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CDC Food Safety Alert: E. Coli Outbreak Linked to Romaine Lettuce
- savethefuture 8y agoIts always the lettuce!
- HeavenBanned 8y agoLettuce alone!
- stcredzero 8y agoThe other day, my wife introduced me to yet another difference between Chinese cuisine and US cuisine: She cooked the Romaine lettuce she got from her coworker. She just cooked it like you'd cook Bok Choy. It was quite good! My wife also rinses everything we get from the store. No one is to be trusted with your family's food. Absolutely everything is rinsed, including things most Americans would really rather not. One day, I had to work a bit to convince her to not rinse the steel cut oats!
- spicymaki 8y agoI always cut and rinse lettuce, is that uncommon? Sounds interesting. I need to try stir frying romaine.
- panarky 8y agoYou can't rinse off what's physically inside the plant. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5404196/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5404196/
- spicymaki 8y agoYou took that comment out of context. The parent implied that it was unusual for people to cut and rinse vegetables (I was replying it was not unusual for me). I never said that would resolve the E. Coli problem.
- ShorsHammer 8y agoMany restaurants in China serve cooked lettuce as a side, I found it quite odd at first but it's really tasty and with some soy sauce easy to eat by itself. Cooking lettuce in the western world will probably raise a few eyebrows.
- el_benhameen 8y agoI’ve gone to a few restaurants in the US that do a cooked version of a caesar salad that’s quite good. I’ve made it myself, too. Grill whole heads of romaine until they’re blackened and wilting, then dress and shave parmesean on them. Well ... don’t do that now, I guess. But once the red alert is over, it’s pretty tasty.
- xfitm3 8y agoGordon Ramsay has something to say about cooked salads, and it’s hilarious.
- moojd 8y agoI'm used to eating cooked collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, spinach, and kale but I don't know why it has never crossed my mind you could do the same with something like romaine or lettuce. I imagine it wouldn't be too different.
- wil421 8y agoI’ve halved romaine lettuce and grilled it before with olive oil, salt and pepper topped with a light Vinaigrette. Quite tastey but difficult to grill. I’ve done it twice. My wife’s eyebrows were raised both times. She thought it was weird but didn’t think it tasted bad.
- Alex3917 8y agoIt's a pretty standard hot pot ingredient in the U.S.
- mjevans 8y agoRinsing is good at /gorse/ cleaning, getting the really big obvious, bad to chew, things off. The cooking is the part that actually sanitizes the food.
- ryukafalz 8y ago>Absolutely everything is rinsed Don't rinse raw meat. It makes things worse! https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/food-safety-fact-sheets/safe-food-handling/washing-food-does-it-promote-food-safety/washing-food https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety...
- VectorLock 8y agoSpoilers: Its not making things worse. It just provides an avenue for cross contamination, which you should be accounting for when preparing meat anyways.
- stcredzero 8y agoIn my experience, it makes the roasted meat worse. A lot of roasted meat works better if you dry out the outer layers with salt. Rinsing does the opposite.
- nixpulvis 8y agoI mean, unless I'm eating it completely raw (where is hope to practically know the cow by name) then washing the outside before cooking it seems like a complete waste of time.
- xaqfox 8y agoThe thought was to do it prior to seasoning to provide better coverage (after drying). Recipes switched to having you just pat the meat dry with paper towels to avoid the cross contamination vector.
- oftenwrong 8y agoA soup of puréed romaine is quite good as well.
- pmccarren 8y agoAgain?
- po 8y agoIf people are wondering why vegetables can be infected with something like E. Coli, the reason is that animal waste is often used as fertilizer, or animals live near the crop's water supply and then gets sprayed all over the vegetable crops.
- ihumanable 8y agoPlanet Money just did an episode on this issue which ended with the opinion that it was highly likely to happen again, guess they were right. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/24/641739640/episode-861-food-scare-squad https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/24/641739640/epis...
- craftyguy 8y agoIt seems like no one learned anything after the last one 5 months ago: https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2018/o157h7-04-18/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2018/o157h7-04-18/index.html IIRC the first outbreak was from farmers in Yuma watering their fields with water that had been contaminated by runoff from a large cattle farm upstream. (The article says the two aren't related, but it seems like more than a coincidence unless romaine lettuce is more succeptible to contracting and retaining e. coli somehow..)
