Spinach E.Coli outbreak is over, but not forgotten

When you’re walking through the Fresh Produce aisle of a grocery store, you usually don’t wonder about how fresh the produce really is, and what sacrifices had to be made to get fruits and vegetables to your grocery store in prime condition. People tend to forget that all of the produce we consume is not grown and packaged in our own town. Food is shipped all over the world to end up in our local supermarket.

Wikimedia.org

Because of the huge market for fruits and vegetables, they are shipped quickly and over great expanses, meaning that there is a greater chance of tainted produce going unnoticed, and causing problems all over the world. These massive quantities sent out are usually from multiple fields growing the same product. This means if one field is contaminated, it spreads to the other product from other fields that it is mixed with before packaging.

This was the case in the recent E.Coli outbreak caused by infected spinach. While this was a shock to the nation, it is the 20th time that illness has been caused by lettuce or spinach in the United States since 1995. Obviously there is a problem. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) keeps telling companies to start monitoring their produce better, yet they have no strong restrictions, especially compared to the precautions taken for meat and poultry. The largest problem is that there is no centralized organization in charge of produce production. Illness rates have been slowly creeping up, and it’s about time that the government did something to prevent outbreaks like the recent one, from which two people died. It seems as if it was a wake-up call, and the FBI is beginning to investigate what caused this particular E.Coli outbreak, which is a small step towards safer fruits and vegetables.

---