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Articles : CorporationsCorporate E. Coli
The latest string of E. Coli outbreaks should raise serious questions about the vulnerability of our country’s food supply. While most public health officials blame the cases on a violent strain of noxious bacteria, the corporate food industry continues to evade its due scrutiny.
Indeed our corporate dominated food system is the real culprit in dispersing infected spinach across the country. As of this writing the Food and Drug Administration is still tracing the origins of the most recent E. Coli epidemic, which has killed one person and sickened over a hundred more. The FDA’s task isn’t an easy one. The path America’s food travels from field to plate, is a long, unstable journey. Not only does our food often voyage hundreds upon hundreds of miles before it reaches our grocery store shelves, it also passes through dozens of different hands along the way.
The fact that people in the New York are getting sick from spinach allegedly grown in California should be telling enough of our unsustainable consumer habits, as well as the inherent problems of our commercialized food industry. Corporate giants like Phillip Morris and General Mills have driven out small independent farmers. The food we eat is no longer grown close to home. If it were, the most recent E. Coli scare would not be as widespread or as difficult to rein in.
Natural Selection Foods LLC of California is currently thought to be the originator of last week’s E. Coli eruption. Natural Selection produces spinach that is packaged by Earthbound Organics, Dole, Green Harvest, Natural Selection Foods, Rave Spinach, Ready Pac, Trader Joe’s, among others. With such a widespread distribution it’s not hard to understand why so many people in so many different states have fallen ill.
But Big Food is big business. Controlling the market is profitable, even if it puts consumers and the environment at risk. Especially if it puts us all at risk. And there really are no good guys at the top of our corporate food chain. Even if they are organic producers like Natural Selection Foods, which operates 24,000 acres of certified organic farms in California, Arizona, Colorado, Washington as well as Mexico and New Zealand. And believe me, they aren’t in it to provide us with healthy organic food: they are in it to make money and lots of it. In 2005 alone Natural Selection Foods had revenue of almost 250,000 million dollars.
Perhaps this could serve as a wakeup call. Our corporate food industry is not sustainable. It’s vulnerable. Easy to be infiltrated and too expansive to oversee. The time is now for us to turn away from corporate food and toward local food. Find your town’s food co-operative (if there isn’t one, start one) and ask where the local products are kept. Visit your area farmer’s market and purchase vegetables and fruit grown by local farmers in your region. Not only will this help build community, it will also help ensure that future outbreaks of E. Coli (or something even more deadly) won’t find its way onto your dinner table with such ease.
GNN contributor Joshua Frank, author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, edits www.BrickBurner.org.
Posted by anthony
Anthony Lappé is GNN's Executive Editor. He's written for The New York Times, Details, New York, Paper, The Fader and Vice, among many others. He has worked as a producer for MTV and Fuse. He is the co-author of GNN's True Lies and the producer of their Iraq doc,...
http://finance.google.com/finance?cid=15087800
2005 revenue of 278 million USD, not 250 billion USD. Still a hefty chunk of change though. And I’m not 100% sure if I see the point. The company probably isn’t getting away free on this one (wonder how much its cost them already). As far as I can tell, this is just kinda the sort of thing that will happen from time to time. I fail to see how that will change if we switched to a system of thousands of small producers to track, manage, and oversee. Oh wait, thats right, local farmers aren’t in it for the money at all, just for the joy of feeding the rest of us.
well, that’s the point. no one entity is going to have to “track, manage and oversee” all of them. It’s managed from a local perspective. And yes, small farms need to make money, but it’s a hell of a lot smaller potatoes. Power corrupts…etc…
And believe me, they aren’t in it to provide us with healthy organic food: they are in it to make money and lots of it. In 2005 alone Natural Selection Foods had revenue of almost 250,000 million dollars
they are bad because they are making money?
Why do you think people make organic food in the first place?
heh.
??Why do you think people make organic food in the first place? ??
because they cost 2 or 3 times as much at the supermarket!!!
...yet because they dont use all the chemicals, shouldn’t they cost less to produce?
Nope, it’s easier to grow with chemicals.
exactly
In an ideal world the organic foods SHOULD cost less as they are locally grown, have much less to travel, don’t use pesicides and herbacides etc…screwy imo but there it is.
Nope, it’s easier to grow with chemicals. Organic is labor intensive
Hey folks lemme tell ya about this crazy little thing I discovered: A GARDEN! WoW, I grow my own food, dont use pesticides and I dont ever get E COLI! Its so AMAZING!
People, get a damn clue. Corporations run our lives. Diverge from your corporate cocoons, rely less on big biz, get off your ass and grow your own food. Its fun easy and very rewarding. And hey, if you live in a million dollar loft and arent capable of growing your own food, thats your own damn problem.
How many business’ have been fined for having illegal workers?
Not many.
