Last updated on December 12, 2015
Another day, another media story in which I weigh in on some food policy-relevant story: I was quoted last week in an article in US News & World Report about the potential link between Chipotle’s focus on “sustainable” (i.e., local, non-GMO) procurement practices and the nine-state E. coli outbreak linked to food from the same chain fast-food chain, and which has made 52 people sick.
I discussed for a while with journalist Kimberly Leonard, who wanted to know about my own work on a similar relationship, viz. the statistical relationship my coauthors and I have found between farmers markets and food-borne illness:
Marc Bellemare, a researcher at the University of Minnesota, has conducted research that suggests an increase in the number of farmers markets is associated with an increase in foodborne illness in that location.
Bellemare cautions, however, that the research doesn’t necessarily show that the food is less safe, and he says one of his theories is that people are mishandling the food, whether leaving meat on the counter too long or leaving produce in the car sitting in the sun for several hours. “They may have an implicit bias that the food might be better, and may think they don’t have to wash it as thoroughly,” he says.
Which is a useful reminder that I should probably revise that paper as soon as possible in order to submit it for publication, especially since adding two years worth of data has considerably strengthened results that were already pretty robust.
The USN&WR article also quotes my Oklahoma State colleague Jayson Lusk, whose book Food Police everyone should read, and who puts it as succinctly and as clearly as possible:
“If you want to make products fresh, that means you’re not going to use a preservative or it’s going to be unprocessed,” says Jayson Lusk, president-elect for the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, who has been critical of Chipotle’s marketing practices. “It does provide a real tradeoff in terms of providing a safe product for the consumer.”