OPINION:
America does not need lettuce. It needs food.
Lettuce is about 95% water. A hundred grams of iceberg delivers roughly 14 calories and a gram of protein. Beans, potatoes, eggs, cabbage and milk feed people. Lettuce fills a bowl.
Eating it would be a harmless habit if the crop were cheap in every sense. It is not. Most of America’s lettuce still comes from two regions that trade the season between them: California’s Salinas Valley and the desert valleys around Yuma and Imperial.
In winter, a large share of the nation’s salad greens is grown with Colorado River irrigation on land that would not grow lettuce without that water.
We spend scarce water to produce a crop that is mostly water, then truck it across the country before it wilts. A lot of it never even gets eaten.
What lettuce does deliver reliably is risk. As of last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) DC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has tied a cyclospora outbreak in iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico to more than 11,000 illnesses, nearly 500 hospitalizations and two deaths in 20 states. Federal investigators say the true count is likely higher.
This is not a one-season fluke. Leafy greens are eaten raw, grown close to the ground and often irrigated with surface water that can carry manure from nearby cattle. Leaves fold and tear; pathogens stick and are hard to wash off.
Shredding and bagging mix many fields into one product that moves fast. For E. coli O157:H7, vegetable row crops — mainly leafy greens — account for about two-thirds of illnesses attributed to a food source. Romaine has been the usual E. coli vehicle. This summer’s giant outbreak is iceberg and a parasite. Different germ, same crop.
Darker greens carry vitamins. Fine; eat spinach, cook cabbage or make a salad out of other ingredients. Washing helps. But it does not make raw iceberg safe enough to include in every sandwich and taco in 20 states.
A food supply is judged by what it returns: calories, protein, nutrients and a tolerable amount of risk. Iceberg fails that test.
A national pipeline that yields almost no nourishment, burns desert water, spoils on the way and periodically sickens thousands is a habit we should break.
RAY WATFORD
Hilliard, Ohio
Please read our comment policy before commenting.