Weren't you proud when you found out that New Mexico scientists were the first to identify the source of the big spinach scare? It was a bag of Dole baby spinach from a sick person's fridge that tested positive for the same strain of E. coli that has killed one person and sickened, as of this writing, about 150 people in 23 states. The Dole spinach was traced back to Natural Selection Foods, a California-based company that specializes in bagged salad greens, especially organic greens. Some early news reports made it sound like organic spinach was the villain and implied that organic farmers' use of manure as a fertilizer was the reason for the contamination. Since then, Natural Selection has claimed that it was its conventional, not organic, spinach that is being investigated, but the E. coli scare brings up an important reminder about why hippies like me are always whining at you to buy locally.
California produces 75 percent of the country's spinach. About 75 percent of that comes from Monterey County, which includes Salinas Valley-the valley that produced that bag of Dole baby spinach. Natural Selection is the country's largest producer of salad greens. Think about the implications here: One densely populated cattle ranch on a hill in Salinas Valley and one heavy rainstorm could potentially
affect 75 percent of the country's spinach? That's terrifying! This kind of concentration of agricultural production makes us vulnerable, not only to bacteria, but to things like, yes, terrorism.
To refresh your memory of eighth-grade biology, E. coli is a species of bacteria that lives in the lower intestines of mammals like humans and cows and helps us digest our food. However, several strains of the bacteria can make us sick. According to the Centers for Disease Control, about 70,000 people come down with E. coli every year; approximately 60 of them die. You can get the bacteria from undercooked beef, unpasteurized apple juice (Oops! Odwalla!) and things like…salad greens. Food can become contaminated with the fecal matter of an infected person or animal. In this case, we're not exactly sure how the contamination happened, and it may take a while before we figure it out.
Did one sick guy working in a spinach processing plant forget to wash up after dropping the kids off at the pool and subsequently give hundreds of healthy eaters the runs? (Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work!) Probably not, says Brett Bakker, chief inspector for the New Mexico Organic Commodities Commission (NMOCC). "It's very possible, but I doubt that's the case here. My guess would be that for such a wide-scale contamination it would take more than one dirty hand. I think it would have to be hundreds of acres of contaminated spinach."
The search for the culprit of this wide-scale contamination has focused on a number of sources. One of those is contaminated irrigation water or floodwaters. In 2004 and 2005, the Food and Drug Administration warned California farmers about contamination to leafy greens from floodwaters or irrigation water. Imagine this: One wild jackrabbit leaves a little pile of pellets near a stream, then a rainstorm comes and washes his poop into a nearby arroyo, where your dog takes a drink, then comes in the house and licks your face-and now you've got E. coli. That's really simplistic, but the idea is that with the concentration of animals like cattle on feedlots, we've created a really big poop problem that turns into a really big runoff problem. "Manure has always been a resource for farmers, not a liability," Bakker says, "but until recently we didn't have so much concentration of that resource." One benefit of organic farming is that certification rules do not allow the use of feedlots, Bakker points out; cattle must be on pasture.
But another possible method of contamination is through the use of manure as a fertilizer, something that farmers have been doing for millennia because a) it works really well and b) it's readily available. Because of the original focus on organic spinach as the E. coli culprit, folks in the organic industry have been on the defensive lately, especially regarding their use of manure as a fertilizer. As industrial farms have moved away from manure as a fertilizer, it has become associated with small family farms and organic farming. But the USDA's National Organic Program has rules about the use of manure and compost. The NMOCC, like other organizations that certify organic farms and processing plants, is charged with strictly enforcing those rules. "What the public fails to realize," says Joan Quinn, education and marketing director of the NMOCC, "is that non-organic farms, in great numbers, use just as much manure or compost with absolutely no restrictions whatsoever." In short, if the outbreak was the result of contaminated manure or compost, it seems less likely that the more heavily regulated organic farms would be the culprit. You know what's even less likely? Spinach from a local farmers market sickening the whole country.
"The more centralized our food distribution network is, [the more] we can send contaminated products further and faster than ever before," says Bakker. "The closer you can buy it to home, the better. That doesn't mean that spinach from [Albuquerque's] south valley won't be contaminated by E. coli, but at the very least it won't have such a widespread effect. I guess I'm saying I'd rather get my E. coli locally."
Tell me where to eat! I need your input. Send all of your tips, gripes and raves to
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