After Last Year's E. Coli Outbreak, Produce Testing Diverged at Border

Early last month, Dole Food sent thousands of pounds of lettuce, picked mostly in California, through its processing plant in Springfield, Ohio, where a company inspector looked for defects before sending it along a conveyer belt.

There it was washed three times, dried and deposited into half-pound packages of Heart's Delight salad mix.

About 6,000 bags were loaded into refrigerated trucks, most destined for nearby states, where they would be put into grocery store cases without further examination. But 528 bags went to Canada, where the government had responded to last year's E. coli contamination of spinach by more than doubling random tests of leafy greens. Those tests, at a distribution warehouse in Ontario, detected E. coli bacteria and led to a massive recall not only in Canada but in nine states.

A year after the contaminated spinach — also packaged under the Dole label — killed at least three Americans and sickened hundreds of others, manufacturers, regulators and lawmakers in the United States are still arguing about how to ensure leafy greens are grown and handled safely. Canada, however, has already moved forward, focusing on catching potential problems before they reach retail shelves.

Read the full Washington Post story here.