Romaine lettuce and radiation

[Skyhunter]

Sorry to keep ragging on organic food, but a bit of wax and some pesticide residue never bothered me. Bayer has experimental farms less than a mile from me where they grow "glow in the dark" corn and other mutant vegetables and carry out research on killing insects. It won't be long before I start to glow. I won't live long enough to see the effects and I spawned years before I moved here, so my offspring are safe.

Organic is more about sustainability, however if your only concern is yourself and your immediate offspring, then I agree, you have little to worry about.

 

[Skyhunter]

The E. coli contamination is probably from the field, likely it is occurring in the irrigation system. The problem has existed in the Salinas Valley for 10 years. So far all the product codes, and the actual spinach were non organic. that leads me to believe it is from one of the recent farms. Since it takes three years to become certified organic.

From what I know about EarthBound farms, they are spreading their organic model to improve agricultural sustainability. If they have acquired farms that have problems, I believe that their model will actually improve sanitary conditions on these farms. What I would like to see is all farms be regulated to meet health and sanitary standards. If this were the case and the fees were spread around, organics would be cheaper. Equalize the subsidies and organic produce would become competitive with industrial produce. this could go a long way to restoring the small family farms ability to be competitive.

The greatest advantage of organics is that by not using chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, the farmer does not kill off the myriad of living microbes in the soil, keeping the topsoil healthy and not depleting it. Some of the smaller farmers have gone beyond organic, and scoff at the term since the USDA has developed a certification program. Using mixed crops and bio-intensive agriculture they are actually producing topsoil in their fields as opposed to depleting it.

Being vegan I eat a lot of vegetables. I can attest from personal experience that the organic produce I get from my local farmers market is far superior in taste and quality to anything I can get at a super market, even ones that specialize in organics.

Regardless, Dr. Riley is an obvious crackpot. e coli doesn't exist in Africa? Perhaps they don't notice it because they have bigger problems (as I suggested), but he's straightforwardly wrong about it not existing in Africa. Here's the first hit from Google on it: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11394181&dopt=Abstract A hippie crackpot from Berkeley? I'm shocked!

I believe he was referring to the spread of the disease. Of course E. coli exists everywhere that there are mammals. His point, not well illustrated by the reporter in that SFGate rag, is that our model of mass production and mass distribution is what enables the bacteria to spread across the country.

 

[Evo]

Being vegan I eat a lot of vegetables. I can attest from personal experience that the organic produce I get from my local farmers market is far superior in taste and quality to anything I can get at a super market, even ones that specialize in organics.

You really can't taste a difference between fresh organic or fresh non-organic produce. They brought that up in the articles on the spinach, there's just no difference. Of course something ripened naturally on the plant will taste better then something picked green and shipped, organic or non-organic doesn't matter. The non-organic produce usually looks better though. I buy fruits and vegetables from an elderly farmer in my neighborhood, but it's not organic, he's a traditional farmer.

 

[tribdog]

you can't taste a difference because there isn't a difference. The only difference is in which bag you put the spinich in.

 

[Skyhunter]

You really can't taste a difference between fresh organic or fresh non-organic produce. They brought that up in the articles on the spinach, there's just no difference. Of course something ripened naturally on the plant will taste better then something picked green and shipped, organic or non-organic doesn't matter. The non-organic produce usually looks better though.

Without a doubt the freshness is the most important ingredient for taste. One of the reasons we shop at least twice a week for produce.

I buy fruits and vegetables from an elderly farmer in my neighborhood, but it's not organic, he's a traditional farmer.

Buying local products, is more important for sustainability than buying organic.

Here is a good article about spinach.

http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2006/09/21/E-coli/index.html?source=daily

The organic question distracts from the real story behind the outbreak: consolidation of production. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that California produces three-quarters of the spinach consumed in the United States -- and of that, fully three-quarters comes from Monterey County, which encompasses Salinas Valley.

Natural Selection Foods buys, processes, and packs salad greens for such giants as Dole, Trader Joe's, and Sysco, among others. The company's Earthbound Farm brand boasts on its website that it produces "[m]ore than 7 out of 10 organic salads sold in grocery stores" in the U.S.

In 1999, Salinas-based Tanimura & Antle, the largest U.S. fresh-vegetable grower and shipper, with 40,000 acres under cultivation in the United States and Mexico, bought a 33 percent stake in Natural Selection/Earthbound.

Given Natural Selection's scale, it's no surprise that an outbreak in a small region of California's central coast could repeatedly wreak havoc nationwide.

It appears that the initial source of the deadly strain is from the intestines of grain fed beef.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/opinion/21planck.html?ex=1158984000&en=4243879375d8130f&ei=5087

First, some basic facts about this usually harmless bacterium: E. coli is abundant in the digestive systems of healthy cattle and humans, and if your potato salad happened to be carrying the average E. coli, the acid in your gut is usually enough to kill it.

But the villain in this outbreak, E. coli O1577, is far scarier, at least for humans. Your stomach juices are not strong enough to kill this acid-loving bacterium, which is why it’s more likely than other members of the E. coli family to produce abdominal cramps, diarrhea, fever and, in rare cases, fatal kidney failure.

