0:00:01 Intro Speaker: Welcome to Fresh Takes on Tech, the podcast exploring what’s next in food and agriculture through the lens of innovation and technology. Hosted by Vonnie Estes, each episode features conversations with people driving change in the produce industry. From entrepreneurs to scientists to industry leaders and policymakers. This isn’t about hype, it’s about real conversations with people who are making a difference.

0:00:24 Intro Speaker: Let’s get into it.

0:00:26 Vonnie Estes: Hello everyone and welcome back to Fresh Takes on Tech. If you’ve been reading the news lately, you’ve probably seen the term PFAS pop up again and again. These so called forever chemicals that are supposedly everywhere, including in our food. But what’s actually true? Are they affecting produce? Are we talking crisis or confusion? Today I’ve got someone who can break it down with science, not spin. Dr. Linda Lee is a professor of environmental to chemistry at Purdue and a leading expert on PFAS. She testified in Congress, she’s built national monitoring protocols and she knows the ins and outs of these chemicals better than pretty much anyone.

0:01:06 Vonnie Estes: So let’s get into it. This is one of those episodes where we leave the fear behind and bring the science forward. Linda, welcome to the show. It’s so glad to have you.

0:01:14 Linda Lee: Thank you, Vonnie.

0:01:15 Vonnie Estes: So let’s start with the basics. What are PFASand why are they suddenly dominating the news cycle?

0:01:22 Linda Lee: So PFAS per and polyfluoroalkyl substances is really a family of what we now say about 15,000 compounds. And the reason you can have so many is because they can have different chain lengths. If you think about, we talk about saturated unsaturated fats, so they can have different chain lengths and they’re all saturated with fluorine and that’s what makes them unique. And they can have different, you know, polar functional groups. So it just creates a lot of them. And they’re been in the news a lot over the last few years because we started to, you know, we had last year EPA gave their maximum concentration levels for 6 PFAS.

0:02:02 Linda Lee: And then most recently there’s been huge news around the draft risk assessment that EPA put out for two of the most infamous PFAS. PFOs and PFOA. They put out a draft risk assessment for how high they can be in biosolids to not cause issues when biosolids are used as fertilizer. So I think those two things is really what is driving a lot of the news. And then obviously concerns about their toxicity because of growing research that shows that they can have adverse human health and ecological effects.

0:02:37 Vonnie Estes: So what does the Term forever chemicals actually mean. And is that true? Are they forever chemicals?

0:02:44 Linda Lee: Yeah, so that’s a little tricky. So in the natural environment, PFAS, I always say they just multiply because you have big PFAS that can have places where microbes can attack to make smaller PFAS. So one PFAS that we oftentimes call a precursor can be broken down into several PFAS that are what we call the terminal, like the end products of a microbial process. So under natural conditions, they don’t go away. And that’s one main concern of any chemical class that doesn’t go away. Nature cannot do anything but dilute them at best. And so it is somewhat accurate, but it’s not accurate in the sense that now we are starting to develop more and more technologies that can offer destruction of these chemicals under high temperature, added chemicals, high pressures.

0:03:35 Linda Lee: So we can break them down. But compared to a lot of the organic chemicals that end up in the environment from our everyday use, these do not break down except to they still are PFAS. So it’s somewhat true, but it’s not like we don’t have a way that we can get rid of them. Although scaling up those methods is our biggest challenge now.

0:03:56 Vonnie Estes: So you said that there’s thousands of different compounds. What unifies them? What’s the difference between them? And why does that matter for public understanding and policy?

0:04:06 Linda Lee: Yeah. So what unifies them is they all have what we call perfluorocarbons. So the carbon, instead of being like fatty acids that might have hydrogens on them or not, these all have fluorines. So they have a number of carbons that have fluorines on them, usually in, you know, at least two or more in the chain. That’s what’s common. What makes them different is their length. So you can have some with, you know, just a couple carbons that are perfluorinated, or they can have 10, 11, 12, up to 16, 18 carbons that are perfluorinated.

0:04:37 Linda Lee: And then what makes them different is that they can have different, what we call polar functional groups. So they’re like soap, they’re surfactant. So they have part of their compound likes to be in fats and oils, and the other part of the compound likes to be in water. And so that other part of the compound that’s polar and likes to be in water, there can be lots of different options. And then you can have lots of different attachments. So that’s kind of how we end up with thousands. And plus they have something might have eight perfluorocarbons, but they might not be in a straight line, they might be branched off.

