The Flavor of E. coli Part II

I think it is useful, while my vast audience still has Taco Bell on the brain, to discuss the related web of issues a little more. Nameley: most people get their lettuce or green onions or whatever from the same place: California. What is it like out there in a lettuce patch? First of all, there are no cute bunny rabbits hopping about stealing a nibble. Large corporate farms have some things in common: the soil is essentially sterile and supports vegetable growth only by being bathed continuously in toxic, petroleum and natural gas-based fertilizers and pesticides. Who is going out into that mess to harvest my lettuce? Who else, but underpaid migrant labor (who, by the way, have no emotional investment in the quality of the product. I wouldn't if I were them). I suspect that, although bound to by law, farm managers often don't provide onsite bathrooms for their workers. Now, poo is not the only source of E.coli. It can come from farm animals and some other sources, but clearly, the scale of these veggie operations is lending itself to a lack of quality control.

People ought to be shocked when they realize that 1) they are eating food the origin of which is completely unknown, and 2) when one source of spinich or onions or whatever is called into question, they have no other option but to avoid buying the stuff all together. What we have here, is an incredibly fragile food system. If it was disrupted for a week, people would start starving.

Why, when California spinach showed evidence of contamination, did we not simply buy good old Wisconsin spinach or Maryland Spinach or Arkansas spinach? Or better yet, why not buy spinach froma local grower or get it from your own back yard? Oh, I see, because none of those options actually exist for most people. Spinach is essentially a luxury item. But what will happen if some staple food becomes contaminated with somethin or other? What will happen when we can no longer ship all of our food 1,500 miles across the country on a daily basis? A more plausible scenario in the near future is that this system will not so much become impossible as it will become unaffordable. When this finally happens, there are a couple of things I don't want to witness: the look of a conventional spinach field the year after they cancel the growing operation. Rolling back all that artificial chemical fertility will no doubt leave a field of lifeless sand, incapable of supporting anything, even microbes. The other thing I don't want to see is the look on people's faces when they realize that they took all the available farm land in Baldwin County Alabama and built subdivisions and Taco Bells on it.