Leafy Green Sewage

[Guest guest]

From today's NY Times. Interesting Read.

 

FARMERS and food safety officials still have much to figure out about the recent

spate of E. coli infections linked to raw spinach. So far, no particular

stomachache has been traced to any particular farm irrigated by any particular

river.

There is also no evidence so far that Natural Selection Foods, the huge shipper

implicated in the outbreak that packages salad greens under more than two dozen

brands, including Earthbound Farm, O Organic and the Farmer’s Market, failed

to use proper handling methods.

Indeed, this epidemic, which has infected more than 100 people and resulted in

at least one death, probably has little do with the folks who grow and package

your greens. The detective trail ultimately leads back to a seemingly unrelated

food industry — beef and dairy cattle.

First, some basic facts about this usually harmless bacterium: E. coli is

abundant in the digestive systems of healthy cattle and humans, and if your

potato salad happened to be carrying the average E. coli, the acid in your gut

is usually enough to kill it.

But the villain in this outbreak, E. coli O157:H7, is far scarier, at least for

humans. Your stomach juices are not strong enough to kill this acid-loving

bacterium, which is why it’s more likely than other members of the E. coli

family to produce abdominal cramps, diarrhea, fever and, in rare cases, fatal

kidney failure.

Where does this particularly virulent strain come from? It’s not found in the

intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other

fibrous forage. No, O157 thrives in a new — that is, recent in the history of

animal diets — biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and

dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms. It’s

the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates the

groundwater and spreads the bacteria to produce, like spinach, growing on

neighboring farms.

In 2003, The Journal of Dairy Science noted that up to 80 percent of dairy

cattle carry O157. (Fortunately, food safety measures prevent contaminated fecal

matter from getting into most of our food most of the time.) Happily, the

journal also provided a remedy based on a simple experiment. When cows were

switched from a grain diet to hay for only five days, O157 declined 1,000-fold.

This is good news. In a week, we could choke O157 from its favorite home —

even if beef cattle were switched to a forage diet just seven days before

slaughter, it would greatly reduce cross-contamination by manure of, say,

hamburger in meat-packing plants. Such a measure might have prevented the E.

coli outbreak that plagued the Jack in the Box fast food chain in 1993.

Unfortunately, it would take more than a week to reduce the contamination of

ground water, flood water and rivers — all irrigation sources on spinach farms

— by the E-coli-infected manure from cattle farms.

The United States Department of Agriculture does recognize the threat from these

huge lagoons of waste, and so pays 75 percent of the cost for a confinement

cattle farmer to make manure pits watertight, either by lining them with

concrete or building them above ground. But taxpayers are financing a policy

that only treats the symptom, not the disease, and at great expense. There

remains only one long-term remedy, and it’s still the simplest one: stop

feeding grain to cattle.

California’s spinach industry is now the financial victim of an outbreak it

probably did not cause, and meanwhile, thousands of acres of other produce are

still downstream from these lakes of E. coli-ridden cattle manure. So give the

spinach growers a break, and direct your attention to the people in our

agricultural community who just might be able to solve this deadly problem: the

beef and dairy farmers.

Nina Planck is the author of “Real Food: What to Eat and Why.’’

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