Ohio Lettuce Processor Not Tainted, State and Federal Officials Report

Dole Fresh Vegetables, a division of Dole Food Co., has recalled its salad — a mix of three kinds of lettuce hearts labeled Dole Hearts Delight — in the United States and Canada due to possible E. coli contamination. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency found the contamination Sunday.

Dole also notified the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of the problem. The FDA sent inspectors to the 165,000-square-foot packing and processing plant in Clark County, near Dayton, that receives produce, washes it, packages it and ships it to distributors in the Northeast and the Midwest as well as in eastern Canada.

"Inspectors have been to our plant, and they will visit the growers," Dole spokesman Marty Ordman said.

"We are trying to trace the source of the contamination," Ohio Department of Agriculture spokesman Bill Schwaderer said. That source could be in the field where the lettuce grew, someplace en route to the processing plant or at the plant. Inspectors may never discover it.

Ordman said Dole Hearts Delight contains romaine lettuce from California and Colorado, butter lettuce from Ohio and a green-leaf lettuce from California. He said the company will investigate farming practices at the various fields where the produce was harvested.

Meanwhile, an Ohio agriculture department inspector, one of nine in the state, examined the Springfield plant "for sanitation and good manufacturing practices," Schwaderer said.

Chuck Kirchner, the department's food safety administrator, said the state "tries to inspect each processing facility twice a year and food warehouses once a year."

For large facilities like the Dole plant in Springfield, Kirchner said, an inspector can spend a day and a half to two days peering into vats, swabbing surfaces for lab tests, checking for rodent urine and looking for insect infestations.

Kirchner said the 350-employee Springfield plant, which Dole has operated since 1998, has received no bad reports.

He also said the twice-a-year inspections are a challenge for the department, which, in the early 2000s, "had four or five more inspectors than we now have. There have been budget reductions in the last several years," he said.

The Ohio butter lettuce that nestles among the other greens in Hearts Delight comes from a diminishing harvest in the state. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's census no longer even tracks the quantity of lettuce grown commercially in Ohio because it has declined to less than 1 percent of the nation's total.

Kirchner said the rinsing processes at the Springfield plant exceeded federal and Ohio requirements. The produce, he said, got three washings in chlorinated water. But there is scant evidence that even that many washings can assure that E. coli bacteria don't survive in agricultural products.

"The environment where we grow crops is not a sterile place," LeJeune, the Ohio State microbiologist, pointed out in a phone interview as he paused on a rural drive in Northeast Ohio. "You can't provide any assurance that there's no contamination."

Read the full Cleveland Plain Dealer story here.