As new peanut butter products are added to the recall list, more public school lunch programs are being red-flagged. Add South Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Oregon and Texas to the list of states whose school cafeterias received products that originated from the salmonella-tainted Peanut Corporation of America.

They join Idaho, California, and Minnesota, which were recently alerted by the USDA that their school-lunch inventories included products from the company responsible for killing eight people and sickening 500. Those three states were already late to receive official word of the contamination – Idaho schools officials were told to pull the peanuts from their inventories two weeks after American companies began a voluntary nationwide recall.

Would there have been an easy and quick way for the public to know that the Peanut Corporation of America was the source of one of the national school lunch program’s staples? There should have been, but the answer is no. It takes some online digging even to turn up the USDA’s list of approved packaged goods providers – i.e., the folks who take the raw materials and process them into entrees, pastries, condiments and other ready-to-eat fare. Once I located the list, I saw that it includes three peanut butter vendors: Velmar Foods of Phoenix, Ariz.; J.M. Smuckers of Akron, Ohio; and Integrated Food Service of Gardena, Ca.  A Velmar representative told me that the USDA information is wrong – the company doesn’t process any peanuts (“It should say, ‘beans’ ”). I already knew that J. M. Smuckers has no products involved in the recall. That left Integrated Food Service, and from its representative I learned that the company had indeed received USDA “diverted product” from the Peanut Corporation of America – over a year ago. Long before Integrated got an email from the State of California alerting it to the recall, the finished product had been shipped out. The good news is, no schoolchildren got sick from eating it. The bad news is, that was sheer luck.

As it happens, Integrated also processed beef that came from Westlake-Hallmark, the California meat packer caught last year slaughtering “downer” cattle. The USDA ordered about 140 million pounds of beef pulled off the market – the largest recall in U.S. history – but not before about 20 million pounds had been served up in school lunchrooms.

When Alice Waters and I began writing an article on the problems with the current National School Lunch Program, I consulted nutrition and food-service authorities and, of course, relied on the web sites of the USDA and its affiliates for up-to-date information. An overview of the National School Lunch Program appears in dozens of USDA-related documents, most of them referencing the commodities program that forms the backbone of the public-school lunch menu. But in searching for the answer to one central and seemingly simple question – How do we track commodity food back to its source? – I came up empty. In light of the peanut crisis it’s a more important question than ever. The USDA’s food-safety notification process is cumbersome and flawed, and this latest crisis is further proof that more food served under the auspices of the National Food Lunch Program should be locally sourced.

Photo: AP/John Amis

Given this obvious connection between food production and health, it is surprising how few in the health field are interested in food, much less the system that produces that food.  Recently, thanks to the strength of the sustainable agriculture movement, there have been some promising signs that this is changing: Health Care Without Harm, a multinational not-for-profit, has spearheaded a healthy food in hospitals program and so far 168 hospitals across the country have pledged to buy regional foods whenever possible. And for the first time, in 2007, health care professionals began to take an interest in the content of our Farm Bill. But even so, a large fissure remains between the system that is supposed to feed us, and that which is supposed to keep us healthy.

This fissure is seen at every level: Historically the department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Welfare have had little to do with each other. Similarly, the American Medical Association has hardly concerned itself with issues of agriculture and food production. While most state and city health departments do have programs to help low income families gain access to food, disinterest or red tape has hobbled most efforts to require that these foods be from a local source. And when I discuss sustainable agriculture with medical colleagues, especially those that work with under-served patients, I am often told that this is an elite issue or simply an environmental concern with negligible heath implications. I wonder if this latest round of Salmonella poisonings might finally prompt us all to reassess; after all, physicians across the country are seeing the damage that can be wrought by one peanut processing plant in Georgia and our business-as-usual food chain.

My neighborhood market sells locally roasted peanuts and provides a mill so that customers can grind their own peanut butter. Suddenly this seems less like a frivolous foodie activity and more like a prudent public health measure. Would it not be similarly advisable to use this fresh-ground peanut butter to prepare my own Thai style chicken satay rather than selecting a prepackaged brand from the freezer case? And maybe an in-season apple would be a better snack choice than that Clif Bar. In fact, I can safely say that anyone making food choices based on the principles of “fresh and local” would have nicely side-stepped all the recent major outbreaks of salmonella, listeria, botulism and E coli.

Of course, there are many reasons beyond the threat of food-borne illness why health officials should join the effort to build a sustainable agricultural system. A large body of research now identifies regionally produced foods as being more nutrient rich, less chemical-laden and more affordable. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that populations around the world who still eat their local foods are relatively free of most modern chronic diseases.

Who knows. Perhaps this latest outbreak of salmonella, along with a will for change, is finally the catalyst we need. We will become a much healthier nation if our community health programs and community food systems team up, if our family doctors and family farmers link arms and, most importantly, if the two Toms, our Secretary of Health and our Secretary of Agriculture, take each other out for lunch and discuss ways to collaborate—hold the chicken satay, please.