Food Safety in Arizona: Now It's Pistachios
By Kevin Rogers, Arizona Farm Bureau President
You may have noticed ongoing news coverage in recent months of The Peanut Corporation of America. The company at the heart of a nationwide outbreak of salmonella-tainted peanut products has shut down operations at its Texas facilities after authorities discovered the bacteria in its products there and at another facility in Georgia.
Tragically, eight people are dead and hundreds sick from salmonella poisoning and tons of products containing tainted peanut paste pulled from store shelves. The shock is that two processing plants from one company could wreak such havoc.
This recent violation of our food safety system should never have happened and it should’ve been stopped long before anyone became sick, let alone died.
If wrongdoing is found, the guilty parties should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
And, of course now we have the pistachio recall.
Other victims always mount as these food safety breaches occur. From the grower standpoint, this becomes a devastating financial loss for American peanut and pistachio farmers. Peanut farmers in Georgia will tell you that they’re quite discouraged by this breach in the food chain by one bad processor. The incident gives everyone having anything to do with peanuts and peanut butter a black eye.
And, as The Peanut Corporation of America’s violations ruinously spill over, a big drop in demand for peanut products has the potential to occur. This happened more recently with the spinach scare. The latest could be pistachios.
In tough economic times, peanuts are an affordable protein source, but they’re also the bread and butter for a lot of farm families in the south. When E. coli was found in spinach and traced back to one small farm in California, it devastated the entire spinach industry that included parts of Arizona. Some produce farms are still trying to recover.
Peanut Corporation of America’s CEO, Stewart Parnell, appears to have possessed a cavalier attitude toward safety; as well as his company’s dodgy health record. Yet such behavior is the exception to the rule in the food industry, as the relatively rare examples of disease show. While this outbreak led to the biggest food recall in history because of how widely the ingredient had been distributed, it still makes up a tiny fraction of the 40,000 reported U.S. salmonella cases a year, most of which are caused by accidental contamination in home kitchens, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
The final outcome of the Pistachio recall is still emerging. The Pistachio incident does hit home in our state. Here in Arizona we have a significant pistachio industry as it’s the second leading pistachio state in the United States behind California.
As a result of how quickly Peanut Corporation of America has been brought to account, the best regulator is a market that ferrets out the reckless and flagrant violators. And while I don’t believe we need more government regulation, I do believe that the regulations that exist should be enforced.
Additionally, our regulating organizations, specifically the Food and Drug Administration, can work more proactively to administer oversight before an outbreak occurs. Blanket recalls covering all pistachios (shelled and unshelled, roasted and unroasted and more), for example, have the potential to devastate an industry while not truly ensuring legitimate food safety.
Perhaps part of the solution lies more in self regulation. The Arizona Leafy Green Products Shipper Marketing Agreement is a good example. The agreement is an industry initiated voluntary program that set up standards and procedures for leafy green shippers in order to assure the food safety of leafy greens.
Another sign of this has been some sectors of the food industry cobbling together their own form of regulation in an attempt to reassure consumers by hiring their own inspectors. These do-it-yourself programs may provide an enhanced safety level in segments of the industry that have embraced them but they can also introduce new challenges and conflicts of interest. All this without even factoring in the additional costs.
Back to the peanuts and the pistachios: America puts our future purchasing choices at risk when we overcorrect for one bad apple, in this case the peanut processor (the pistachio processor took extremely proactive action by alerting officials and stopping production) . The overcorrection by us avoiding peanut and pistachio products could lead to peanut and pistachio farmers going out of business. Then where do these vast and healthy sources of protein come from? Overseas?
American farmers and ranchers are feeding more than 300 million of us 365 days of the year, three times a day. And that’s not counting our global contributions.
Key Words: Food Safety in Arizona, Arizona Pistachios.