I just seen on CNN a report of a second persons death believe to be caused by e coli.
glad my tounge tells me spinach taste like shit..
I had to throw out two bags of greens this week. I always buy organic when I can. A garden sounds nice right now. (My leftist deranged mind did momentarily go to ‘maybe this is all a plot against organics’.)
Hey folks lemme tell ya about this crazy little thing I discovered: A GARDEN! WoW, I grow my own food, dont use pesticides and I dont ever get E COLI! Its so AMAZING!
heh, word
Why again is a bacteria present in mammal intestines (and thus poop) showing up in bags of spinach? I haven’t heard an explanation of how the contamination likely occured at all.
violent strain
Shouldn’t that be virulent?
This guy is not a good writer. His grammar is terrible.
I mean seriously, is this even English?
The fact that people in the New York are getting sick from spinach allegedly grown in California should be telling enough of our unsustainable consumer habits, as well as the inherent problems of our commercialized food industry.
I agree that it is a pretty tortured sentence, but is actually grammatically fine.
“people in the New York” <- huh?
And tortured the sentence is.
So aside from being in the throes of grammar woes, missing the content completely, this highlights how disconnected our food systems are. What is it, a week later and the specifics of this are still being tracked down, and they’re unsure of them still at that.. that is a sad state indeed not to have awareness at the consumer level, let alone health officials and food processors in charge of monitoring and tracking be so vague. I’m sure the people involved are doing their very best to gather all information on this, but, it begs the question about how backwards our food distribution is.
As for theories of getting the e coli onto the spinach, during an NPR interview I heard today that it could be from wild animals that come into the field, though I found that rather implausible, as I thought e coli was from cattle—though i’m not sure about that. here is from another site, ways that e coli can get onto veges:
“The most common route is probably by water. Irrigation water can be contaminated. The contaminated water can be sprayed onto crops or fields are sometimes flooded either by natural methods (too much rain) or by purposeful irrigation methods or even accidentally. Uptake of contaminated water by a plant is also possible with some produce during the growing time or immediately after harvest (during processing). Improperly processed animal based fertilizer (manure) that is applied to a crop can also spread contaminants to produce.”
“people in the New York” <- huh?
oh, right (maybe it should be capitalized the like The Hague?)
As for theories of getting the e coli onto the spinach, during an NPR interview I heard today that it could be from wild animals that come into the field, though I found that rather implausible, as I thought e coli was from cattle
Nearly all (or all, I forget) mammals carry some strain of e coli.
None of the answers given sound plausible to me. Blame the terrorists.
ELF, Sis?
I said the terrorists sarc.
you knwo
ALF?
evildoers
Actually, I bet some disgruntled employee shit in the processing equipment.
I can still say shit right?
Fuck no. That’s an evildoers word.
I hate your freedom
Don’t hate Sarcasm because he’s beautiful.
This is exactly why I don’t eat things that are green.
If it’s not in an individually wrapped single serving hermetically sealed package… how can you expect me to trust it?
Actually, the spinach in question was hermetically sealed in plastic packaging.
It seems pretty fucking obvious what happened: animal fertilizer or, even worse, night soil.
There’s a totally sweet restaurant I go to here that buys their produce from local growers. The spinach with foie gras I had last night was awesome. The foie gras was in tiny bits though, which made me feel better about it.
by animal fertilizer you mean using fecal matter as fertilizer, right?
I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more outbreaks if animal fertilizer is used this extensively..
Check this shit out (no pun intended).
I used to date a girl whose uncle lived in Fresno where he worked for a chemical company. I don’t remember exactly what his company produced, but his job was to sell waste heavy metals from their production to fertilizer manufacturers.
Y’see, the USDA has a certain allowable threshold for heavy metals in commercial fertilizer, which presumably is in there as a naturally occuring component. So they established some guideline as to how much is an acceptable level.
The benefit to the chemical company is that by selling these waste materials, they don’t have to dispose of them. The benefit to the fertilizer companies is that the heavy metals allow them to put less actual fertilizer in their packaged product, because fertilizer is sold by weight.
Agribusiness is fucking rad.
Yummie.
can agribusiness drive small farmers out of business if consumers don’t let them? I’m a small farmer and it is hard to even break even selling local vegetables. Local farmers do, as a rule, care a lot more about feeding people than agribiz can. After all, we eat the stuff ourselves, and are neighbors with our customers. We can usually afford to take the time to go in and use the bathroom, which is more than you can as a picker for a big outfit. and yes, disgruntled employees do. Manure is healthy and proper fertilizer for plants if it has been composted through a vibrant process of bacterial action. But Shogo’s ex-girls uncle is right, the stuff that gets pawned off on the earth (I mean soil, not planet) is pretty scary these days. Human waste is by far the most dangerous for the soil and water because of all the drugs we take that don’t break down (Lipitor et al ad naus.)we eat what we are, eh?