SAN JOSE, Calif. – Just days after the government said it was safe to eat spinach again, concern shifted back to lettuce as one Salinas Valley grower announced Sunday that it was voluntarily recalling some of its crop after finding E. coli in a sample of irrigation water.

Green leaf lettuce packed under the Foxy brand has been recalled from stores and distributors in California and several other Western states, according to the grower, the Salinas-based Nunes Co.

The company said its tests so far have shown no contamination in the lettuce itself, but it was acting as a precaution after tests found the potentially deadly bacteria in water from a reservoir used for irrigating the crop. The firm said no illnesses have been reported.

“We are being proactive. We’re just not going to take the chance with this,” said Tom Nunes Jr., president of the family-owned company, which grows vegetables in California and Arizona.

The recall was a reminder that the government has already been concerned about past outbreaks of food-borne illnesses that traced back to lettuce from the Salinas Valley. Even before the recent E. coli outbreak involving fresh bagged spinach, federal and state health officials were working with growers in the area for more than a year to improve safeguards against such outbreaks.

And the news was likely to cause concern for growers as well as consumers.

“Absolutely everybody in the packaged vegetable business will be looking at what’s happened here,” said Bob Perkins, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Sunday that her agency is aware of the latest recall and is looking into it.

“As a standard course of action, we would expect the firm to identify the source of the contamination and take steps to correct and prevent to ensure that it doesn’t happen again,” spokeswoman Julie Zawisza said in an e-mailed statement.

The lettuce recall was announced just nine days after the government lifted an advisory against eating fresh bagged spinach, following an outbreak of E. coli contamination that has killed three people and sickened nearly 200 others nationwide.

It also comes after the FDA advised last week that a batch of bottled carrot juice from a Central Valley producer was contaminated with botulism, which severely injured several people who drank it.

Meanwhile, an Iowa meat company announced Friday that it was recalling some ground beef suspected of being contaminated with E. coli, although no illnesses had been linked to that case.

Nunes said he was well aware of public concern over those episodes.

He said his company acted out of concern for public safety as well as “recent events in the produce industry.”

“The family decided not to wait. Everybody is just hypersensitive to this stuff, and you know what? Our industry is too,” a weary-sounding Nunes said Sunday evening. “And by God, we’re going to do the right thing here.”

Nunes said his company was recalling about 8,500 cartons of green leaf lettuce – which comes in bunches, as opposed to iceberg lettuce heads – that was grown on one farm and was shipped last week. By late Sunday, he said the company had recovered about 97 percent of the affected cartons, and he was hoping to track down the remaining cartons.

As with the contaminated spinach outbreak, which has been traced to a different grower, the exact cause of the lettuce contamination was unknown.

Nunes said his company’s tests showed the problem water came from a reservoir that served as a “secondary source” of irrigation water, meaning it is not used all the time. But he said it’s not clear how the reservoir became contaminated.

Nunes also stressed that no other shippers or brands are affected by the recall, including no other products from his company.


Despite his concerns, the latest news left some consumers unfazed.

“There’s always going to be weird stuff in food. It doesn’t worry me,” said Francesca Ross, as she loaded groceries into her car outside the PW Market in north San Jose Sunday evening.

Fellow shopper Lauretta Del Curto said she pays attention to advisories and recalls, but added that she has a simple reaction: “I’ll buy an alternative brand.”

Cartons of the recalled Foxy brand lettuce are labeled “Green Leaf 24 Count, waxed carton” or “Green Leaf 18 Count, cellophane sleeve, returnable carton.” They are also marked with a lot code: 6SL0024.

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(San Jose Mercury News correspondents Kimra McPherson and Joe Rodriguez contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

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