Tucson Unified School District students shouldn’t have to worry about an ongoing Cyclospora outbreak, characterized by explosive diarrhea, coming from their school lunches this school year.
Throughout the summer, the district did not purchase any produce, using leftover frozen vegetables in its summer meal program, food services director Lindsay Aguilar told the governing board Tuesday.
Now that the school year has started, the two food vendors the district will get produce from are both from the U.S., not from Mexico, where the outbreak was traced.
“We track every single source of all the produce that we do purchase, and also with National School Lunch Program, there's actually a ‘buy American’ requirement,” Aguilar said.
The district’s two distributors are Greco and Sons, a large volume produce distributor with a global food safety standard certification, and Pivot Produce, an Tucson-based food distributor.
People are also reading…
“We have not started purchasing our produce through them yet,” Aguilar said. “We usually wait till about week three of the school year to get up and going, but that lettuce that we purchase through Pivot Produce is actually grown with a staff of three people at Howenstine at Merchant's Garden, so it's a very controlled environment.”
