This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Robbin Peterson, the development director at the West Seattle Food Bank in Seattle. Peterson spoke with Business Insider on Tuesday, two days after the US Food and Drug Administration said a test result tying iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms to the cyclospora outbreak was a “false positive.” Taylor Farms did not respond to a request for comment on this essay.
A big part of what we do here is “grocery rescue.”
Grocery stores and food wholesalers often offer us food that they cannot or will not sell. Often, that’s because they’ve purchased too much. Other times, it’s because a grocer has really strict cosmetic standards: One grocer I’m aware of here will reject an entire load of zucchini if one doesn’t match their size and appearance expectations, even if it’s perfectly good, wholesome produce.
In the last day or so, we’ve started seeing additional salad greens come in. We assume retailers are having a harder time selling many of these products due to consumer fear.
Much of it is prepared greens that aren’t the focus of investigations over the cyclospora outbreak — salads prepacked in bowls or bags, for instance.
We’ve even been offered a truckload of cut watermelon from Taylor Farms. Now, people don’t want anything from that brand, no matter what it is.
West Seattle Food Bank
Contamination scares make shoppers skeptical
We purchase the majority of the produce we distribute, often at a discount. This isn’t typical for most neighborhood food banks, but we believe providing the most expensive items on a grocery list, like fresh meat and produce, helps stretch the family’s budget and SNAP benefits farther.
We’re affected directly by customers avoiding fresh produce. Many food banks, like ours, don’t just hand people a box of food. We run what we call a “modified markets” — a space where food is laid out like a store, and people can come in and pick what they want.
As we start distributing this influx of produce, there might be people coming to shop at our stores who don’t feel comfortable buying leafy greens. That’s fine, since we have a process for composting produce that we can’t distribute before its sell-by date.
We don’t take products that are part of any recall or otherwise unfit for consumption. We want to make sure we’re not distributing anything that doesn’t live up to our quality standards.
A lot of our partners in retail and wholesale help us acquire food that would otherwise go to waste. But worries about contamination, like the one we see now, make it harder for us to function.
Think about how many lettuce recalls we’ve had over the last decade. People have become a little bit more fearful.
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