect channel for distributing food that may have been tainted before it ever arrived in their warehouses and prep stations. Even if everything had gone right (and who knows, it may have actually gone according to plan in that 2006 oubreak), they are still a behemoth food distributor distributing behemoth amounts of food to other behemoth chains. (And there are many Ready Pac style companies across the country. After Taco Bell determined their tainted produce was coming from Ready Pac, they simply switched to Taylor Farms.)
So, yeah, avoid the guacamole and salsa at big chain fast foods. But don’t presume the fresh ingredients are any better.
Photo of Taco Bell HQ in Irvine CA by Timjarret courtesy Creative Commons license.