0:05:10 Linda Lee: So even PFOs can have nine different molecules that are all PFOs. PFOs, but they are all actually uniquely different molecules because of their structures. So that’s why we have so many. What’s important for public understanding and policy is our biggest concern is that when they enter the body or enter biota in the ecosystem and or trying to enter plants, is that chain length has the biggest control over what ends up in plants, what ends up in animals and in humans. And our biggest concern is that the longer the chain lengths, the more they tend to bioaccumulate in our body.

0:05:47 Linda Lee: So if we ate vegetables that have longer chain PFAS in them, those could accumulate in our body. And they like to go to protein. So they’re in our liver, our blood or kidney or muscles. Now we know they like to travel to the brain as well on phospholipids. So we don’t want anything that hangs out in our body long. And that’s what’s unfortunately a bad side of the chemical. They have great properties, but they like to stay in our body a long time. So PFOs, we talked about that one can stay in your body for six to seven years, meaning if you never get exposed again, it’ll take six to seven years for half of it to leave your body and another six to seven for half of it to leave your body.

0:06:29 Linda Lee: So we call those half lives. That’s from a public understanding and policy perspective, anything that stays in your body is a concern because you’re not able to excrete it under any kind of natural processes very quickly. And so longer chain lengths are more of concern. And that polar functional group does affect other processes in terms of how easy they are to get into plants and how mobile they are to get in our drinking water.

0:06:56 Vonnie Estes: So how do they get into the environment to begin with? Where do these come from?

0:07:00 Linda Lee: A lot of PFAS ended up in the environment from the use of aqueous film forming foams to put out hydrocarbon fires. And practicing with those foams at military sites for decades. And training happens, you know, it’s a regular ongoing thing. Obviously they don’t train the same way now with these foams, but. And obviously these foams were put into requirements in the military because they put out fires within a few seconds and meet military specs so that whole ships don’t have everybody die when there’s a hydrocarbon fire.

0:07:31 Linda Lee: Unfortunately, people didn’t realize the unintended consequence, which was that they don’t naturally break down and that they do build up in our body and that they have adverse effects. The other sources. So that, that, that we have a lot of military bases, a lot of airports, of a lot of fire stations that all have been training and using these foams and, and nobody was going out there and cleaning them up. So now when there’s a hydrocarbon fire, someone’s out there after it’s been put out. Because first we have to save lives now, right?

0:08:00 Linda Lee: And now clean up the rest of it. So now teams go out to clean it up. But that wasn’t happening for decades. The second way is that we use these. These are in our products. These have made a lot of our life very easy. You can remember the old commercials where they showed the housewife with like, her clean her pan that was easy to clean and her clothes didn’t stain anymore, carpets didn’t stain. Well, we can thank the PFAS for this. And they keep, you know, we have rain, rain garments and everything.

0:08:28 Linda Lee: So all those things, and then they’re in our cars, they’re in everything. They made our life much easier. Quality of life got better. Again, we didn’t know all these negative effects of them. And so even now, even for chemicals that have been phased out, they’re in our products that are in our homes, things that we keep for decades and decades. And we wash our clothing, we wash our carpets and things go to the wastewater treatment plant, and then these chemicals end up in the biosolids that have historically been used for their fertilizer value.

0:08:57 Linda Lee: So that has applied PFAS to the land inadvertently. That was not the plan, but that’s what happened. And municipal biosolids, while they do have PFAS in them, they typically are not as high as industrial impacted solids, which can be in industry or landfill leachate that’s going into our treatment plants. So not all biosolids are equal, but we know that that is one way that they’ve ended up. One way they’ve ended up in the environment.

0:09:27 Linda Lee: And then once they’re in the environment, and then there’s also direct discharge from industry for years into the air and into our waterways. So that affects our groundwater also, that’s used for irrigation and wet dry deposition, which is why we have background PFAS everywhere now.

0:09:42 Vonnie Estes: I didn’t know all that. That’s really fascinating. So on an ongoing basis today, where is our biggest risk of exposure? Do all these products that we own still have them and we’re still getting PFAS from the products that are in our homes. Is it more the biosolids? Is it water? Where is it everything?

