New at Reason

David Weigel | September 29, 2006

He's strong to the finish 'cuz he eats his spinach - he's Ronald the Reason man.

Comments

|9.29.06 @ 1:57PM|#

Out local newspaper had an article about a company in the state that produce irradiation equipment. The company invited in the press, took bags of spinach that had been tested and shown to be positive for Ecoli, irradiated the bags, then had the spinach for lunch. So far, no reports of dying executives.

There is more than one way to solve the problem, and the phobias of the general population are preventing some of them from going into service.

|9.29.06 @ 2:19PM|#

While the food supply as a whole is safer today than in the days of smaller local farms and local distribution, factory farming isn't off the hook. As you note, this spinach-based outbreak now looks like it may be the result of one infected worker in one shift.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with one big processing plant supplying a large proportion of the world's fresh spinach, but all the RFID tags in the world (which I seem to recall you opposing in a similar farm-to-consumer tracking application for meat a year or two ago) won't help limit the scope of a recall if the processing itself is done in such huge batches.

As with the increased risk of spreading BSE, for instance, that comes from processing ground beef from ten, twenty or fifty cows in a single batch, potentially spreading an infected cow's tissue in ten or fifty times the number of packages of meat, this incident involving bagged spinach affected far more packages and very likely forced a much wider recall and a more complicated investigation than would have happened if the spinach had been processed in smaller batches and/or from a single source.

Anyway, packaged vegetables appear to be marked with their batch ID already, and the batch ID should point back to the processing plant, warehouses and farms further back in the supply chain.

An EMT rushing a poisoning victim to a hospital can read a printed batch number off a label, not an RFID. After that, manufacturers, distributors and whoever else will use that printed batch number to trace back to figure out what other batches may have been affected, and then back down the tree to build a list of other batches that need to be recalled. RFIDs will only be helpful once the recall is underway, in pulling up which stores and distributors are in posession of the problematic goods. From that point, stores and consumers will again need the old-fashioned printed batch numbers on the boxes and bags in order to carry out the recall.

Matt|9.29.06 @ 2:23PM|#

Per the reflexive contrarian impulse found so often here lately I would have expected the teaser to say that Bailey thinks we should all eat more spinach. Doesn't that just sound libertarian?

|9.29.06 @ 2:37PM|#

"The outbreak has been traced to pre-washed spinach from a packing plant of California produce grower Natural Selection Foods . . ."

Natural Selection! When do the Darwin jokes start?

|9.29.06 @ 2:47PM|#

Great article, Ron. Although it sounds like you could write a book on the subject, you boiled it down nicely.

Paul|9.29.06 @ 3:25PM|#

Slightly off-topic:

This is an interesting statement:

Today if you mention raw milk, many people gasp and utter ridiculous statements like, You can die from drinking raw milk!" But the truth is that there are far more risks from drinking pasteurized milk than unpasteurized milk. Raw milk naturally contains healthy bacteria that inhibit the growth of undesirable and dangerous organisms. Without these friendly bacteria, pasteurized milk is more susceptible to contamination.

Especially after considering this:

A 5-year-old boy from Issaquah was still hospitalized with [E-Coli] Thursday, while an 8-year-old girl from Snohomish County was recovering at home, said state health officials and a spokeswoman for a store that sold the milk.

The unpasteurized milk came from Grace Harbor Farms, a small dairy in Custer, north of Bellingham. It is sold by PCC Natural Markets and Whole Food Markets.

|9.29.06 @ 3:45PM|#

You forgot the "Toot Toot!" at the end of the title.

Ha-guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-guh!

|9.29.06 @ 4:05PM|#

Curses! Foiled again...

Paul|9.29.06 @ 7:40PM|#

It presents a compelling case against the free market that advocates need to address, even if they disagree.

Headline:

Gravity Cause of Many Falls: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.

I'm sorry, it's Friday. I just couldn't stop myself.

|9.29.06 @ 9:00PM|#

I mean I really enjoyed "They Live" even though it ultimately was little more than an anti-capitalist screed featuring Rowdy Roddy Piper.

I always thought it was more anti-conformist/anti- thoughtless consumerist screed/adventure. But it sure is fun!

|9.30.06 @ 12:22PM|#

"Being compelling and being _convincing_ are two different things."

Indeed.

My point was that it is inaccurate to claim it is not compelling.

"a) Many of the most frightening details from the book were made up from whole cloth."

Duh. It is a novel (aka "fiction")

Thomas Paine's Goiter|10.1.06 @ 1:40AM|#

Today if you mention raw milk, many people gasp and utter ridiculous statements like, You can die from drinking raw milk!" But the truth is that there are far more risks from drinking pasteurized milk than unpasteurized milk. Raw milk naturally contains healthy bacteria that inhibit the growth of undesirable and dangerous organisms. Without these friendly bacteria, pasteurized milk is more susceptible to contamination.

I drank raw milk for the first 18 years of my life. No harm done.

(dairy farms = prisons without walls

Amen.

Mark Bahner|10.1.06 @ 10:22PM|#

Why not just throw the spinach in your home nuclear reactor?

What, you don't have a home nuclear reactor? But they promised (at the New York World's Fair)!

|10.2.06 @ 12:36PM|#

Mark B.

I have a resource bet for you.

I am thinking of a natural resource that we will run out of... it is ubiquitous, currently powers most of the activity on Earth...despite improvements in technology, we will run out of it.

Can you guess the resource?
Hint: it is not oil, but there is an important connection.

Mark Bahner|10.2.06 @ 9:08PM|#

"I am thinking of a natural resource that we will run out of... it is ubiquitous, currently powers most of the activity on Earth...despite improvements in technology, we will run out of it."

I was watching...the Discovery Channel, I think...and the show said the earth's magnetic field would collapse some day. Completely zilch. Nada. That would be a major bummer.

It doesn't "power most of the activity on Earth"...but it definitely is a good thing to keep the radiation zombies away.

Other than that, there's nothing I can think of that will "run out."