Where did Popeye live, anyway?
Today, the Los Angeles Times is reporting on the alert mother who identified raw spinach as the source of her children’s distress. In a related story, the Times is also reporting on how a Salinas based lettuce grower voluntarily recalled 8,500 cartons of lettuce Sunday after tests found E. coli contamination in the water used for irrigation.
friday18 has an interesting take on this in her journal. She addresses the role of the FDA in all of this, and the idiocy of a proposed Food Safety Agency. Just what we need: a new government agency to fix up one that didn’t work in one case. Perhaps this is the FEMA solution.
More significantly, she has a pointer to Alton Brown’s take on the subject. As usual, Mr. Good Eats has an insightful analysis, focusing on the key aspect: If we only ate locally grown produce, the problem (a) would have been found sooner, and (b) would have been localized. To quote Mr. Eats:
21 states affected by spinach grown not only in one state but in one region of one state. Had the spinach stayed near home odds are good this would have been caught sooner. But packaging and trucking just gave the 0157:H7 time to grow. (For some reason I’m reminded of Charlie Sheen in Apocalypse Now talking about “…every minute Charlie squats in the bush he gets stronger…”.) What’s my point? Had the big chain grocers and restaurant suppliers purchased locally grown produce, this wouldn’t have happened. But don’t blame them. Nope. Blame us. By demanding fresh spinach year round (or anything else for that matter) we create the monster. It’s like Dan Akroyd thinking of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghost Busters. Our own unnatural desires and our refusal to consume locally grown foods have brought us to this sorry state.
And to make matters worse, our ever-wise government has told us to eat no fresh spinach at all. They could have advised us to eat only locally grown spinach but Noooooooo. Let’s shoot every poor farmer in America that’s doing his or her job in the foot. And why? Because we can’t sort out what went there when and how and what it might have touched or been near. Here’s the news kids: when the system gets this big and out of whack, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (and the USDA and the CDC, and the FDA) cannot keep us safe. I want you to think about that a minute. It’s not their fault. it simply cannot be done. It should not be done.
That always bothered me about this whole spinach recall thing: What made them think a bacteria was present in all spinach throughout the world? It made no sense. Yes, restrict the problematic area, but permit people to use farmers they know and trust.
I’ve always been leary of non-US produce. We consider our produce safe in this country, and it usually is. But we eat grapes and apples from Chile, and other fruit from who knows where… and water cleanliness standards do tend to be weaker in developing countries. Is this all safe? Have we just been lucky so far? I think it is time to go back to buying my produce at the local Farmer’s Markets.