0:10:02 Linda Lee: Yeah, so it’s not the easiest question to answer because it kind of depends where you live and I’ll explain that. But yes, you’re still being exposed in your office, your cars, your homes, because, you know, most people aren’t just going to gut their whole home and throw it out. Okay, but so that is, you know, we’re still being exposed that way. But exposure pathways and how it affects your body are different. So we know if you’re drinking water with PFAS in it. So if you’re ends up, you have a drinking water well that ended up being, you know, you’re exposed all the time.

0:10:35 Linda Lee: And, and water is a pathway that you can assume like 100% transfer into your body. You can assume that dermal contact. Yes, you can have some transfer. Oh, it’s in makeup, it’s in lotions. I know it would just shock you how many things it’s in. There are now manufacturers that advertise being PFAS, PFAS free. It’s very important to know what that means. So when they say PFOS free, that only means it’s free of just that compound or PFOA free.

0:11:06 Linda Lee: That’s not really sufficient. It’s like the days of, oh, this does not have bpa, but there was actually lots of other molecules that were just like BPA with one little variation. You know, it has to be, you know, all of them. So you can now buy furniture and carpets and dish and cookware. That our PFAS free companies advertise that they are selling PFAS free or going to be PFAS free by a certain date. So that’s very encouraging.

0:11:34 Linda Lee: Fast food packaging in many states, that’s another place you get it right from. You go drive through McDonald’s. And besides it being bad for your health, you’re also getting a PFAS exposure, not just McDonald’s. It’s just because nobody wants to get something and have the grease coming through onto their lap and won’t realize PFAS are preventing that. So we do have all that. But then what about our food system?

0:12:01 Linda Lee: Our biggest concerns that we worry about is what’s in dairy and livestock. Because they eat so much grass that can accumulate some of the PFAS and they eat 25 pounds a day is nothing for a cow to eat. And they’re building up these bioaccumulative PFAS that don’t remember their half lives. They’re faster in animals than humans, but they’re still very short. They’re still not short half lives. And so I think consumers of milk and cattle need to know where their things are coming from.

0:12:37 Linda Lee: And then fish, fish is another big source because they also highly bioaccumulate PFAS. When you’re talking about produce like carrots and vegetables and lettuces, tomatoes and corn, those kinds of things, it varies depending on the type of crop. So for example, we know PFAS don’t. They don’t preferentially go to the corn and the corn cob. So when you eat corn, you’re probably, you’re probably safe. You don’t necessarily need to know, was this corn grown on a field that is being irrigated with PFAS contaminated water or has PFAS contamination in the soil?

0:13:12 Vonnie Estes: If you’re talking it doesn’t get taken up by the plant.

0:13:15 Linda Lee: Actually, it does get taken up by the plant, but it does not offload into the kernels. So we’re finding that into the grains like we just did an intensive study for soybeans. It does not. The bioaccumulating PFAS like PFOS and PFOA, they do not offload into the bean. And this is a physiological thing because you have the transpiration of the plant pulling up water that pulls up PFAS. But then for it to get to certain other parts of the plant, it has to.

0:13:45 Linda Lee: What I’ve learned, I’m not a plant physiologist, has to offload into the phloem and to get there. And it doesn’t actively offload, except for the really short chains that might be mistaken for a little fatty acid or a little amino acid. So we know that corn. And when we think about cattle and the corn cob, those are safe things to eat or to feed your cattle. Where it all likes to be is in the storage compartments, the leafy above ground.

0:14:16 Linda Lee: So that’s why lettuce tends to be the highest accumulator. And then your spinaches might be down the road, then you have your root vegetables. But just remember when you’re like, if people are grabbing articles and they’re like, oh my goodness, I could have this much on a dry weight basis. Just remember, when you think about eating lettuce, it’s a hyperaccumulator because it has all that water. But when you think about a dry weight basis, you’re not eating a pound of dry lettuce today.

0:14:46 Linda Lee: So you’re eating wet lettuce, which 90% of it or more is probably water. So people need to be mindful of that. And it’s less in spinach, but it’s in again, the above ground leafy materials that we eat. When we talk about root vegetables, it can migrate into the root through the soil and it can also get into the root vegetables through active transport. Potatoes are kind of different. They’re only going to really get diffusion from the soil into the potato because they’re actually tubers and they’re not what we think of root vegetables. And if you were asking me, a non plant person, I’d say, oh yeah, a root vegetable, a potato too. But it’s different.

