They Hate Us for Our Antioxidants

The specter of spinach terror is upon us:

This month's outbreak of E. coli on spinach from California left many worried about the safety of our food. Others contemplated terrorism.

"E. coli is a problem wherever it shows up," said Paul Welsh of food360, a Lenexa publishing group focused on the food industry. "You probably wouldn't have even thought terrorism before, but now we have to."

Indeed, that's the subject of the second annual International Symposium on Agroterrorism that starts today at the Westin Crown Center hotel.

News accounts containing rough approximations of the sentence: "While there is technically no evidence that contaminated spinach is directly connected to Islamo-fascists trying to kill us, experts say… " here, here, here and here.

USA Today has a good (and terror-free!) article on the push for greater FDA oversight of Big Spinach. Voluntary safety guidelines may be made mandatory, but given that no one knows what caused the contamination, it's hard to know what practices would have prevented it.

I stare down the threat of catfish terrorism here.