Vegetable Growers’ Food Safety Vigilance Is Paying Off (Opinion)

I wanted to get a handle on just how often food safety recalls involving vegetable growers occur, so I pored through public records from the FDA. The agency reports every recall it issues, from medical devices to vitamins and supplements, to meat and dairy, to produce. It turns out vegetable growers are doing pretty well.There have been 210 food safety recalls so far in 2017 as of this posting. Out of those recalls, only 49 involved foods that included vegetables in some way, including processed foods like carrot muffins and prepared salads, as well as straight up vegetables like salad greens.I read through each formal recall notice and learned that only 19 recalls could potentially be traced back to a grower. Disease Is the Leading Cause of Vegetable Recalls. Fourteen of the 19 recalls involved diseases.Foreign Objects Are a Less Common Cause. There were four recalls generated by detecting foreign objects, although two of the four were from the same incidence. A single recall stemmed from a supply of thyme containing lead.All of these numbers represent a sharp improvement. By this time last year, there were almost double the number of vegetable recalls due to disease. The hard work growers are putting into keeping their produce safe is obviously paying off.