0:15:33 Linda Lee: So it does, you know, again, it’s just if the soil’s highly contaminated, you could have diffusion into the skin. So if you peel the skin, you’ll have less PFAS and then, you know, you’ll have a little bit. It’s kind of like thinking about chlorophyll in your potato and you’re like, oh, I’m going to peel away the first quarter inch of my potato because it’s gotten too much exposure. It’s got, you know, when they’re starting to turn green kind of. That concept can also protect you from PFAS exposure.

0:16:00 Vonnie Estes: Well, how you, how much of a risk is that? I’m just concerned about people hearing this saying, oh, my lettuce and all my spinach is contaminated in comparison. And looking at cooking on a pan that has a coating or wearing rain gear or other things, how do we look at the level of risk of eating leafy greens?

0:16:19 Linda Lee: Right. I want to say two things about the risk, both directly and comparatively. First of all, what we don’t have a good handle on is that just because it’s in your vegetable does not mean it transferred into your body. Because we call that, you know, we call that availability. The bioavailability factor. It does. It didn’t. So water, that’s what I said. We can assume 100% transfers into your body. And when they do risk assessment, they also assume that for food, but we know for a fact from other chemicals that is not the case.

0:16:50 Linda Lee: You will not get 100% transfer of a chemical in your vegetables from your vegetables and things transferred into your body from any of your food products. So that’s one thing. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean it got transferred into your blood. You know. So for example, when you take medicine, it’s not unusual for 40 to 90% of it to end up in your urine. It never, it doesn’t transfer into your body.

0:17:14 Linda Lee: So that’s one thing to remember. The second thing to remember is that you don’t. There’s not very many people that eat massive amounts of a single vegetable every day. I mean, it’s just not there. You don’t eat massive amounts. And so like tomatoes, there’s, you know, a little bit could be in the fruit, but it doesn’t. Again, it’s kind of like the seed and not a lot goes there. And again, it’s a dry weight basis. And your tomato is mostly water, so you can see numbers. That seems like you’re getting exposed to a lot, but really, given how much you eat per day and the variety of food you eat, you know, it’s. It’s probably not something to be concerned about.

0:17:54 Linda Lee: Heavily concerned about. And what, you know, I always tell people, do what you know, understand where your food comes from when you can. If it’s in an area. There are areas that we know were heavily impacted by industrial impacted biosolids, like Maine, where they’ve just had lots of farmland that, that has lots of PFAS, both from biosolids land applied and also from irrigating with water that was contaminated from a military base. And they never even knew. And then they found out.

0:18:25 Linda Lee: Years and years of irrigating with PFAS. Contaminated water leads to crops being exposed. So you can do your homework, but as a consumer, think about what you choose to buy and put on your body. The makeups, the lotions. There’s just a lot of things that, that you can control. And again, dermal transfer, when you put it on your body, you don’t necessarily get 100% dermal transfer into your body. Yeah. So in terms of risk of what you’re eating, I still think that eating a healthy variety of produce is to your benefit because you’re not eating. You never eat massive amounts of one thing on a regular basis. I still eat a lot of vegetables. I’m not concerned about the PFAS in them.

0:19:11 Linda Lee: We get concerned about PFAS and fish because sometimes you say, oh, I’m a healthy eater, I eat lots of vegetables and I eat lots of fish. Okay. Gotta know where your fish comes from because, you know, and we, you know, it used to be we always want fish from, you know, a certain, like the ocean or from, you know, natural water body. But some data suggests that the fish that we’re getting from the ponds where they generate them, you know, the, what are they? Aquaponics or the aquaculture that those are actually, you know, tend to be safer with less PFAS potential in the fish than, you know, the wild ones just because we don’t know what water bodies have been contaminated and there’s less control.

0:19:55 Linda Lee: So I think for the most part most of our vegetables are not, are not that much of a concern. And even when fda, so the way FDA does things is a little different. They don’t want to pick on any one person so they go sample lots of different spinach, for example, lots of different packs, combine, mix and then just subsample. And they haven’t really found even for milk that there’s a PFAS, a significant PFAS issue in our, in our off the shelf food system.

0:20:27 Linda Lee: So I think that that’s true for, for produce too. And I think it’s more limited to some of the areas that have been heavily impacted. Although I have to say we don’t always know all the areas because not everybody’s area has been thoroughly tested. But when you start to see it showing up in the cattle or the milk in your area, then you have to be a little more attentive because our produce also being grown on those same soils, then you might want to be more attentive.

