Forgive me for mentioning this, but there is shit in your food. There is feces in my food too, if it makes you feel any better.
By now you know about the new strain of E. Coli that’s plaguing the European Union. E. Coli 0104:H4 has killed at least 17 people. The CBS Evening News says it has sickened over 1,600 Swedes, Danes, Germans, Swiss, Norwegians and more.
The New York Times this morning called this new strain of E. Coli “unusually lethal”. The serious complication caused by E. Coli is a disease called H.U.S. or Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, where damaged red blood cells clog the kidneys and may cause kidney failure, stroke, coma and in up to 5% of cases, death.
H.U.S. had been expected to occur in less than 10% of diagnosed E. Coli patients. The incidence of H.U.S. in this outbreak, as in recent E. Coli O157:H7 incidents in the US, is over 30%. (New York Times, June 2, 2011/Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, CIDRAP News).
E. Coli poisoning is notoriously painful, difficult and slow to heal. Complications and residual effects from either E. Coli poisoning or H.U.S., according to Eric Schlosser, author of the bestselling book Fast Food Nation, can last a lifetime.
As a vegetarian, I have had people point at fresh fruits and vegetables as the culprit for recent E. Coli infections. The source for this European outbreak is still a mystery. When the media pointed the finger at spinach in a California E. Coli outbreak a couple of years ago, they weren’t entirely correct.
Anger at fresh veggies is woefully displaced.
E. Coli does not come from vegetable sources. If you show me a carrot that shits, I’ll eat my words, and I’ll eat the carrot and take my chances.
Shit does not come from carrots. It does not come from spinach, tomatoes, or lettuce. Yes, fresh fruits and vegetables can carry contaminants and residue, the result of feedlot or other animal contamination upstream. Farmers might spread what they believe is a natural fertilizer onto their crops, when in fact they are spreading a potentially deadly poison.
A better place to point your outrage is at animals, and not the ones you may be thinking.
Humans are the animals to blame for E. Coli poisoning. Factory farms were not invented by cows or pigs or chickens.
There is E. Coli bacteria right now in your digestive tract, and it passes without causing disease because, generally speaking, humans do not defecate on their food. The E. Coli that factory farm animals produce in their intestines is often rife with increasingly resistant antibiotics.
If E. Coli doesn’t cross-contaminate meat in a slaughterhouse, it might live to fight another day.
Because we are all downstream from unclean cooking surfaces, factory farms, feedlots, and slaughterhouses we all probably consume a certain amount of bullshit with our food. Even healthy, benign foods like leafy greens.
Today the fragile economies of the EU are faced with a fecal challenge. It’s like the entire subcontinent is a big cruise ship with poor refrigeration, a limited buffet and a roulette wheel instead of a dinner plate. And to make matters worse, Europeans, avoiding roughage, are likely going to be constipated all summer long.
No port of call is safe until we clean up our factory farms.
Article first published as Veggies Don’t Poop: The EU Search for E. Coli Culprit on Technorati.
 |
> |
> |
> |
> |
> |
> |
> |
> |
> |
> |
> |
> |
> |
> |
> |
WR8K99V8XCRF
Pingback: Friday Linkage | Greater Falls!
DANNY CHORIKI replied via Facebook:Hmmm… Agree and disagree. Yes on don’t blame vegetables. Not sure though that this can really be laid on factory farming. Certainly not sure what could possibly prevent this from ever happening again.
Bacteria is a very hard to manage. Organic farming could increase the incidents, not decrease them. What I do know is that bacteria as a cause of human death has gone from the number one cause of killing humans to something that is worthy of a headline, even when it happens on another continent.
That is really pretty amazing.
