News Coverage
Valley lettuce is 'clean'
Rocket fuel component found on others' vegetable
Published May 4, 2003
The power of words was brought home to Monterey County agribusiness last week when the word "perchlorate" became part of a national discussion on lettuce.
A report of lettuce contaminated with trace amounts of perchlorate, a toxic component of rocket fuel, had the lettuce industry working to get information out that addresses concerns raised in the study.
A study by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research and advocacy group that focuses on air, water and food, found perchlorate in four of 22 lettuce samples purchased in January and February at supermarkets in the San Francisco Bay Area.
That lettuce likely would have come from winter harvests in Yuma, Ariz., or the Imperial Valley. Both areas, unlike the Salinas Valley, receive water from the Colorado River. Salinas-area growers use local water.
The four positive samples had more than 30 parts per billion of the pollutant. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has set a preliminary safety level of one part per billion of perchlorate in water.
So the first order of business for the lettuce industry was to get the word out that lettuce on store shelves now around the nation was not harvested in those areas. The lettuce found on store shelves now was harvested on the Central Coast down to Santa Maria, with the vast majority coming from the Salinas Valley.
Eric Lauritzen, Monterey County agricultural commissioner, said there is no perchlorate threat here.
"It isn't a maybe when it comes to Central Coast lettuce," Lauritzen said. "There's been adequate testing to ensure it's (perchlorate) not here."
Perchlorate, a chemical salt, is the main component of rocket fuel. It is also used in highway safety flares, fireworks and auto airbags.
There's no existence of perchlorate in the groundwater here and no point source for it, Lauritzen said.
"We're very confident in the Salinas Valley irrigation and drinking water supply," Lauritzen said.
Lorri Koster, spokeswoman for Salinas-based Mann Packing Co., said it's important to get the word out at the store level about lettuce's safety.
"The produce manager is key," Koster said. "Our (Mann's) retail partners disseminate information out to individual stores."
Mann, a shipper of numerous fresh vegetable commodities and one of the largest shippers of fresh broccoli in the world, has been proactive in the good times and built trust with its partners, Koster said. As a result, those partners tend to turn to Mann as resource before they believe the media, she said.
Bill Walker, Environmental Working Group's vice president for the West Coast, said he understands the concern among farmers that EWG's report brings, but he supports agriculture. EWG is based in Washington, D.C., but Walker headed the study out of EWG's Oakland office.
"I have repeatedly been up front to say the lettuce (now) on the store shelves is safe," Walker said. "There is no known suspected source of contamination in the Salinas Valley."
Long-time concern
It's been an open secret for five or six years that the water source for so much of winter lettuce is known to be contaminated, he said, adding it's not farmers' fault water got contaminated.
"All we did was break a taboo on talking about it," Walker said. "It's not our intention to scare people away from lettuce."
The study looked at a broad sampling of lettuce on store shelves, including iceberg, romaine and bagged salads, he said.
"We made no attempt to make a correlation between the amount of lettuce and type of perchlorate we found," Walker said.
He said the findings are a double-whammy to organic growers, whose marketing is based on healthy growing practices but whose lettuce uses the same water source as lettuce grown conventionally.
Carmel Valley-based Earthbound Farm, North America's largest grower of organic products, released a statement that reads in part that "since the beginning of April, all Earthbound Farm organic salads and lettuces available in your local market have been grown in Central California, where there is no known perchlorate contamination in irrigation water."
Walker defends EWG's study, though he acknowledges the study used a small number of samplings, a fact critics have been quick to jump on. He said his office began working on the problem back in 2000.
"In terms of the science, we used a lab at Texas Tech University that is cutting-edge on perchlorates," Walker said. "The EPA and USDA have used it."
He said in many ways the study raises more questions than it answers, such as whether perchlorates concentrate in other vegetables.
Farms in Yuma, Ariz., are hooked into an irrigation system with the Colorado River. Farmers in the Imperial Valley are sent a certain amount of Colorado River water for irrigation, while cities such as water Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas receive a certain amount as drinking water.
Kathy Means, a spokeswoman for the Produce Marketing Association, said as soon as PMA learned on April 25 that the report was going to hit the media, it sent an issue-alert to its members, who are growers and retail customers who buy from them and retail buyers in food service and retail.
Edith Garrett, a spokeswoman for International Fresh-Cut Produce Association, said last week she was not hearing of reduced sales in the retail marketplace.
Libby Miksell, a spokeswoman for the National Food Processor Association, said in terms of a health risk, consumers should not change diets based on what's known about perchlorates.
"There are federal and state agencies that set safe levels, intended as safe consumption levels for daily consumption over a lifetime," Miksell said.