Spoiled, She Said

Grocery shopping with Nicols Fox is like seeing a play with cranky New York critic John Simon or watching a local newscast with Howard Rosenberg.

Here we are in a Berkeley supermarket, not far from the hallowed sanctum of Alice Waters’ restaurant Chez Panisse, in a neighborhood where organic vegetable gardens hold sway in backyards the way swimming pools do in Encino. Still, it’s a pretty ordinary supermarket; we could be anywhere in the country.

Through the automatic doors, Fox, in town for a brief visit from her home in Bass Harbor, Maine, immediately heads to the produce section. She scans the abundance and flicks a shock of Marilyn-white hair against the collar of her oversized shirt.

“I wouldn’t buy this,” she says. She inspects a shrink-wrapped bag of broccoli and frowns. “It’s already cut up--and cut up by whom?” She shudders at a flat of bean sprouts that have browned and gone slimy in one corner. “I wouldn’t trust it,” she says.

A display of cut cabbage halves does no better. “Well, this is really worrying if you’re going to use it for cole slaw,” she says. “Bacteria can grow so easily. People buy these because cabbages are so big and they don’t want to waste food.” She pauses, perhaps realizing that she’s being hard on what is, after all, an innocent cabbage. “If they thoroughly cook it in a winter stew, that’s fine,” she finally says, then briskly moves to the cantaloupes.

She touches a plastic-wrapped cantaloupe half displayed on a bed of ice. “It’s actually cold,” she says, mildly surprised. “Yesterday I was in a supermarket and the cantaloupe was sitting attractively on ice, but in fact the surface was quite warm--a perfect moist environment for microbial growth.” Does that mean these cantaloupes pass inspection?

“I still wouldn’t buy them,” she says. “I’d buy them whole and I’d wash the outside before I cut them.” Suddenly, I am having second thoughts about walking Fox to the meat counter.

She is not just a picky shopper. After spending four years covering food-borne disease for the Economist magazine and writing the recently released book “Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About a Food Chain Gone Haywire” (Basic Books, $25), Fox has become one of the country’s leading experts on food safety.

Her book begins with the story of Carlsbad first-grader Lauren Rudolph, the first child to die from a fast-food hamburger in the West Coast outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 that came to dominate the news in 1993. She goes on to examine how changes in the way our food is grown, processed, distributed, cooked and eaten have led to the emergence of new strains of harmful bacteria and new opportunities for more familiar pathogens to make their way into the food supply.

Consider what Fox says about the cut-up broccoli she rejected in the market.

“First, it says ‘pre-washed,’ ” she says. “But I’ve taken vegetables like these and found a tablespoon of dirt in the water when I washed them. People think these are ready to eat, and they really aren’t. The other thing is that oxygen is taken out of the bags and nitrogen is put back in its place. That keeps the temperature down, which keeps the spoilage bacteria out.”

Isn’t that good?

“The problem is that other pathogens can grow.” She says that without the spoilage bacteria to tell us our food is old, we’ve lost a potent visual cue.

“People need to question why food lasts so long these days,” she says. “I don’t think they understand anymore that food is perishable. They’re under the assumption that the government’s there to protect them, which it has tried to do. But obviously the government can’t inspect every head of lettuce for microbes.”

Fox wasn’t always so interested in food safety. “I heard about the Jack in the Box outbreak like everybody else,” she says, “and I was interested in it, but not that interested. Then we had an E. coli outbreak in Maine. Two children died. Now Maine only has a population of about a million, and the entire country was interested in this case where four kids had died. I decided to trot off to the library to see what I could find about E. coli.” Pathogens soon became her obsession.

Through the process of writing her book, Fox experienced many emotions, especially anger.

“I’m still angry,” she says. “I love good food, and I think what’s happened to our food supply is a tragedy. It makes me furious that there are recipes that are no longer appropriate to make because they contain raw or undercooked eggs. It’s just incredible; we’ve wiped a good portion of our heritage off the map.”

Surprisingly, however, Fox turns hopeful when asked what might be done to fix the problems in the food supply.

“I wouldn’t want to see a Stalinist approach to food safety where everything is canned or irradiated or sterilized,” she says. “That would be horrible, like some Orwellian vision for food. Totally alienating.

“All we need to do is pay attention and think that food and eating are important. The family dinner is important. We need to eat together. But if we treat eating like some casual refueling process, we’ll get inferior food.

“If instead we realize that taste is important, that these sensual things we dismiss from our lives are actually quite necessary for our quality of life, we can demand changes.

“Maybe I’m just an incurable optimist,” Fox says, “but I believe we can fix things. I mean, if we look at the past 20 years and see how people who once just bought anything off the shelf are now gazing avidly at those labels to see what’s in a product, that’s an enormous change.

“Change won’t happen in 10 minutes or even in 10 years. But I think we’ll see things differently over a 20-year period, even 30 years, I don’t care. Maybe it will take that long. But I think we can change and I think we have to change.”