Eat With Caution — Even the Healthy Food

In late December 2010, the CDC reported a salmonella outbreak linked to alfalfa sprouts that had sickened some 94 people across 16 states and the District of Columbia, with roughly half the illnesses in Illinois. About 24% of those sickened were hospitalized. No deaths were linked to the outbreak.

Health officials traced the first cases to early November, with many of the ill reporting they'd eaten alfalfa sprouts in products from Jimmy John's Gourmet Sandwiches outlets. The FDA identified the source as Tiny Greens Organic Farm of Urbana, Illinois, whose alfalfa sprouts — and "spicy sprouts" blending alfalfa, radish, and clover — were distributed in 4-ounce and 5-pound containers to farmers' markets, grocery stores, and restaurants across Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, and possibly other Midwestern states.

The FDA's advice was blunt: don't eat the sprouts, don't serve them, throw them away. Jimmy John's founder Jimmy John Liautaud told franchisees the chain had pulled sprouts from all its Illinois stores.

The episode was a useful corrective to a lazy assumption — that "healthy" food is automatically safe food. Sprouts have been a recurring outbreak vehicle for years: the warm, humid conditions that coax a seed to sprout are exactly the conditions salmonella and E. coli love. The FDA has long advised the elderly, young children, pregnant women, and anyone immunocompromised to avoid raw sprouts entirely.

Eating well and eating safely are related projects, but they aren't the same one.