Now that lettuce has been identified as the probable source - or delivery "vehicle" - in the outbreak of E. coli illnesses at Taco Bell restaurants, the next question is where did that lettuce come from? Taco Bell said it "was grown by various farmers and shipped to the company's former produce supplier." That supplier was not identified, but earlier this week Taco Bell announced that it had dropped Irwindale-based Ready Pac Produce and switched over to Taylor Farms of Salinas - presumably over concerns about green onions, not lettuce.

Ready Pac has a processing center in Florence, N.J. (the outbreaks were in the Northeast). I have a call into Ready Pac to see if it's one in the same. Earlier, a Ready Pac spokesman said that the loss of business wouldn't last long. The spokesman said that Ready Pac's food-handling standards involved a "triple-wash" process whereby the produce is sanitized three times before being packaged. As with an earlier E. coli outbreak, this story has been getting lots of play and there are the usual calls for better regulation, but it's unclear how serious the problem actually is. Let's face it, people will continue to eat spoiled or contaminated food, no matter what the growers are forced to do. Why? Because there will always be some refrigerator on the fritz or some idiot who has forgotten to wash his hands. It doesn't take that much. I hate to sound like our former Secretary of Defense, but stuff really does happen. From last week's LAT:

Food safety experts believe several factors have made produce-transmitted illnesses more prominent. In addition to increased consumption of fruits and vegetables, public health officials have developed better surveillance and data-sharing systems, which leads to better and quicker identification of outbreaks. When people became sick from food previously, the cause and extent of the outbreak was often never known. Now, however, officials can link incidents of food-borne illness and quickly take action to publicize the outbreak and investigate the source.