Where does this particularly virulent strain come from? It’s not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. No, O157 thrives in a new — that is, recent in the history of animal diets — biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms. It’s the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates the groundwater and spreads the bacteria to produce, like spinach, growing on neighboring farms.

In 2003, The Journal of Dairy Science noted that up to 80 percent of dairy cattle carry O157. (Fortunately, food safety measures prevent contaminated fecal matter from getting into most of our food most of the time.) Happily, the journal also provided a remedy based on a simple experiment. When cows were switched from a grain diet to hay for only five days, O157 declined 1,000-fold.

This is good news. In a week, we could choke O157 from its favorite home — even if beef cattle were switched to a forage diet just seven days before slaughter, it would greatly reduce cross-contamination by manure of, say, hamburger in meat-packing plants. Such a measure might have prevented the E. coli outbreak that plagued the Jack in the Box fast food chain in 1993.

Unfortunately, it would take more than a week to reduce the contamination of ground water, flood water and rivers — all irrigation sources on spinach farms — by the E-coli-infected manure from cattle farms.

http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/prodltr2.html is a Letter to California Firms that Grow, Pack, Process, or Ship Fresh and Fresh-cut Lettuce from the FDA

In June 2004, the California Department of Health Services, Food and Drug Branch (CDHS-FDB) initiated multi-agency, collaborative research aimed at identifying the environmental reservoirs for E. coli O1577, and understanding how lettuce may become contaminated. In a preliminary report presented at the August 2005 annual meeting of the International Association for Food Protection, E. coli O1577 was isolated from sediment in an irrigation canal bordering a ranch that had been identified in three separate outbreaks. The ranch is bowl-shaped; it sits upon a drained lake, and is highly susceptible to localized flooding. Expanded sampling in the Santa Rita Creek and the Salinas Valley area indicate that creeks and rivers in the Salinas watershed are contaminated periodically with E. coli O1577. The specific source of contamination that led to the outbreaks was not identified. However, several possible sources of contamination were identified, both on the ranch initially studied and upstream. Although it is unlikely that contamination in all 19 outbreaks was caused by flooding from agricultural water sources, we would like to take this opportunity to clarify that FDA considers ready to eat crops (such as lettuce) that have been in contact with flood waters to be adulterated due to potential exposure to sewage, animal waste, heavy metals, pathogenic microorganisms, or other contaminants.

[edit] BTW California had a lot of rain last season. Which probably meant a lot of flooding. I will check that factor later. [/edit]

So I stand on my earlier premise that...

The model of the mass production, mass distribution, should never have been applied to our food. Local production and consumption would keep contamination like this from spreading all over the country.

...and am reaffirmed in my belief that a vegan diet, is the better diet.

If the cattle were grass fed organic, perhaps the water used to irrigate our plants would be less likely to become contaminated.

 

[Skyhunter]

Dr. Riley is an obvious crackpot. e coli doesn't exist in Africa? Perhaps they don't notice it because they have bigger problems (as I suggested), but he's straightforwardly wrong about it not existing in Africa. Here's the first hit from Google on it: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11394181&dopt=Abstract A hippie crackpot from Berkeley? I'm shocked!

An obvious crackpot?

Perhaps you should get to know Dr. Lee W. Riley. He doesn't fit the crackpot profile.

"At the time of that (1982) outbreak, there was no knowledge that E. coli could cause a disease like this, so nobody believed it," said Lee Riley, a professor of infectious disease and epidemiology at UC Berkeley who was one of the lead investigators for the CDC in the McDonald's case and an author of the first paper published on E. coli in the New England Journal of Medicine

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/23/MNGOGLBFOB1.DTL

The probelm with E. coli is not spinach or any other type of plant food. It is beef.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/Organic/ecolimyths.cfm#E

According to microbiologist Russell, acid-resistant strains of bacteria
have evolved to overcome the protective barrier of the gastric stomach.
The ongoing process of natural selection allows organisms with the appropriate
genes to survive and multiply where others cannot. Because cattle have
been fed high-grain, growth-promoting diets for more than 40 years,
he says, there has been ample opportunity to select acid-resistant forms.

Further research is needed to identify the acid-resistance genes of E.
coli, but Russell says that "common laboratory strains" of E. coli appear
to lack the necessary DNA to survive acidic gastrointestinal environments.

"In the meantime, now that we know where the acid-resistant E. coli are
coming from, we can control them with a relatively inexpensive change
in diet," Russell says. "This strategy has the potential to control the production of
other acid-resistant bacteria, including virulent strains of E. coli that
have not yet evolved."

A brief period of hay-feeding immediately before slaughter "should not
affect either carcass size or meat quality,"
and the diet change could be implemented with minimal expense and
inconvenience to feedlot operators, according
to Donald H. Beermann, Cornell professor of animal science.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010511074623.htm

Finally, grain-based diets can promote Escherichia coli (E. coli) within the digestive tract of cattle, and these E. coli are more likely to survive acid shocks that mimic the human gastric stomach. This discovery, first reported by Russell and colleagues in 1998 (Science, 11 September), has now been confirmed. Other USDA scientists have likewise shown that cattle switched from grain-based diets to hay were less likely to shed harmful E. coli 01577 in feces.