Just when it seemed we were starting to want to eat our veggies
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Just when it seemed we were starting to want to eat our veggies …
Just when it seemed the food industry had created a convenient way to get veggies into the meals of “too busy” families …
Just when it seemed organic growing methods were on the verge of becoming mainstream …
Along comes a particularly vicious microbe named E. coli that kills a couple of innocent people, disables a bunch of others and brings a burgeoning industry to its knees.
I happened to read some of the New York Times coverage of the catastrophe and its emphasis was on the victims who became ill.
There was a 2-year-old boy, Kyle Algood, who drank a spinach smoothie. A few hours later he was hooked up to IVs in the hospital with hemolytic-uremic syndrome, a type of kidney failure often linked to E. coli, and a little while later, he was dead. Imagine the grief. Imagine how the person who made him the smoothie must feel.
It’s the kind of disease that leaves people debilitated, with kidney damage and other problems, even if they survive.
Out here, of course, the coverage has focused more on the growers, processors and shippers who make up the spinach industry.
Who knew that the spinach industry was a $293 million business? For that matter, who knew there was such a thing as a spinach industry? When I think of vegetables, my reflexive image is of single small farmers, selling one or two bunches at a time. A carrot here, a radish there. But of course I know that there is much more involved.
For bagged spinach and other greens to have become as ubiquitous as they have, a vast machinery has been created, encompassing farmers, farmworkers, processors, packers, shippers, wholesalers, grocery chains and grocery clerks. And spinach salads have become a popular feature of deli counters and sandwich bars.
It appears that most of the mechanisms are already in place to isolate, eventually, the source of contamination, and these same mechanisms will allow safeguards to be strengthened to prevent a recurrence. Most parties involved hope a solution can be found without resorting to legislation, which all too often creates expensive bureaucracy without solving the actual problem.
Let’s hope so, because there is a lot at stake: in the short term, people’s paychecks; in the middle term, the survival of farms that have had to plow under a whole season’s worth of hard work, investment and irrigation; and in the long term, the future of one of the biggest economic engines in our region.
After all, right now San Benito County is facing pressure from two sides. On one side, there is the pressure to allow more home building, so the county would be paved over, its crop clusters of look-alike subdivisions. The opposing pressure is to be “conserved,” as if it were under glass, a life-sized diorama of the way things used to be. To resist these pressures, agriculture will need not only to thrive but to continue to improve and create new ways of getting veggies onto plates.
