Don't eat the Spinach!

[Crys]

In case you haven't heard yet:

An outbreak of E. coli in eight states has left at least one person dead and 50 others sick, federal health officials said Thursday in warning consumers nationwide not to eat bagged fresh spinach.

The death occurred in Wisconsin, where 20 others were also sickened, said Dr. David Acheson of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. The outbreak has sickened others -- eight of them seriously -- in Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah.

FDA officials do not know the source of the outbreak other than it appears to be linked to bagged spinach. "We're advising people not to eat it," Acheson said.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/09/14....ap/index.html

[pk]

:cry: Wow, you try to eat healthy and then the e coli gets ya. You never know what is safe anymore.

[keith]

I love the stuff, too!

Fortunately, I've got a little in the garden!!!

Feel bad for the unsuspecting who eat a nice salad and WHAM!

Regards,
Keith

[AJE]

The individual who died came from Manitowoc, WI. My condolences to the family. :cry:

[MrKhay]

The thing is, all the washing in the world won't get the e coli bacteria off the spinach. The microbes are clingy little creatures. Soaps would do it, but then you have soapy spinach.
Seems someone allowed a septic system near the spinagh field ovreflow, and contaminate the crop.
I now know why Popeye always ate canned spinach...like I did'nt know before :wink:
Fresh isn't always better than fresh canned...ask a canner.
Brain

[Crys]

This is why I hate living in an apartment. I want an acre or two to plant all my own vegetables, with a nice big greenhouse for tropicals and for winter forcing. Sure, I'd have to supplement a little at the grocery, esp. during the winter, but I hate not having any control over the noxious chemicals that intentionally or unintentionally get into the food I eat. If I was growing it myself I'd know for a fact that there were no pesticides, and I think I'd notice if my sewer backed up and contaminated my vegetables.

[Crys]

Here's an update on the story with a list of affected brands:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/09/21....ap/index.html

[rudedog]

ok im having a serious moment here.
i hauled fresh produce local for many years, and much of it came from ca. i delivered to all the major grocery chains and many mom and pops.
i also delivered to many of the fresh roadside produce stands.
things really are not what they seem in the produce buisness.
i could easily write a book on the coruption in this industry.

yes, there was a contaminated shipment. yes people got really sick. yes a person died. yes i feel really sorry for the family of that person.
but the reality is the difference between this instance and any other is that the media has dramatized this one. this is far from being the first time this has happened. and it will be far from the last time. these instances are usually quitely taken care of and all bad publicity avoided, because news like this can cripple whole farming communitys, and cost millions and millions in lost revenue.

i need to point out two things here.
1. produce grows in dirt, there is always bacteria in the dirt. no matter how hard the farmer trys to clean a crop, it will always have some residue of naturally occuring bacteria.
if youve ever known anyone who works in a produce warehouse, ask them about the respitory problems they get every year because of the airborn spores.
2. from the second produce is harvested, it begins to rot. everyone in the produce industry is in a mad race to get it to you before it becomes too rotten. which means"fresh produce" is nothing but a marketing term to make you think its all good. enless you picked it yourself, washed it imediatly and then ate it within minutes of harvest, its not fresh!! most produce you buy in the store is at least a week old. some items can be months old by time you buy them. have you ever wondered how you can buy fresh apples in july and august?

having said that, there are several items that really give produce people a hard time. spinach is one of them. almost all berrys are another. it decays really fast, and must be moved quickly or lost. there are cases where whole loads came straight from the fields to wisconsin only to be rejected here because they didnt have enough shelf life left. i used to love it when fresh spinach was rejected. i would fill my fridge with the stuff, and just gourge on it for days. i love the stuff. i could get away with it because in many cases it was heading for a dumpster anyways. no time to resale.
in the majority of these cases it was prepackaged spinach.

