By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 12, 2007

Early last month, Dole Food sent thousands of pounds of lettuce, picked mostly in California, through its processing plant in Springfield, Ohio, where a company inspector looked for defects before sending it along a conveyer belt. There it was washed three times, dried and deposited into half-pound packages of Heart's Delight salad mix.

About 6,000 bags were loaded into refrigerated trucks, most destined for nearby states, where they would be put into grocery store cases without further examination. But 528 bags went to Canada, where the government had responded to last year's E. coli contamination of spinach by more than doubling random tests of leafy greens. Those tests, at a distribution warehouse in Ontario, detected E. coli bacteria and led to a massive recall not only in Canada but in nine states.

A year after the contaminated spinach -- also packaged under the Dole label -- killed at least three Americans and sickened hundreds of others, manufacturers, regulators and lawmakers in the United States are still arguing about how to ensure leafy greens are grown and handled safely. Canada, however, has already moved forward, focusing on catching potential problems before they reach retail shelves.

By last year, Canada, which gets about 90 percent of its lettuce and spinach from the United States, had already become worried about the safety of the goods it was receiving. There had been several produce-related outbreaks in recent years, and Canadian authorities had documented one illness related to the spinach problem last year but suspected there were more cases. Mirroring the initial reaction of U.S. industry, Canadian industry officials called for tighter control of the supply chain, assurances that farmers were abiding by acceptable agricultural standards and more scientific research into the causes of the problems.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency went further. It diverted resources dedicated to testing the quality of goods and more than doubled the size of its safety program. Instead of 550 tests of several types of produce each year, Canada now tests 600 samples of leafy greens and another 600 of tomatoes in addition to increased testing of other produce.

The testing takes place in one of Canada's five government labs. For lettuce, it will typically mean taking five bags or items from a single lot in for checking. "We should have been more aggressive before" last year's E. coli contamination, said Ren¿ Cardinal, acting national manager of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's fresh fruit and vegetable program.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency also requires U.S. importers to be part of a voluntary California program that sets minimum production standards. "If there is somebody that is not under the leafy green agreement, we put out a border alert" and that company will be refused at the border, Cardinal said.

The measures have already produced results, he said. Despite the Dole recall this year, "you can see an improvement. We have no known outbreak," Cardinal said. "If they keep up going like that, the confidence level will be there" among consumers.

In the United States, David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's food safety director, has dismissed the idea of simply increasing tests as Canada did, saying that the problem requires a more complex approach and that you cannot test your way to safety.

"End-product testing is a very expensive and unsure way to ensure that there is a safe product," said Acheson. "You have to do a heck of a lot of it." The agency will focus on "putting the resources and the actions where the risk is," Acheson said. FDA officials say it is more productive to identify vulnerable points within the production process and develop testing or policies to prevent them.

The disparity between the U.S. and Canadian response to the spinach contamination is troubling to consumer advocates who say the FDA's reliance on voluntary standards is outdated. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, outbreaks of illness related to produce contamination have doubled since 1998. The FDA inspects farms for leafy greens on average once every 3.9 years and conducts 900 sample tests a year. It has no mandatory industry standards.

Efforts to regulate the industry have stalled on the federal and state level, while consumer confidence has fallen: Sixty-six percent of consumers are confident in the food they find in the grocery store this year, down from 82 percent last year, according to the Food Marketing Institute. "The crisis in food safety ought to be an urgent priority for FDA, but this administration has not given the agency the direction or the resources it needs to make sure that food on the tables of American families is safe," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who has been critical of the FDA's handling of the outbreaks.

The FDA says it has been working to address consumer concerns. A food safety plan, which will address the import and domestic market, has been fast-tracked and is to be published within three to four weeks, Acheson said. "We are addressing several years of challenges and changes. We're not going to be able to turn this around on a dime. We're not dealing with a static situation," he said in an interview. "I think we're in a better place than we were a year ago."

The most significant change in the United States since last year's outbreak is a voluntary program in California established by industry officials ahead of stricter standards proposed by the state legislature. Under the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, producers such as Dole agree to abide by certain agricultural practices, like keeping crops 200 feet from untreated manure. They also pay 2 cents a carton -- the equivalent of 24 pounds -- to fund auditing of their records and inspections of their fields. The group expects to collect about $4.5 billion this year but will not do sample testing of crops.

"We're still a brand new organization, we have really been working on getting the marketing agreement up and running," said Scott Horsfall, chief executive of the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement.

The program has not been duplicated in other states, though Horsfall says Arizona and Florida are considering it, and remains voluntary, to the chagrin of consumer advocates.

"A voluntary program is a voluntary program. Nobody is requiring the industry to do anything," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The bottom line is for the better companies, the ones that want to improve, there are more tools available. For companies that do not want to comply, nothing is requiring them to change a thing."

The program does not offer standards higher than what was acceptable within the industry before the outbreak, critics say.

"Nothing has changed. This is the same voluntary approach that has been the source of 21 outbreaks in California. I am not confident that without a mandatory system we're any safer," said state Sen. Dean Florez, a Democrat.

Noting that the program touts the fact that 99 percent of producers have signed up, Florez adds, "It only takes 1 percent to poison an entire nation."