♪ ♪ [Asha] We're tracking Canada's
food supply to the deserts of southern Arizona. You want to pull over here. Looking for clues
to a modern mystery. Wow looks at all the green,
and we're in the middle of the desert. [man] Why do our salads
keep making us sick? We're farming romaine
lettuce, butter lettuce, red leaf lettuce, green leaf
lettuce and iceberg lettuce. [Asha] John Boelts farms about
2000 acres around Yuma, Arizona. Let me cut this one open
for you so you can kind of-- [Asha] It's very sturdy. --look at it. [Asha] We're not socially
distancing because we filmed this before the pandemic. It looks so fresh. [Asha] In winter months this
area supplies almost all the salad we eat in North America. But Yuma has also given us one
of the worst outbreaks ever of romaine lettuce
contaminated with E.coli. [Asha] Do you take
lettuce home to your family? I do. I'm going to take some home
out of this field before we head home, I mean I trust it
to my own three kids, my wife and myself to eat. If you have romaine
lettuce in your fridge, don't eat it, don't serve it. -A new case of E.coli.
-E.coli. -E.coli.
-E.coli. [Asha] At least five outbreaks
in three years involving romaine from the US, and a strain of
E.Coli known as 0157:H7. Hundreds have been poisoned. At least seven have died from
eating something that's supposed to be good for us. What's going on to
cause all these outbreaks? [Asha] Boelts says his farm has
not been part of any outbreak and he can't say
what's causing them. They are a little bit of a
mystery in that we don't seem to be able to get back and
resolve them all the time. [Asha] It's a
similar story next door, in California where lettuce
production moves from spring to fall, and from where
contaminated romaine has made many people sick. Look he still has
that birthmark. [Asha] One of the most
heartbreaking cases: a small boy in Richmond, British
Columbia, Lucas Parker. Get you up a bit more. Shake it to the
left and to the right, see if he moves his head. He moved his eyes. [Asha] Lucas is four years old,
and this is how he spends most days now, at home with
parents Nathan and Carla. -He's smiling, eh?
-Of course he is. I love his little smile. [Asha] He was a healthy
boy for his first few years. Today, Lucas can't
walk, he can't talk. He can't see. It's amazing to think that
in a first-world country, people could serve you a romaine
lettuce salad that would bring on such sickness. This is Lucas and his brothers
not long before a family trip to California.
[Giggles] [Asha] Disneyland was their
ultimate destination but after a long drive south to a motel,
they're a hungry family. Nathan and Carla decide to order
take-out from a pizza place with a side order of romaine salad. [Asha] You couldn't have
anticipated what was to come. No. I had no idea stopping on
a small mom and pop shop, you know, tired from
being on the road, exhausted you know, I had no
idea that ordering some takeout could kill my kid. [Asha] I mean he
didn't even eat that much. No. He had probably 3 bites
of my salad, you know. [Asha] And as a parent
you're feeding that to your kids thinking I'm
doing something good. This is healthy. This is the right
thing to do, right? Man was I wrong, I'd really like
to go back in time and change this. [Nathan] Lucas, can you blink? [Asha] It takes several days
before Lucas shows any real signs of sickness. [Nathan] If I move over here,
will you look at me now? [Asha] By the time he's
in a Canadian hospital, the E.coli shuts
down his kidneys and that leads to
two brain injuries. [Nathan] Can you smile
at me? This is our little boy, he was
the nicest little kid in the world, and you know, there he
is like-- what do you mean? You know, and every day
that was the question, like how can this get worse? Like where does it stop? You don't under-- like... This is the most devastatingly
injured human who has survived a food borne
illness outbreak ever. [Asha] Bill Marler is an
American lawyer and food safety advocate who represents
Lucas and his parents. It's just devastating. You know as a father, I look
at it, you know, and just think to myself, you know, this could
have happened to my kid. It could have
happened to your kid. And it's just wrong. We run our office, just
like a health department. [Asha] Marler launched his first
food safety lawsuit nearly 30 years ago. I have an epidemiologist
that interviews these people... [Asha] Most cases of E.
