Preach, Alton, Preach

This is a post from Alton Brown's web page about the E-coli infected spinach outbreak. It's brilliant. Here you go.

Edible News
Tuesday, September 19, 2006E. coli 0157:H7

It’s 11:30 pm on Monday night and as of 1pm today 114 persons are infected with E. coli 0157:H7 in 21 states. According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention here’s the breakdown:
California (1)Connecticut(2)Idaho (4)Illinois (1)Indiana (8)Kentucky (6)Maine (2)Michigan (4)Minnesota (2)Nebraska (1)New Mexico (5)Nevada (1)New York (7)Ohio (10)Oregon (5)Pennsylvania (4)Utah (15)Virginia (1)Washington (2)Wisconsin (32)Wyoming (1)

In short, a lot of people are sick and one person has died in Wisconsin. This is a bad thing. And yet, it was going to happen. It was bound to happen.

I don’t want to sound like some crazy, anti-establishment bio-terrorist but maybe, just maybe this is a wakeup call. Truth is our food system has major flaws which point to one reoccurring theme: too much of our food is produced by centralized, industrial concerns. At this hour the continued suspicion is that the spinach, which may have been infected by irrigation water in a field, incorrectly composted manure used as fertilizer on organic crops, or by water used in processing. It may be quite a while before we know.

Now look at the states listed above. 21 states affected by spinach grown not only in one state but in one region of one state. Had the spinach stayed near home odds are good this would have been caught sooner. But packaging and trucking just gave the 0157:H7 time to grow. (For some reason I’m reminded of Charlie Sheen in Apocalypse Now talking about “…every minute Charlie squats in the bush he gets stronger…”.) What’s my point? Had the big chain grocers and restaurant suppliers purchased locally grown produce, this wouldn’t have happened. But don’t blame them. Nope. Blame us. By demanding fresh spinach year round (or anything else for that matter) we create the monster. It’s like Dan Akroyd thinking of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghost Busters. Our own unnatural desires and our refusal to consume locally grown foods have brought us to this sorry state.

And to make matters worse, our ever-wise government has told us to eat no fresh spinach at all. They could have advised us to eat only locally grown spinach but Noooooooo. Let’s shoot every poor farmer in America that’s doing his or her job in the foot. And why? Because we can’t sort out what went there when and how and what it might have touched or been near. Here’s the news kids: when the system gets this big and out of whack, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (and the USDA and the CDC, and the FDA) cannot keep us safe. I want you to think about that a minute. It’s not their fault. it simply cannot be done. It should not be done.

Right now everyone is doing what they have to do and by the looks of it they’re doing it right. I’m hoping that ground zero for this outbreak will be discovered and that something will be learned. But I still hold that until we diversify and decentralize our food growing system and learn to eat locally and seasonally, we only open up ourselves for more of the same.

And let that be a lesson to us all.