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AGRIBUSINESS SCAPEGOATS ORGANIC SPINACH

Submitted by KAT on Mon, 10/02/2006 - 8:19am.

The bags of spinach that have been linked by DNA testing to the E. coli outbreak contained conventional spinach packaged by Natural Selections Foods and sold under the Dole label. Natural Selections is also the company behind the Earthbound line of organic produce, so there’s been some suspicion that organic farming practices might somehow be the cause of the outbreak.

And some agribusiness "biostitutes" are doing their best to encourage that misconception. They’re perpetuating the notion that organic farms are a likely culprit in the E. coli outbreak because they rely on cow manure instead of chemical fertilizers.

But why is there E. coli in the cow manure in the first place? We may never know how E. coli 0157:H7 found its way into the spinach crop, but there’s no mystery about the origins of this deadly strain of the bacteria: the factory farm cows in whose intestinal tracts this particular kind of E. coli flourishes.

As the Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based progressive farm policy research group, observes:

This agricultural area of California, where this latest contamination crisis originated, produces the majority of the country’s spinach and many other fresh-market vegetables. It is contiguous to many CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) managing thousands of dairy cows each.

E. coli and other potent pathogens are known to migrate onto neighboring farms by contamination of surface water and groundwater and/or by becoming airborne through blowing dust from feedlots or farm fields where manure has been spread.

Yes, it’s possible for E. coli to spread through the use of manure, but the real root of the problem lies with the feedlots.

This fact has been largely ignored by the MSM, with a few exceptions. Nina Planck wrote an op-ed about it for the NY Times, and Marion Nestle, professor of Nutrition Food Studies and Public Health at New York University, and Joan Dye Gussow, Emeritus professor of Nutrition and Education at Teacher's College-Columbia University, discussed this issue with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer the other day. As Nestle pointed out:

E. coli is a normal inhabitant of every animal’s digestive tract, including ours, but this is a special form of E. coli that picked up a toxin from a different form of bacteria called shigella, and it’s a normal inhabitant of the animal intestinal tract if, and only if, animals are fed corn rather than grass, which changes the acidity of their digestive tracts…

…it may have been around forever, but it only started causing problems in the early 1980’s when we started having these big confinement animal facilities…it’s one of these newly emergent pathogenic bacterial species that we have to worry about and in this case it’s a result of the kind of farming practices that we do…

Gussow dubbed the E. coli outbreak a “singularly teachable moment,” and both women agreed that the incident underscored the wisdom of buying local produce and, ideally, pasture-raised meat and dairy, and the folly of relying on one region to provide the nation’s produce. Gussow added that “we absolutely need farm-to-table safety regulations.”

But “the FDA has been an agency under siege,” according to Nestle, “because Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to try to ruin its regulatory capacity.”

Thanks to shoddy reporting and misinformed bloggers, consumers have been given the impression that the source of the contamination could be anything from organic fertilizers to poor hygiene on the part of workers, or even wild animal droppings in the field.

But agribusiness knows the truth, which is presumably why researchers at a University of Nebraska research feedlot are developing an E. coli vaccine that would be given to cattle to reduce the incidence of infection. The research is funded, in part, by the cattle industry.

And so, for that matter, is the MSM. I can’t turn on NPR, or watch PBS, or pick up the NY Times, without being subjected to ads from Cargill or Archer Daniels Midland. Just bear in mind, these are the corporations who are feeding the cows all that corn—and they’re feeding the rest of us what comes out the other end.