Evolving Food Safety Pressures in California's Central Coast Region

California’s Central Coast rose to national food safety prominence following a deadly 2006 outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7 that was traced to spinach grown in this intensive agricultural region. Since then, private food safety protocols and subsequent public regulations targeting farm-level practices have developed extensively, aiming to avert future foodborne illness crises. However, amidst sweeping reforms in prescribed best practices for food safety, growers were pressured to take precautionary approaches to control pathogenic contamination—suppressing wildlife near fields, removing habitat, restricting biological soil amendments (e.g., compost, manure), and most recently, chemically treating irrigation water—that may generate negative unintended consequences for environmental and social sustainability. We synthesize socio-ecological data from three qualitative, interview-based studies to examine grower perceptions and experiences of food safety reforms in California’s Central Coast region and explore the effects of food safety regulations on environmental and socio-economic sustainability. We identify three disjunctures between food safety requirements and farming realities in practice: 1) Growers perceive that some food safety practices legitimately mitigate risk, while others fail to reduce or even accentuate risk; 2) Food safety requirements can create contradictions in the co-management of food safety and environmental sustainability; and 3) Food safety requirements may foster impediments to regional food systems socioeconomic sustainability. We argue that these disjunctures warrant changes in food safety policy, implementation, and/or food safety education. We provide concrete suggestions for shifting the focus of food safety reform away from the narrow surveillance of individual grower compliance and toward an integrated perspective on regional risk, vulnerability, and resilience.

2006年，一场致命的大肠杆菌O157:H7疫情爆发，源头追溯到加利福尼亚州中央海岸这个集约化农业地区种植的菠菜，此后该地区在国家食品安全领域声名鹊起。从那时起，针对农场层面操作的私人食品安全协议以及随后的公共法规大量出台，旨在避免未来食源性疾病危机。然而，在食品安全最佳规范的全面改革中，种植者被迫采取预防措施来控制病原体污染——抑制农田附近的野生动物、清除栖息地、限制生物土壤改良剂（例如堆肥、粪肥），以及最近对灌溉水进行化学处理——这些措施可能会对环境和社会可持续性产生负面的意外后果。我们综合了三项基于访谈的定性研究的社会生态数据，以考察加利福尼亚州中央海岸地区种植者对食品安全改革的看法和经历，并探讨食品安全法规对环境和社会经济可持续性的影响。我们确定了食品安全要求与实际农业现实之间的三个脱节之处：1）种植者认为一些食品安全措施确实能降低风险，而另一些措施却无法降低甚至会加剧风险；2）食品安全要求可能会在食品安全和环境可持续性的共同管理中产生矛盾；3）食品安全要求可能会对区域食物系统的社会经济可持续性造成阻碍。我们认为这些脱节之处需要对食品安全政策、实施和/或食品安全教育进行变革。我们为将食品安全改革的重点从狭隘地监督个体种植者的合规情况转向对区域风险、脆弱性和恢复力的综合视角提供了具体建议。