- pkaye 8y agoThe way the leaves are bunched together makes it hard to clean. And secondly it is not cooked before eating.
- craftyguy 8y agoThat's a property of most (all?) lettuces, but here we are with two romaine-related instances in 5 months.
- jaggederest 8y agoInterestingly enough, bean sprouts are eaten raw, are not (thoroughly) cleaned before eating, and must be, by definition, held at an unsafe temperature to sprout. They also cause a bunch of foodborne illness. I think it's a pretty clear connection.
- selimthegrim 8y agoI blanch bean sprouts before freezing them for storage and then toss them in something I’m frying or boiling. Seems to work for me.
- VectorLock 8y agoSo you eat them not raw.
- beefman 8y agoTens of millions of people shouldn't eat Romaine lettuce because 30 people got sick in October?
- agumonkey 8y agoWell you can if you want
- decebalus1 8y agoNot really. Just got back from some holiday grocery shopping and in all 3 stores I've been to the clerks were removing the romaine from the shelves. That's how I found out about this.
- capkutay 8y agoI had the unfortunate luck of reading the breaking news as I was eating a caesar salad at a restaurant. The restaurant didn't seem to be aware of the news.
- ehsankia 8y agoI guess you were also for people carrying phone bombs (Note 7) in their pockets?
- EpicEng 8y agoYep, that about sums it up.
- prepend 8y agoIn order to prevent additional illness.
- rdlecler1 8y agoThere are about 100 deaths from car accidents each day and there’s no ban on driving.
- garysahota93 8y agoIt seems like this happens all the time. I really wonder what the implications of this will be to companies like Chipotle, who use Romaine Lettuce exclusively. Personally, I am more of a fan of Iceberg, but it just makes me wonder why E. Coli is much more common in Romaine than in Iceberg. Any thoughts?
- lalos 8y agoMy guess is that more folds make it harder to clean properly.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- smileysteve 8y ago> wonder why E. Coli is much more common in Romaine than in Iceberg. Any thoughts? Romain grows in sprouts while iceberg grows round, effectively in its own shell > Personally, I am more of a fan of Iceberg, The U.S. shifted from Iceberg to more Romaine as a way to have more flavor, nutrition in their lettuce than mostly water.
- ransom1538 8y agoForcing workers to drag a "porta potty" through lettuce fields so farmers don't have to pay for the restroom breaks could be causing this. http://crownservicesco.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Ag-and-construction-porta-potty-2-700x536.jpg http://crownservicesco.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Ag-and...
- Godel_unicode 8y agoOutrage notwithstanding, the last couple of these have been caused by water contaminated with animal feces.
- VectorLock 8y agoIf I was a farm worker I wouldn't be too upset about not having to go perhaps a long ways to use a restroom and be able to clean my hands afterwards.