0:20:54 Linda Lee: But again your exposure is going to be less on a lot of the produce than it, it’s going to be for meat, milk and fish, if that helps.

0:21:02 Vonnie Estes: Yeah, no, that’s really helpful. So some advocacy groups are calling for a complete ban on PFAS and food. Is that reaction rooted in science? Is that possible?

0:21:13 Linda Lee: Is that political? What, where’s that coming from? Well, so I, I, I’m, you know, before we get to the food, I’m, I’m supporting all non essential uses of PFAS and eventually getting rid of PFAS where we can. So essential uses are medical devices. Most people have people in their lives that are still alive because they have a valve, a Teflon valve in their heart. That valve could only be made with PFAS because their resistance to breakdown in the environment is also what makes them so great for so many processes.

0:21:47 Linda Lee: So that’s, that would be like an essential use. There’s some essential uses for national security purposes like the semiconductor industry. They are trying to replace all their PFAS related chemicals. But right now you can’t just, it’s complicated. You can’t just replace it instantly. It takes, it’s sometimes a five to ten year process and we need, you know, everybody also wants their chips for their phones and their Cars and their computers and everything. Right.

0:22:14 Linda Lee: So that’s what I call kind of essential uses for right now. But most of them not essential uses, definitely. Let’s get them out of our packaging. Let’s get them out of our products that we use in our homes. Let’s get them out of shampoos and cream rinses and lotions. It’s ridiculous. Then when we’re looking at food, is there an acceptable level that can be in the food? I think part of the problem with food is also packaging.

0:22:43 Linda Lee: So it’s. I’m always telling my husband, could you please buy the vegetables that are not all wrapped up tightly in this plastic? I don’t. I want the vegetables off the open bins, please, not have these tightly bound, you know, And I said, because, you know, we don’t need to create plastic waste. And plus, I don’t want that plastic stuff coming off the plastic in my. In my food. Not just PFAS, just anything. You know, it will be very challenging to do a complete ban on PFAS and food, because are you going to check every single package and you’re going to check every farm 55 times?

0:23:14 Linda Lee: You know, we know now there’s random checks of where they go in and take a plug for meat and say, well, this meat looks okay. It doesn’t have antibiotics. That’s part of the USDA certification. I think that that would be harder for a lot of food products that we want fresh and it would be expensive. So I do think that we have the right to challenge what’s in our food. I think it will be very hard, both politically and just on an everyday function to be checking PFAS in food, in every kind of food.

0:23:47 Linda Lee: And first we got to get the packaging problem out of the way because PFAS in the packaging, which is a little easier to address, although. So I think we’re up to about 80% of packaging that can be. Do its function in packaging. Paper, paper plates and all that. They can do their function without pfas. You can buy pfas free paper plates now. You can buy pfas free plasticware. So these are things that consumers can control as far as PFAS in their diets.

0:24:20 Vonnie Estes: And is that on. Is it labeled?

0:24:24 Linda Lee: A lot of people? Yes, they will be labeled because that’s. And you probably have to pay a little bit more, but they will be labeled because that’s a good marketing strategy.

0:24:34 Vonnie Estes: Yeah, it costs some money to do that. And so that makes it higher value.

0:24:39 Linda Lee: When I go to a PFAS conference and they’re serving coffee and cups that I know are not PFAS free. I’ll go up and I’ll say, well, let me just get my dose of PFAS really quickly. First. I got hot coffee in these. But there really is options. There are options now. So just in the last year and a half, there are options.

0:24:58 Vonnie Estes: So from the produce industry perspective and thinking about if you’re a grower or an operator in the produce space, what do they need to know and what can they do and where do they fit into all of this?

0:25:12 Linda Lee: Right? So I want to say two things. First of all, when we’re talking about adverse effects of PFAS, obviously our most sensitive people, women that are pregnant, are carrying unborn children that are growing and then young children. So I think the biggest concern, I do think baby food should definitely, that’s where we should focus our. If we want to start looking at PFAS and food and ensuring that our food is nearly clear of PFAS, we want to focus on food for babies and toddlers first.

