Beware of Leafy Greens

This afternoon I spoke with a health inspector who informed me that the USDA has recommended that local health departments begin treating leafy greens as potentially hazardous foods, and the King County Health Department is considering following this recommendation. I asked her whether the proposed regulations would cover greens like collards and kale that are cooked before you eat them, and she said it would.

If what she said is accurate and these regulations go into effect, they could have serious consequences for farmers' markets. Treating leafy greens as potentially hazardous foods would mean handling them in the same way you're supposed to treat chicken, at least with respect to temperature control. This means that any farmer selling leafy greens would have to keep them in closed ice chests. Not only would farmers be unable to display leafy greens, but they would also be severely limited as far as what they could transport back and forth to markets because ice chests take up a lot more space than boxes. The implications for my own business would be tragic, because my vehicle couldn't hold enough coolers to keep my greens cold.

I did some cursory online research and learned that the stricter standards for temperature control for leafy greens is coming about in part because of the initiative and voluntary compliance of vegetable grower trade associations, or groups that lobby on behalf of industrial scale commercial farmers. This was equally disturbing: commercial growers truck their product in refrigerated vehicles to refrigerated warehouses. It's mainly the little guys who store their greens at room temperature on the way from the farm to the market.