At the Plattsburgh Farmers and Crafters Market Saturday, customers milling between vendors selling vegetables, fruit and meats were not worried that the produce they were buying could lead to a bout of cyclosporiasis.
An outbreak of cyclosporiasis has spread to 34 states and health officials are not sure why. Customers at Plattsburgh Farmers and Crafters Market felt the produce being sold there was safe, and the gastrointestinal outbreak is due to a broken food distribution system.
Taylor Edmonston, owner of Edmonston Beef in Chazy Lake, says people in the region want to know where their food comes from.
“They want to know what’s in their food and how it was raised, and how it was grown," Edmonston said. "You can find that by talking to an actual producer that you can’t find when you’re at the store. If you go to the store, you don’t know where anything comes from or how it was made. It might say so on the label, but there’s no guarantees. Like, if you get your food from somewhere where you can trust it, you don’t have to worry about it.”
Several shoppers pointed to what they characterize as a flawed global food distribution system.
Will Garrow is moving to Rochester and was at the market with his mother. He thinks the outbreak is due in part to the global food distribution system and a move away from local markets.
“What we should really be thinking about [is], how are we distributing food within this country and within the world?" Garrow said. "We’ve gotten away from doing it locally sourced to our local markets. We’ve gone to a global, you know, international too. So we’re creating waste. We’re creating a lot worse environmental impacts and stuff like that. So the parasite is one thing in the whole global understanding of our food distribution.”
Vendors and customers echoed health officials’ advice that people wash produce before eating it.
