Food for Thought

Certain childhood moments stick in the memory for life. It’s doubtful the little preschoolers who attend the Dayton Heights Children’s Education Center will forget last Thursday. They will remember it forever as The Day of the Shot. They will remember the nurses in white uniforms and the wailing of their compatriots and, most of all, that godless 4-inch needle. Maybe they also will remember that it all began with strawberries.

The scene at the preschool, located in the heart of Los Angeles, was at once comical, pathetic and infuriating. It resembled one of those Norman Rockwell paintings that decorate pediatric waiting rooms everywhere, the ones of terrified boys bolting from the clutches of doctors. Not that the children saw anything amusing in the chaotic adult intrusion into their playroom.

The grown-ups could talk all they wanted about contaminated fruit cups and hepatitis A and inoculation. All these children heard was the screaming. Nobody was dying behind the makeshift cubicles, but often it sounded that way. The little eyes grew wider and wider as the ritual proceeded. Some children covered their ears. A few literally went limp when their time came. They would grasp at chairs and even the floor, begging for their mothers.

“And all because somebody wanted to make a buck,” a nurse said as she shooed a would-be escaper back into line. All because some fruit packer down in San Diego apparently didn’t want the gravy train of government lunch programs to leave without him. This was the infuriating part.

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“Stuff happens,” was one bureaucrat-

philosopher’s summary of the food poisoning episode, which has exposed something like 9,000 Los Angeles children. Well, hepatitis A is not some mere bout of flu. It is serious stuff--an observation rooted, unfortunately, in experience (Baja; uncooked shellfish; stupid). Even if the injections work to ward off the disease, the contamination should not be dismissed as small stuff, a bullet dodged. It was big stuff, and for a nation of supermarket shoppers largely oblivious to the ways of the farm it ought to raise some fundamental questions.

Such as, where does food come from?

And is it safe?

Food represents a great, societal leap of faith, right up there with the expectation that jetliners always will fly and mail will find the right address. It is a belief that whatever gets forked down the old food hole has been grown, picked, slaughtered, preserved, packaged, shipped and sold by people who care about the public health. It is a faith in the hygiene of migrant fruit pickers, the thoroughness of food inspectors, the ethics of those who toil in the rough and tumble packing and shipping trades. It is a faith in words on a package.

Most of the time, the faith is not violated. Just as, most of the time, airplanes don’t crash. Only in the aftermath of contaminations do consumers start to wonder about food. People who work in the field display a different attitude. A relative once managed a meatpacking house; he’s diligent about scrubbing down steaks before they are cooked. A farmer friend will hold his own grapes under running water for several minutes before eating even one. What do they know?

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The emerging official version of the strawberry episode--official, that is, on this side of the border--is that the contaminated berries came, vaguely, “from Mexico,” and then were processed, packaged as American-grown and sold through the federal school lunch programs. An executive with the San Diego distribution firm has resigned. California’s half-billion-dollar strawberry industry has declared itself exonerated. Case closed.

And perhaps it’s that neat and simple. It might prove interesting, however, to find out exactly where in Mexico these strawberries originated: Could it have been one of the several big operations launched, post-NAFTA, by American farmers? And it might be helpful to know how the contamination occurred? Hepatitis is spread through human feces. Is the supposition that farm workers in Mexico somehow wash themselves less carefully than farm workers in California? Are they not, in fact, the same people?

And what is to stop it from happening again?

And, finally, do consumers care?

“Nah,” said the produce manager of a supermarket not far from the Dayton preschool. “I could sell them poison if the price was right. Nobody ever asks where this stuff comes from.”

Stocked on his shelves were watermelons from Mexico and tomatoes he thought might be from Mexico. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. There were blackberries from Guatemala and blueberries from New Zealand. There were strawberries packed in boxes that indicated the fruit had been grown in California. And there were strawberries in baskets that bore no markings whatsoever. These were on sale for 59 cents a basket.