Wash your lettuce well.
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New York restaurant workers and wholesalers say they’re closely tracking the rapidly spreading gastrointestinal bug that has sickened thousands of Americans over the past three months — but the outbreak has prompted few changes in their extant food-safety protocols. Nobody we talked to cited slowing demand for salads (“I haven’t noticed any change in orders,” said a host at Michael’s; “Salad orders are the same,” confirmed one at Serafina) and without any firm idea where this year’s cyclospora outbreak originated, restaurants are simply washing, waiting, and praying.
“I only learned about it in the past few weeks when it hit the news,” says Angela Cawley, project and marketing manager of John’s Pizzeria in Times Square. “Of course it’s something to be worried about. We’re trying to do our best to maintain the healthiest environment for offering these products. We’re still being thorough with everything we’ve done.”
At Di Fara in Midwood, employee Natali Espinoza also heard about the outbreak but says workers are taking the same precautions as ever to clean their produce: “We haven’t gotten anything from the health department,” Espinoza says. “We really rinse it all the time even if it comes prewashed.”
It’s the same story at Mighty Quinn’s in the East Village and Joe’s Pizza on Carmine Street, where existing protocols already call for thorough cleaning: “Everything is washed and prepped in our basement ahead of time and brought up to the kitchen,” says a worker at Joe’s. “It’s the best we can do until we get more guidance.”
One reason the investigation has been so challenging is that no one yet knows exactly how the parasite got into the food supply. The illness can have a weeklong incubation period, which means a patient’s symptoms may not appear for several days, and it does not spread from person to person, making contact tracing difficult.
It does not help matters that more than 20,500 federal health department workers left or were pushed out by the Trump administration last year, including more than 400 FDA inspectors who monitor farms and food-processing plants, and 240 consumer-safety specialists who safeguard food products, ProPublica found. As a result of the layoffs, the FDA reduced its surveillance inspections of food producers and drugmakers and halted a laboratory-testing program for food pathogens, including cyclospora.
In the meantime, state health officials suggest the same commonsense measures that restaurants already use: Wash all fresh herbs, fruits, and vegetables under running water before eating or cutting into them. Cooking foods by heating them to 158 degrees Fahrenheit or higher will kill cyclospora, but, to be truly safe from the parasite, some experts advised skipping fresh produce entirely, especially salad bars, at least for a couple of weeks.
That’s what Cawley, at John’s Pizzeria, believes she may have to do: “I’ve had both lettuce and basil every day,” she said. “It’s concerning that it’s affecting healthy stuff. Should I just start eating pizza instead?”