Coli poisoning used to involve hamburgers. These days, it's lettuce. The E.coli outbreaks linked to
romaine lettuce and other leafy greens, blew up in the last
decade and a half because we wanted bagged salads. We wanted to be able to
go to the grocery store, restaurants wanted to be able
to not have someone in the back chopping up lettuce, they just
wanted to open a bag and dump it in your salad
bowl and good to go. That's the cause of the problem. It's industrialized
agriculture, convenience, and it's killing us. [Asha] Yuma, for instance, is
surrounded by big factories where trucks take
fresh-cut veggies for cooling. We are trying to
get the freshest, safest, highest quality product. [Asha] And where
lettuce is washed, chopped, and bagged like
in these corporate videos, from some of the big players. Everything is designed to
produce the highest quality product possible. [Asha] Before the pandemic, we
ask several companies to let us inside to see for
ourselves, but they say no. Instead, researchers at Michigan
State University share a study with us showing how germs can
spread during food processing. They take 2,000 pounds of
iceberg lettuce and throw in 20 pounds of radicchio,
contaminated with E.Coli. This way we could visually
see the product that was contaminated. [Asha] Then send it through a
processing line that mimics how bagged salad is created. At the end, they
find the contaminated radicchio in every single bag. A thousand trucks
leave Yuma every day, carrying veggies all
over North America, spreading any problems
that might be inside. But where exactly could E.Coli
be coming from? We've talked to scientists and
other experts who say it's a mystery why these
outbreaks keep happening. What do you say to that? -It's a "mystery"?
-Yeah. Have you been to Yuma? Have you been to Salinas? You know, we all know where
E.coli 0157:H7 comes from, it comes from cows. And when you have a
100,000 cow feedlot, a dirt road, a canal, and then
leafy greens for as far as the eyes can see, it doesn't take a
rocket scientist to figure out what happened. [Asha] Here's what
he's talking about. We shoot this video just outside
Yuma where there's a feedlot, with more than
100,000 cows. Beside it, an irrigation canal. And besides that, field upon
field of leafy greens. Marler believes it's a
dangerous combination. We have an environmental
contamination source, cows, in
proximity to a product that is ready to
eat, essentially. And when you have cows near a
product that is ready to eat you've got a problem. I'm surprised that the Canadians
still allow US romaine lettuce across the border. [Asha] The U.S. Food
and Drug Administration admits now that cows near
lettuce fields could be a factor in E.Coli
contamination. But it's not making any
new rules to deal with it. Those knives are going to be
chlorine-dipped on a regular basis. [Asha] John Boelts says farmers
like him are already doing more than what rules require, to
keep the food supply safe. Farmers' practices are
remarkable these days, not just mine but everybody in
my business and so I think we're doing everything
humanly possible today. [Asha] That includes independent
testing of the irrigation water surrounding his field and making
sure that water never touches the edible parts of his crops. Boelts says they've also taken
steps to keep animals away and isn't worried about all
those cows down the road. That feedlot has been
around since the 1930s, 1940s and we've been producing
leafy greens in this area for about that length of time. If there really was an issue,
we would be having an issue more frequently. Let's just assume for the sake
of argument that all the things that they've done have
been arguably beneficial. The question is, "why are
we still having outbreaks?" Okay? Something is not working. [Asha] Back here at home
professor Larry Goodridge is an expert in food safety at
the university of Guelph. He says E.Coli
outbreaks are actually pretty are. We are focusing on five
outbreaks since 2017 of romaine lettuce, but it's important to
understand that in that period people have consumed a large
amount of romaine lettuce, and many people have done
that without becoming ill. [Asha] But his
research also shows, the less food
processing, the better. The more a food is handled, the
more contamination can occur. Does that mean eating
head lettuce is safer than bagged? I think to reduce the risk of
developing a food borne illness one of the things that consumers
can do is to purchase whole heads of lettuce, remove
the leaves themselves, and prepare the salad that way. Getting suited up here. [Asha] But even if you do stick
with head lettuce don't think you can wash your worries
away if there's a recall. I'm going to put some
fluorescent powder onto the lettuce. [Asha] Professor Goodridge uses
a glow-in-the-dark powder to demonstrate how hard it
is to get rid of germs. So, I'm washing this
lettuce here like I'd be washing it at home. Some of it has been washed away
and the rest has been spread over the surface of the leaf. [Asha] Canada's food inspection
agency took steps to improve safety last fall; importers had
to show their lettuce was either free of E.Coli or did not come
from California's Salinas valley. But those measures never
targeted lettuce from Yuma and have since expired. The CFIA says it will reassess
is its rules later this year. A safe food supply
failed the parker family. It's lunch time, buddy... [Asha] For Lucas, his meals
are now liquified and ingested through a tube in his stomach. People say to eat healthy,
and then this is what happens. And it's just, I
don't understand it.
