So you're a vegitarian, maybe even a vegan. If it's important for the general population to eat enough leafy greens, it's even more so for you because you don't have as many dietary sources of iron and calcium. You head to the store, take a look at the kale and chard but ultimately decide that you feel like spinach this week. You even do the environmentally responsible thing and buy organic. After heading home, you make a spinach salad with walnuts and some of those pears that are just coming into season. Soon after, toxins flood your digestive tract and your kidneys fail. The culprit, E. coli.
Now here's the crazy thing: this particularly toxic strain of E. coli occurs almost exclusively in the diatary tracts of cows. You may have even given up meat to avoid exposure to this type of bacteria, in addition to the other health benifits of a meatless diet. It gets worse. Although the government is not exactly forthcoming with these specifics, this particular strain of E. coli, O157: H7, occurs almost exclusively in the gut of grain-fed cattle.
Now I'm not usually a big fan of vegitarians who proseletise, and I feel that I, as an on-and-off flexiblitarian, have even less high ground from which to criticize. Do I wish that people ate less meat? Sure, but as long as it is a choice that primarily affects their own health, I don't have a big issue with the choice to eat meat. The concerns that have made me an occasional vegitarian have always been health and environmental ones. And what this latest E. coli outbreak makes clear to me is that people can be hurt by second-hand meat as much as they can by second-hand smoke. The problem in this case was not one of contaminated meat or dairy, it was one of contaminated vegitables. This is apparently not that uncommon. It looks as if the spinach-growers and -packers are not particularly at fault for their handling practices; the culprit is a strain of bacteria that is expecially resistant to washing, acidic environments and antibiotics.
See, O157: H7 is a strain of E. coli that has mutated in the particular conditions of grain-fed livestock. Cattle in particular are not built to eat grain on a regular basis, they are built to eat grass. In grass-fed cattle, the levels of O157: H7 drop to almost nothing. So the spinach industry fell victim to being downstream from heards of living petrie dishes perfectly designed to grow resistant, toxogenic bacteria. But that's not even the end. Why are cattle being fed grain in the first place? Doesn't it seem like it should be cheaper and easier to feed them on grass and hay (as is the predominant practice in every other country in the world)? It would be, if it were not for subsudies for grain, especially corn farmers.
These subsudies make corn the cheapest way to do just about everything. Processed foods are often cheaper than real food because of cheap corn oil and corn syrup, and this is making us fat. Cattle are fed grain, which they are not built to handle in large quantities. It raises the acidity of their stomaches, giving them ulcers, which in turn nessisitates the use of massive quantities of antibiotics (I read somewhere that 70% of antibiotics used in the US go to agriculture). This, in turn, creates the perfect environment to grow military-grade biological weapons. Now corn is the top priority in ethanol-fuel development, despite the fact that you loose energy in making it (as opposed to switchgrass and sugar-cane based fuel which gain energy).
The point is, factory farming has gone beyond the point where I can simply let it be someone else's business. Cattle ranches and dairy farms are massive polluters of groundwater and in some places are even leading emitters of ozone-destroying gasses (I recall reading this about New Zealand, but I can't find a source...clearly in America there are much bigger air polluters, but cattle are still a major source of groundwater pollution). They are the biggest culprits in overuse of diminishing water supplies (espcially in the American West and many places in the developing world). Subsudies to the big grain growers have been making us fat and are making us sick. The spinach outbreak is the perfect case in point: even people who don't eat meat, avoid processed goods and otherwise supporting the big farm-factories can get sick from eating organic spinach.
Of course, people on the East Coast should be eating local spinach anyway. New Jersey spinach has not been connected with the outbreak, as Senator Menendez mentioned even while campaigning for reelections. Farm subsidies don't work the way they are supposed to. Labling of agricultural goods for point of origin would help consumers even more amidst this sort of scare. Appologies for the rant, but this is important stuff.
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