Now that the shock of ‘killer spinach’
– as screamed by the media – has subsided, the time is at hand
to prevent such a disaster from happening again.
Now that the shock of ‘killer spinach’ – as screamed by the media – has subsided, the time is at hand to prevent such a disaster from happening again.
The damage to health, industry and image is already measurable and is taking a toll on everyone from consumers to farmers to processors to grocers to restaurants.
Some of the media reaction would have us believe that spinach itself is to blame. That somehow this extremely healthy vegetable poses a menace to society. We are, rightfully so for the moment, removing it from retailers, restaurants and fields. We have stigmatized it to the extent where you have to wonder if anyone will buy it again. The old saw “eat your vegetables” has taken on a certain dark irony.
We assume so. It is too good to disappear. It is also a $200 million industry in California.
What we need is for hysteria to give way to common sense and an ability to monitor and safeguard our food production. What is alarming is the fact that there have been previous produce bacterial outbreaks in the nation and our region that went mostly unnoticed. In fact, since 1995 there have been 19 food-poisoning outbreaks attributed to lettuce and spinach. The government actually warned growers in 2004 and 2005 that more needed to be done to increase the safety of leafy green production. It appears that message was not taken seriously.
It will be taken seriously now. Someone has died. People are sick. E. coli is not a trifle. Many Americans go an entire lifetime without experiencing bloody diarrhea. There simply have to be better safeguards.
In the wake of this disaster, government and industry officials are currently combing fields, processing plants and stores to discover weak links in the process. They would like to pinpoint the contamination so the information can be used in prevention.
We commend the growing community for cooperating. On Wednesday, Natural Selection Foods of San Juan Bautista held a press conference and voiced its commitment to locating the source of the contamination. The company also stated that its only real concern at the moment is protecting public health.
It was the right thing to say and the correct strategy. We need spinach. San Benito County needs a healthy Earthbound Farm. None of us need hysteria. We need to calmly figure out what causes these outbreaks to happen and do everything in our power to prevent them from happening again.
