On Healthy Living

The cases of people becoming sick has led the FDA to conclude that the culprit is Earthbound Farm’s (Natural Selection Foods) bagged spinach. Traces of E Coli bacteria were found and so far 1 person is dead (a 77 year old woman) and 109 people so far has been diagnosed with the illness tracing to the leafy greens.

The FDA and other officials are asking people not to eat spinach since other companies spinach could also be infected. People also need to watch out for vegetable mixes which usually have many different vegetables that are shredded and mixed together for convenience and they are also warning that some places might have taken the spinach out of the bags and consumers might assume that the leaves came from whole spinach cloves and were not bagged when in fact they were.

Here’s a disgusting fact. Many types of E. Coli come from feces. Ewwwwww. Wash those hands people.

I had watched a story a few months ago, that talked about E. Coli infected lettuce that were making people sick. I don’t believe they finished solving it, but a few things that could have happened also seems likely in the case of infected spinach.

Factor 1. Animals such as cows could have stepped in their feces and then tracked it through the lettuce/spinach fields.

Factor 2. An employee could have not washed their hands and then handled the veggies.

Factor 3. When the food is going to be shredded and bagged that way, most of the farmers remove the core right there in the fields, which could allow viruses and bacteria to get into the food.

Factor 4. Contaminated water could have rolled into the soil and gone into the plant roots, infecting the vegetables. If this happened, then no amount of washing would help, since the bacteria would be inside the leaves themselves.

The good news is that most restaurants and grocery stores have pulled this product. The bad news is that people are still getting sick from spinach they might already have and also I feel bad for both the victims and the company because when you have a business, this is not something that you ever want to see happen and it will probably be a long time before people trust that brand or even have spinach.

One last note. Police are investigating the death of a 23 month old girl who died from E. Coli and they are trying to determine if she has been the second death victim.

Marsha James wrote this on September 18th, 2006 and filed it under Healthy Living, Vegetarian Cooking, Raw Foods |