My response:
Danny, I just re-read Fast Food Nation and it re-affirmed the need to clean up factory farms. When chicken cages, 1′ x 1′, are stacked four deep, fecal matter is chicken feed. Factory farmed animals are administered antibiotics until their intestines don’t know which end is up. Deadly strains of E Coli could be the direct result of antibiotic resistance inside a food animal. Add poor slaughterhouse conditions and the FIFTY POUNDS of daily poop produced by a feedlot cow…and I have pretty strong circumstantial case against factory farming when it comes to these E Coli outbreaks. Expert after expert says that we don’t need weird science, we just need a cleaner, slower system of raising and killing the animals so many people love to eat.
DANNY CHORIKI’s cogent retort:
A few random thoughts
I agree that chicken production is gross. It is the question of scale that has me baffled. Can it be changed without a huge human die off?
All the incidents I recall were with fruits and veggies were because of organic fertilizers. That was what I was thinking of. While I agree with what you are saying about meat production, the incident rate is so low it is virtually zero. It you think about how people died 100 years ago, that is amazing.
Changing the economics of the food chain isn’t very high on anyone’s priority list these days.
Weening people off processed food is not going to be easy.
I am passionate about this issue, sorry…My response:
Danny has strong critical thinking skills, and I respect and appreciate his input. We all EAT, so we should care about issues like ‘what’s the origin of deadly E Coli breakouts, and what can we do to stop it?’
We agree that E Coli is an animal-based bacteria. We agree that it contaminates vegetables via fertilizer, runoff and cross-contamination all the way down the (fast) food chain.
Danny thinks that it’s remarkable more of us aren’t sick, and thinks we do pretty well, considering our population, with just a few outbreaks per year. If the problem was not systemic, I would agree.
What’s the current data on food poisoning in the USA? The last figures I saw were nearly a decade old, but according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) back then, your chance of suffering from some kind of food poisoning over a one year period was 20%. That means in five years, virtually everyone in this country has been the victim of food poisoning.
Sometimes its our fault–please, don’t leave the mayo out all weekend and then slather it on Monday’s lunch–but the failure of feedlots, slaughterhouses and restaurants to maintain sanitary conditions is a symptom of a bigger issue: we are in too much of a hurry to breed, fatten, kill and have it your way.
Instead of SLOWING THINGS DOWN at the feedlot and slaughterhouse, we inject hormones, steroids and antibiotics. We spray bleach and viruses (bacteriophages), INSTEAD of cleaning up and slowing down production. Apparrently the consequences of injuries, contamination and the unknown effects of ‘bacteriophages’ in the human gut are a small price to pay (for a burger).
Danny is right. Weaning people from processed food is not going to be easy. I love Amy’s Enchiladas and Burritoville Vegan Taco Salad and the occasional slice of Brick Oven Pizza. I don’t expect enlightenment. It’s not in our nature.
I fully expect crisis after crisis to chip away America’s confidence in its food supply, I’m hopeful for a continued explosion of farmer’s markets and community gardens, and I expect a hue and cry, after many deaths, to clean up the bullshit in our food supply.
The basic problem is one of industrialization of our food supply. Non-pathogenic E. coli bacteria are normal inhabitants of the GI tract of mammals. We never used to have problems such as E.coli 0157 or this new nephrotoxic strain killing people. (We stopped eating hamburger 10 years ago…instead we eat bison meat from a friend’s ranch). Today’s cattle are raised in inhumane conditions that encourage bacterial overgrowth, antibiotic resistance & mutation of bacterial genes, and cattle are crowded into feedlots where they stand hock deep (or deeper) in fecal matter.
Some of this fecal matter is subsequently used as uncured manure to grow crops….or there is fecal contamination of the water used to irrigate crops. Ironically, crops that are not organic and that are chemically fertilized may actually be safer from this perspective (chose your poison).
Once we return to the “old fashioned” way of raising animals humanely, these horrendous problems and others (such as transmissible dementia from feeding cows protein from cows, which by the way still happens due to cross contamination of cattle feed with chicken feed), will no longer plague us and we shall stop playing “Russian Roulette” with our food supply.
In the meantime, for the past decade we have washed our produce (except that which we grow ourselves) with a diluted solution of food grade hydrogen peroxide, and then rinse with filtered water.
Bon apetit!