Sludge Watch ==> Don't Eat Poop - When Good Food Goes Bad

[Maureen Reilly]

Sludgewatch Admin:


AS this story details....in the face of dramatic illnesses from eating fresh 
produce food safety has moved from cheery tips about picnics and hand 
washing and gets to food safety on the farm.

It is clear that deliberately spreading farmlands with poisonous poo ... 
toxins and pathogens that are  concentrated during the sewage treatment 
process... is not and never will be consistent with food safety.

.................................................................................

Don't eat your veggies

Allison Hanes, National Post
Toronto Canada

Thursday, December 28, 2006


The National Post presents a week-long series that examines some of the 
innovative notions that helped define 2006 and that will shape the way we 
live in 2007.

Today, When Good Food Goes Bad.

They were supposed to be the healthy ones.

The people who prided themselves on buying organic produce, stuffing their 
sandwiches with sprouts, and slurping copious quantities of carrot juice had 
their world turned upside down this year.

Ends up some of them were also eating poop, as one food borne illness expert 
not-so-delicately put it. A series of scares, in which normally wholesome 
foods induced illness or turned lethal, may have forever shaken the common 
wisdom that vitamin- packed vegetables are unassailably good for you.

Many healthy eaters got nasty bouts of diarrhea as a result of E. coli 
contamination. Others were hospitalized when their bodies were colonized by 
life-threatening bacteria. A few even died, including a little boy in the 
U.S. whose well-intentioned parents surreptitiously slipped spinach into his 
smoothie.

Just as the organic food craze was hitting Wal-Mart and the 100 Mile Diet 
was winning converts, good food suddenly went bad. More than 600 people were 
sickened in six different outbreaks in the last three months alone, 
according to the Food Health Network-- and that toll could double once the 
sources of other suspicious cases are uncovered.

"It's the first year we've seen so many outbreaks in fruits and vegetables 
and especially concentrated in such a short time frame," said Rene Cardinal, 
acting national manager for the Canada Food Inspection Agency's fresh fruit 
and vegetable program.

"If it's a trend, we're in trouble," Mr. Cardinal said.

Not all the food frights of 2006 involved fresh produce: a Hershey chocolate 
factory in Smiths Falls, Ont., was shut down for weeks when salmonella was 
detected and green onions and lettuce caused 'runs for the border' among 
Taco Bell patrons.

But between a pair of Torontonians paralyzed by their botulism-tainted 
health drink, and the hundreds made ill by Ontario-grown bean sprouts, the 
greatest danger often lurked in the most virtuous of veggies.

Douglas Powell, a professor of food safety, said the most chilling words he 
heard all year came when a Food and Drug Administration official in the U.S. 
declared the California spinach supply as safe after the outbreak as it was 
before.

Prof. Powell says the system that ensures the safety of fresh produce is 
broken and has been for some time.

All that changed was that blame shifted away from careless cooks chopping 
carrots on the same cutting boards on which they carved up raw chicken and 
finally refocused on the farm.

"What this fall really did was explode this myth that food-borne illness 
just happens at home and it's just people doing silly things," said Prof. 
Powell, formerly of the University of Guelph, now at Kansas State 
University. "It happens everywhere, from farm to fork."

The blunt-talking professor insists the slogan for this new public health 
issue should be, "Don't Eat Poop," because food is often compromised by 
feces -- animal dung that runs off into irrigation sources or the human kind 
that can be found on the hands of field hands or restaurant workers.

He says responsibility begins on the farm, where everything from dousing 
crops with dirty water, to soil contaminated by marauding wildlife can taint 
food that ends up on supermarket shelves.

Mr. Cardinal, of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, toured the California 
spinach fields where the E. coli infestation originated and said while the 
large scale of the U.S. industry was a contributing factor, there's no 
reason to think Canadian producers are immune.

Some hazards are inevitable. When spinach, lettuce or other leafy greens 
from different producers are mixed together, washed and conveniently 
packaged in a bag under one brand name, there is a risk of widespread cross 
contamination if anything goes awry.

It only takes one rogue producer to bring down an entire commodity, as 
slumping spinach sales have shown.

Does this mean days are numbered for the organic craze and the farm fresh 
fad?

Hardly, said Bonnie Stern, Canada's celebrity chef and a renowned gourmet 
whose column appears in the pages of this newspaper.

"People haven't given up beef, have they?" she said, alluding to the spread 
of mad cow disease through infected meat in the last decade.

What the latest frenzy really underscores, said Ms. Stern, is how 
differently people are eating and thinking about what they're eating these 
days. "No one used to eat spinach. So if

there was something wrong with the spinach [in the past] they probably 
wouldn't pay attention to it," she said. "But now people have really fallen 
in love with washed baby organic spinach à

"Everybody ate before, but now everybody's thinking about food, whether it 
is thinking about dieting, or thinking about overeating, or thinking about 
just enjoying food, thinking about watching the food network, reading 
magazines," she said.

"I think people are just more obsessed with food than they've ever been, so 
food in the headlines just grabs their attention more than it used to."

New York Times writer Molly O'Neill labelled this preoccupation as "food 
pornography."

This obsession with an idyllic image of how food is grown, harvested and 
presented can be seen in how recipe books are now volumes of soft-lit photo 
spreads, and in the bounty of mouthwatering food programming on TV, with 
hosts like Nigella Lawson who themselves qualify as eye candy.

Prof. Powell said this ideology has also given rise to an unsubstantiated 
belief that small local producers are universally better and safer than big 
farms.

Not necessarily so, he insists. Big operations have more money to invest in 
technology to uncover and combat bacterial infestation. Small farmers' 
hearts may be in the right place, but at the end of the day, deer droppings 
may cause more immediate harm than pesticides.

If people paid as much attention to safety as they do to what their 
freerange dinner snacked on, he said, it would kick-start a consumer 
revolution that would have the same impact on how grocery store shelves are 
stocked as the demand for fresh and free range.

"The first company to recognize the opportunity and assure consumers they 
aren't eating poop on spinach, lettuce and tomatoes and any other fresh 
produce, will make millions and capture markets across the country," 
predicted Prof. Powell.

Perhaps it's not as unrealistic as it sounds. Just look at the car industry 
since the invention of the air bag. If vegetables were held up to the same 
standards as Volvos, maybe everyone would be better off.

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=656491b3-6957-4790-9b1f-230fd268c46b&k=80018