Cautionary Tale

In keeping with my book review topic, I might as well share the story of our experience with the spinach recall, last week.

I had not bought much produce from the grocery store at all in months, having been more than pleased with what we were getting from our CSA. But after about a month of Nat having no green leafies (too hot on our farm), I started to fret that she needed them in her diet, so I broke down and bought some pre-washed, organic, baby spinach. I made and froze a huge batch of whole-meals made with the spinach and fed her from that batch for two days before I heard about the recall. I checked online, and sure enough, our spinach had to go. So I threw out all of that food (which included much more than spinach) and called poison control to make sure that Nat's symptom-free state meant we had an all-clear for e.coli (we did).

The next day, Nat and I strolled over to pick up our CSA food, and guess what? We had a bunch of Russian Kale in the share. The weather has cooled back down now, and we are back to a weekly green leafy. I remade all that baby food and promised to trust nature in the future.

For those of you who haven't read about this yet, here's some information about why the green leafies from our CSA probably have as close as you can get to a 0% chance of ever being contaminated by e. coli.

Comments

[Jody]

I paid middling attention to the press coverage and was distressed (but not surprised) that no one seemed to want to talk about what the outbreak told us about industrialized food production in this country. It is, or should be, WEIRD that an entire nation's spinach could be contaminated because of practices in one valley in California. It's not healthy, for more reasons than e.coli.

No one seemed to want to talk about it. Was I missing the crucial article or NPR report?

[PinkPoppies]

According to the information distributed in Canada, if you washed the spinach and then cooked it at high heat, you would have no problems. The issue is with eating it raw. Most hamburger, for example, has some e coli bacteria, and that is why they recommend cooking it at high heat. However, where a child is concerned, I would have done the same as you: tossed it. What a bummer! Pink

[:: jozjozjoz.com ::]

Glad you are all e-coli-less!