i dont want to ramble on about this,and its late. so i would like to point out something before i go to bed.
the valley where the contamination occured is huge, it stretches for miles and miles, and is the biggest produce production area in the country by volume. do you really believe that a backed up sewer contaminated thousands of acres of produce? and why only the spinach? that valley is full of other crops as well. experience tells me the sewer story is a cover up. based apon past contaminations from that area, i think it will eventually come out that the spinach in question actually came from mexico, and is falsly labeled as grown in american. believe me it happens alot and sometimes ceo's go to prison for it.

so my suggestion is this. there are growers closer to home that are not part of the contaminated area, they often sell bunched spinach rather then the mass produced bagged. i know there is a large producer in ill just southwest of chicago for instance. wash it well and enjoy.

ps. this would be a very good time for someone in the sand countys to concider growing spinach. theres a lot of market share to be had in next year or so as this thing blows over.the major players in the spinach market are crippled and it will take time to regain consummer confidence.
and they will,

people forget quickly.

dont believe me? then why were these people eating spinach from ca in the first place? dont they remember the reports coming out of the valley a few years ago about the river supplying the valley being contaminated.?.
the whole valley is contaminated with heavy metals and pesticides from the water supply. but yet they still ate the spinach..

heck i still eat the spinach, because if i got paranoid from everything ive seen, i would starve.

[Crys]

I agree with everything you said.

That said, it's really tough to find out where some of the food comes from if it isn't labelled as such, esp. the prepackaged stuff that says where it was packaged, not where it's grown.

Generally, I've been trying to eat only locally when I can find out where the food came from. Unfortunately, even at "local" farmers markets I've found peaches that were shipped in from Washington, spinach from California, etc. ad nauseum. If I only ate what I could be certain was local I'd starve.

What's the name of the producer in Illinois?

Sometime in the next couple weeks I was planning on starting a thread on eating locally (things only produced within 100 mi. of where you live). I wanted to get some resources together first, but really this is a good place to segue to it, so maybe I'll go ahead and start it and just post resources as I have the time.

[rudedog]

i had forgotten the places name so i went and searched for it, but it cant find anything on them. all i know is that its a place with a italian name from plainfield il. the last time i was there was 4 years ago and they were on the edge of development, its possible the farm has been sold to developers. if i get a chance i will call ben-ben's tomorrow and see if the farm is still operating.

its really hard to be positive that its locally grown without actually seeing it in the fields. i ran a route to iowa city from kenosha for a long time. along the way, early in the morning i would stop at farms stands. i would pull my semi right next to the "locally grown" signs and unload whole pallets of stuff that definatlly wasnt local. as long as some of the stuff they were selling was local then they could use the signs. in my view, having a few tomato plants and some beans growing isnt good enough. if it was i could have a farmers market in my back yard.

btw, most farmers markets seperate the homegrown venders from the commercial, and sometimes the organic too. usually the homegrown is near the front of the market. in many cases the organic comes first.
organic is another story all togeather!! lets put it this way, i dont pay the extra price for organic, most of it isnt really organtic.... they just fill out paper work to say it is..for about $4000 i could probuably get my dog and a whole city block declared organic. i do believe the organic regulatory body trys to keep it all good, but the police also try to make you wear your seat belt too(if you know what i mean)

[Crys]

Yeah, I'm really big on researching the companies I buy food from, both the store/market and the producers and processors. It's hard to find information on any of them, though I've had pretty good luck looking online for warnings. And the label organic? Pfft. Since they recently passed the change that put it back in the direct hands of the FDA, I don't put much stock in it now. At least they tried for some accountability before. But with an administration that thinks mercury, lead and arsenic are a-ok for drinking water, I expect that list of 40ish ingredients (things that are not grown and therefore cannot possibly be "organic", like baking soda and carbon dioxide) you can use and still call it organic to become a list of 40,000ish pretty soon.

That said, organics are still held to a slightly higher standard in growth than non-organics. Pesticides, for example, are more limited. I think it's more a matter of learning what companies are really trying to be organic and which are trying to use it for marketing.