- elipsey 8y agoThe offending strain in both the current outbreak, and a major outbreak in June, is E. coli O157:H7, which is a less common strain typically associated with cattle or other livestock.[1] CDC analysis (also helpfully linked by craftyguy) of the previous outbreak of this strain, which hospitalized or killed people in 36 states, found that the source was contaminated canal water used for irrigation near Yuma AZ.[2] A large CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) exists upstream nearby.[3] You can see it from space in satellite imagery. It is interesting to view the orientation of this CAFO to Gila River, and to zoom in to the level of individual cattle to get a sense of it's scale and topographic orientation. Determining the source of water contamination is outside of the scope of office of CDC. EPA is responsible for this, but I can find no evidence of investigation of the source canal contamination. Perhaps EPA is becoming more “business friendly.” [1] https://en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Escherichia_coli_O157:H7#Natural_habitat [2] https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2018/o157h7-04-18/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2018/o157h7-04-18/index.html [3] https://www.google.com/maps/place/McElhaney+Cattle+Company/@32.6971245,-114.0872687,16308m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x80d67cf24fd3037b:0xed7aa673e0848208!8m2!3d32.6917931!4d-114.0578097 https://www.google.com/maps/place/McElhaney+Cattle+Company/@... Edit: FDA published an environmental assessment on Nov. 1. They also attributed contaminated canal water as a possible cause. That assessment included "limited" samples (I can't figure out what kind of samples) from the CAFO, which found no matching e coli strain. The authors state that the assessment occurred several weeks after the growing season ended. "It is uncertain how the outbreak strain of E. coli O157:H7 was introduced into this 3.5-mile stretch of irrigation canal water. The first illnesses in this outbreak occurred in March 2018, and therefore the outbreak strain may have been present in the irrigation canal months before the EA team collected the positive samples, or the outbreak strain may have been repeatedly introduced into the irrigation canal. A large concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) is located adjacent to this stretch of the irrigation canal. The EA team did not identify an obvious route for contamination of the irrigation canal from this facility; in addition, the limited number of samples collected at the CAFO also did not yield the outbreak strain. Other possible explanations for how the irrigation canal became contaminated are possible, but the EA team found no evidence in support of alternative explanations. Growers suggested weather events in the Yuma growing region may have contributed to crop contamination. The EA team considered the possibility that leaf freeze damage and dew on romaine leaves created conditions favorable for windborne contamination of the crop with dust carrying the outbreak strain of E. coli O157:H7. While this type of STEC contamination has been demonstrated (Berry et. al, 2015), it does not explain the presence of the outbreak strain in a free-flowing irrigation canal months later when there was little wind in the region." https://www.fda.gov/Food/RecallsOutbreaksEmergencies/Outbreaks/ucm624546.htm#IV https://www.fda.gov/Food/RecallsOutbreaksEmergencies/Outbrea...
- newnewpdro 8y agoWe really need a way to quickly test if a sample of anything is contaminated with these common pathogens prior to raw consumption at home.
- reasonablemann 8y agoRomaine lettuce is less nutritious, more expensive and make you fart more than spinach. The last part is what made me stop buying Romaine for good.
- phyzome 8y agoReminder that if you're getting your lettuce from a local farm at the farmers market, you probably don't have to worry about this. This outbreak is from some industrial romaine lettuce growing and processing operation. (Yes, it's possible for local produce to be contaminated with E. coli as well. I have no idea if it's more or less likely on average. But it shouldn't be involved in this outbreak, so go ahead and make your salad.)
- agsdfgsd 8y agoBe sure you actually know this local farm is real. Lots of stalls at farmer's markets are just buying the same produce as grocery stores and selling it at a higher price while lying about where it came from. http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2016/food/farm-to-fable/farmers-markets/ http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2016/food/farm-to-fable/far... https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/farmers-markets-lies-marketplace-1.4306231 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/farmers-markets-lies-market...
- mythrwy 8y agoLettuce grows outdoors, in the soil. Animals have access to it for weeks or months. Dust happens around it. It is quite likely sprayed with fertilizer or pesticide at some point. Then it is cut by hand. Then it goes to the store where it is fondled by employees and the passing public. So it's a good idea to wash it (and all produce) very thoroughly and not depend on some process to clean if for you. That means in the case of lettuce separating the leaves. It might be overkill but I usually put a drop or two of bleach in wash water, dunk chopped greens, rinse them well in clean water, then spin them in a centrifugal spinner. Something like this (these things are great) https://www.amazon.com/OXO-Good-Grips-Salad-Spinner/dp/B00004OCKR https://www.amazon.com/OXO-Good-Grips-Salad-Spinner/dp/B0000... Also they sell specific vegetable washes although a little bleach or hydrogen peroxide works well enough for me. Generally I don't eat raw produce at restaurants. For the record, I worked on a lettuce farm years ago and food safety is very important, but it's a mass produced out door farm operation with manual handling of product. To say nothing of transport and retail. It's better to wash things yourself and be sure. I think in many parts of the world this is better understood, but for some reason in the US we have this disembodied view of where food comes from.
- garyclarke27 8y agoWash (obviously) discard any damaged leaves, use plenty of vinegar in dressing, vinegar is quite effective at killing bacteria, balsamic is best, salt, sugar, lemon juice also kill em.
- Pristina 8y agojust soak your fresh vegies in 10% bleach and you will be fine