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Foodborne illness scares caused many people to change up how they buy vegetables this past summer. A lot of people turned to farmers markets. Others grew their own. About a third of U.S. households cultivate fruits or vegetables. Is that safer? NPR's Yuki Noguchi looked for answers.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: On that question of whether homegrown is safer, James Rogers says...
JAMES ROGERS: As with anything, it depends.
NOGUCHI: Rogers directs food safety for Consumer Reports, which regularly tests produce. He says what shapes safety is the farming practices, not their size. On one hand, large operations are regulated by cleanliness standards and can track produce using barcodes, for example. But commingling huge volumes of produce can also lead to big outbreaks.
ROGERS: You can have a problem. If you have one batch that's contaminated, it will contaminate the entire batch.
NOGUCHI: Most small growers, he notes, are exempt from Food and Drug Administration rules dealing with irrigation and soil. So their practices vary widely, which is how you end up with contrasting food safety approaches like those of Phil Tocco and Dave Whitinger, both veteran gardeners, both growing lettuce in their own home gardens. Tocco, who lives in Jackson, Michigan, is a Michigan State University agricultural food safety expert. He advises farms of all sizes and considers himself more fastidious than your average farmer.
PHIL TOCCO: Some backyard gardeners don't understand the risks, the fecal risks.
NOGUCHI: Tocco's wife contracted amoebic dysentery, a painful intestinal parasite from lettuce grown at a small farm 25 years ago. So Tocco keeps his garden free of animals and small children who might track feces and pathogens like salmonella, E. coli, or Cyclospora that are in it. He won't use water from rain barrels in his garden because it might harbor bacteria.
TOCCO: If then someone uses the water from that rain barrel to water stuff that's going to go in their mouth in a day, it's kind of like bacterial soup.
NOGUCHI: Tocco replicates what he can of the sanitary practices he preaches. He harvests with sanitized hands and buckets, won't harvest food near bird droppings and uses hydroxyacetic acid to rid any pathogens on his leafy greens. Meanwhile, Westlake, Texas, gardener David Whitinger is no less concerned for food safety.
DAVE WHITINGER: I told my wife to stop buying lettuce from the store, you know, like, hey, we need to make sure that we're growing lettuce this fall 'cause I don't want to buy any store-bought lettuce until this whole thing dies down.
NOGUCHI: Whitinger runs a family seed business and is director of the National Gardening Association, a group that surveys home gardeners. He says he's shaped in part by a mistrust of large agricultural operations, especially when it comes to handling manure as fertilizer. That isn't an issue in his fenced garden.
WHITINGER: I know what I'm fertilizing with. I know where the seeds came from.
NOGUCHI: He says he feels safe picking and eating leafy greens, even without washing.
WHITINGER: If it's coming in from my backyard and, like, you know, for example, lettuce, I don't want to get it wet. You know how hard it is to dry lettuce after you get it wet.
NOGUCHI: So what should consumers do? James Rogers at Consumer Reports says to wash everything just with water, no matter where the produce comes from.
Yuki Noguchi, NPR News.
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