The Food and Drug Administration’s urgent warning about a romaine lettuce E. coli outbreak left many Americans wondering …. what they could do to protect themselves.
Unfortunately, viewers who tuned into a [recent] CNN segment on the crisis—which featured a blogger who bills herself as Food Babe …. got the wrong answers.
Anchor Ana Cabrera kicked things off by describing self-appointed food investigator Vani Hari as someone who has “studied where our food comes from quite a bit” before asking how the outbreak happened. “[W]hat’s the worst part of this situation is that we do not have a supply chain check-and-balance in place,” Hari said.
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“…. I avoid the bag and box lettuces and I really go for, like, the whole head of lettuce,” [Hari] said …. But that’s not really how …. foodborne illness works—and a head of lettuce isn’t any safer than a boxed or bagged version, an FDA spokesperson told The Daily Beast ….
“It’s true that there are more points of contamination,” the spokesperson said. “But just because a whole head of lettuce is going through [fewer] steps between consumers and where it’s grown does not make it necessarily safer than a bag of chopped up lettuce …. To say the romaine that went directly to a farmer’s market from the field is safer than a bag of lettuce—that’s not true,” the spokesperson said.
Read full, original article: CNN Lets ‘Food Babe’ Spout Pseudoscience on Lettuce Outbreak