0:25:46 Linda Lee: So we want to focus on that. What can industry do? So if you’re unsure of the soils that you’re growing on or where you’re getting your produce from, depending on where you are in that industry stream, there are local, local things in most states where you can get that, that tested. So now, you know, I haven’t tried it yet, but there’s supposed to be ways through usda, even in every state to get, if you think you have a concern, a soil of concern that you can have it tested.

0:26:22 Linda Lee: So that’s one thing that the produce industry could do. The other thing is to recognize that depending on what’s being, you know, whether it’s fresh food or food that’s being processed, the actual manufacturing process could have PFAS in it, not intended to get in the food. But it’s in a lot of our things that you want something to go smoothly. You know how we spray WD40 like to, okay, well, PFAS, a little bit of PFAS and things really helps things move slowly, you know, so it’s, it’s kind of interesting how much we depend on them. We just have no idea. So I think operators can question, like if they’re growing their own things, they can question where they’re growing it. If they’re getting it from other people, they, they could ask for some kind of certification from where they grow.

0:27:13 Linda Lee: We, we need to see soil test from your. Where you’re growing these fields to confirm, you know, where you’re growing your produce to confirm that you’re growing it on. Growing it on soils that are okay. And you still have to recognize that background soils, the background PFAS concentrations in soil for some PFAS can start to approach one part per billion, which is low. So when you see it, you could see it show up from a commercial lab and.

0:27:43 Linda Lee: But it doesn’t mean that that’s very significant for it to transfer into your vegetables.

0:27:50 Vonnie Estes: It just means we’re better at testing than we used to be, is one thing.

0:27:55 Linda Lee: Yes, we are.

0:27:59 Vonnie Estes: Just a wrap up question. This has been such a great conversation.

0:28:03 Linda Lee: I wanted to say one other thing. I’m sure just like the wastewater industry, the produce industry wants to know are we going to be liable for somebody coming back at us? I wouldn’t expect that that would happen unless it would kind of be like when all of a sudden E. Coli gets picked up in a vegetable. If all of a sudden FDA somebody grabs some vegetables and find out it’s really rocket high in PFAS.

0:28:30 Linda Lee: It would be similar to what would happen if there was an E. Coli contamination and trying to figure out where, where that comes from. So I’m not as familiar in that space, but I’m sure the produce industry is very familiar with that space and I would suspect it would have great traceability. Right? I suspect it would be something like that.

0:28:48 Vonnie Estes: So for people who want to go deeper into this topic or who want to keep up on it, do you have some recommendations of where people can find trustworthy science based information?

0:28:59 Linda Lee: Yeah, so there’s. You can go to some of the extension sites that some of. The University of Maine has a good extension site. It’s still mostly focused on obviously livestock and dairy because that’s their biggest challenge. And then there’s the ITRC Interstate Technology Research Council. They have a website with lots of PFAS fact sheets. So you can sort through there and pick one that might relate to what you want to find out about.

0:29:28 Linda Lee: And they’re all the time updating those fact sheets. It’s a consortium of individuals, high level individuals that kind of donate their time to helping to keep all that up to date. So that’s you. And they have a really nice, the left panel gives you nice index and you can cruise through there to find out, you know, and click on something and it’ll take you right there. And that, that can be helpful.

0:29:52 Linda Lee: And you can always, you know, reach out to your academic colleagues in your state if they are PFAS, you know, familiar. I was going to say here we check soils in numerous urban produce places and all the soils had PFAS in them. But it’s just the background. PFAS is everywhere and like you noted, we can see it. So I think that let’s not get too dramatic about PFAS presence because really we’ve been using them for four or five decades now and they’re in everywhere and they’re in our homes. So we should just stay really even keel and just do our best now as a consumer to choose wisely what we do and as an industry person, start to be attentive to where your produce is coming from or where your produce is being grown on.

0:30:46 Linda Lee: That’s really the best you can do for right now.

0:30:50 Vonnie Estes: Thanks so much, Dr. Lee, for joining us today. This has been an important conversation. I’ve certainly learned a lot, much more than I knew about this topic. And you’ve been very grounded in science and a lot of clarity. So for our listeners, stay tuned, stay focused and keep growing. Thank you.

0:31:09 Linda Lee: Thank you, Bonnie.

0:31:12 Intro Speaker: Thanks for tuning in to Fresh Takes on Tech, hosted by Bonnie Estes. If you enjoyed the conversation, please subscribe, rate and share it with your network. You can find more episodes and resources at freshproduce.com See you next time for another Fresh Take.