The recent E. coli outbreak from California spinach is just another incident in a long line of outbreaks which expose the flaws in our nation’s food chain. Our nation’s system of transporting food quickly across the country can just as easily spread deadly bacteria.
Like most of our food, spinach travels from the field it is harvested in to a central facility where it is mixed with spinach from a variety of other areas in the country. It only takes a small amount of tainted spinach to effect the whole batch and spread the bacteria across the country. In the recent E. coli outbreak which occured on August 30th, tainted spinach from California was spread to almost two dozen states, sickening nearly 200 people and causing two fatalities. The fact that this is already the 20th time that lettuce or spinach has been blamed for an outbreak of illness since 1995 strongly suggests that the problem lies within our nation’s food safety policies.
Food safety advocates are calling for stricter regulations and believe that a single agency needs to be made in charge of making sure that our food is safe. “If you raise spinach in the Salinas Valley and it’s in 40 states in a few days, you can’t have a system that says we won’t do anything until somebody gets sick,” said Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy for Consumer Federation and a former USDA official.
The FDA has repeatedly urged the industry to make the changes necessary to control the current problem, but without the inspection and safety programs used by agencies like the Agicultural Department, the FDA has very limited power.
A 1993 E. coli outbreak in beef products caused the Agricultural Department to begin tightening its inspection policies. In 1996 it switched from a visual inspection of meat, to a scientific one. Since then illnesses from E. coli have dropped 29 percent.
An important step in dealing with the tainted beef was figuring out how the meat became infected in the first place. Natural Selection Foods, which is at the center of the current E. coli outbreak has begun sampling every shipment of lettuce and spinach that comes in and is holding shipments until the test results come back. Finding out where the bacteria is coming from is more critical for greens than it was for beef because spinach and lettuce is eaten raw, whereas with beef it is generally pre-cooked providing a better opportunity for getting rid of bacteria.
Currently, the spinach and lettuce industry is in need of more time for finding out exactly where the bacteria is coming and from and what to do about it. However, what’s important is that something is being done about the problem and that in due time, potentially live-saving changes will be made.
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increases in our population. Births are currently exceeding deaths by nearly two to one, causing our population to grow by almost 1.8 million, or 0.6 percent every year. In addition to this, immigration adds about another million people every year, bumping our population growth to 0.9 percent every year. If the U.S. continues on with its current growth rate our population will increase by another hundred million in under forty years.
