Unfortunately, the diary title is literal. Somewhere, somehow, there
was poop on spinach. E. coli of any sort is indicative of fecal contamination.
The other day, I posted the results of a study about current American views on our food system. In short, most Americans don't really notice that we have a food system. The study noted that food scares like the current E. coli O157:H7 epidemic make ideal "teaching moments" - although, in the end, most Americans don't really learn anything from them as soon as the food scare is out of the news.
But if there was something to learn from our current teaching moment, here's what it is:
69% of the American spinach crop is grown in California. The current crisis resulted in a recall of spinach from Earthbound Farms Natural Selection label grown in the Salinas Valley and San Benito County. The Earthbound spinach was also included in a River Ranch brand salad mix. So far 114 people in 21 states have become sick, 1 has died, and more have suffered kidney failure.
Kossacks are more enlightened than the average American so we would probably look at the paragraph above and draw from it the significance of a larger food system. The breadth of the epidemic is due to the centralized production and widespread distribution of our food.
Because of all of the crazy branding strategies, partnerships, and mergers going on behind the scenes, we never really know who makes our food - in this case I would have guessed that the River Ranch salads were safe because only Earthbound grew the tainted spinach, and I would have been wrong.
Although no one has found the smoking gun - or cow pie - yet, many suspect flood waters contaminated with manure. E. coli lives in the intestines of mammals, and the particular strain in this case, E. coli O157:H7, is a recent phenomenon.
Starting a few decades ago, Americans outsmarted Mother Nature. We switched our cows' diets from grass and hay to grain. Eating grain isn't particularly good for the cows, but together with antibiotics and hormones, we can house them in feedlots, fatten them up, and slaughter them quicker than if we had let them graze at their own speed in a pasture. Mother Nature, it would seem, is anti-business.
The new diet changed the acidity in cows' digestive tracts and the close living quarters led to a lot of cows and a lot of poop living side by side. That's when the new strain of E. coli, O157:H7, came on the scene. When cows eat grass, the acidity in their digestive tracts usually kills the bacteria, but grain fed cows' tummies do not.
So the mere fact that E. coli O157:H7 got into the water at all is a result of our need for cheap feedlot beef - and one could take it a step further in exploring the interconnectedness of the food system, because cheap feedlot beef is possible due to cheap corn, soy, oilseed, and other commodities, subsidized by government policies that encourage high production and rock bottom prices. Those policies hurt the farmers who produce the commodities (corn, soy, wheat, etc), but they provide an incentive to anyone who wants to use the commodities as cheap inputs for their products - such as feedlot beef.
So many cows in such a small space contaminated the water that presumably flooded the spinach fields. This was the 20th such epidemic linked to lettuce and spinach from Monterey County in the past decade. The outbreaks have caused over 400 sicknesses and 2 deaths. The current epidemic was also felt economically by everyone from growers to farm workers, truckers, packagers, restaurants, grocers, and more.
In the past few years, spinach producers have stepped up food safety precautions. Farm workers wear rubber gloves and hairnets, for example, and dogs are no longer allowed into the fields. In November of 2005, the FDA warned growers, packers, processors and shippers in a letter that their safety measures were still worrisome.
The most telling comment to me was one from Lee Riley, professor of infectious disease and epidemiology at UC Berkeley, that appeared in a San Francisco Chronicle article entitled "Spinach Growers Were Warned About Produce Safety." He said, "We don't see this disease in India, Africa, China. We only see it in highly technologically advanced countries, and the reason is because of this highly centralized food processing system."
Isn't that amazing? The countries that consider themselves to be at the pinnacle of progress are the ones that have panics over a few cells of bacteria! We need to examine our entire food system, not just hand-washing and glove-wearing by farm workers, if we wish to avoid future deaths.
For more info on spinach and E. coli:
Spinach Growers Were Warned About Produce Safety
Pattern of E. Coli Outbreaks is Seen
E. coli cases prompt calls to regulate farm practices
Spinach scare hits Salinas Valley hard
Spinach producers take financial hit