Not to mention that even if manure leached into the watershed, maybe we should be asking what conditions caused the manure to have higher than normal/safe levels of E. coli. Organic vegetable production couldn't be seen as a problem if we treated the animals with the necessary care.

On Science Friday with Ira Plato on PBS they discussed this issue and briefly touched on the "feeding cows hay for several days before slaughter removes dangerous ecoli" and the comment was "it didn't pan out", but nothing in depth.  

In the huge mega cities of the third world they are surround with slums and outside that small farms and where do the fresh vegtables come from----not from Salinas valley-----and guess where the sewage from all that humanity's sewage goes-----right into the farm fields.  But Golly!! they haven't had any outbreak of this dangerous ecoli which indicated we have something they don't-------they do have grass or even garbage fed cows, they use the milk, they use human fertilizer for the veggies.  

Our problem:  
Maybe we have damaged our immune system with mercury, arsenic, toxic metals and what all else who knows.  
Maybe it's the fluoride in the water that's been there for over two decades now; long enough for our children to be having aches in their joints, the early symptoms of skeltal fluorosis.  
Maybe they were using some kind of water that is not filtered; organic standards have morphed into a franken food now that the government has set its own standards which have nothing to do with real organic.  

Chances are the truth will be long in coming and we'll get the business-friendly interpretation.

I recently finished reading Jane Goodall's 2005 book Harvest for Hope - A Guide for Mindful Eating. To me this is another big piece of the puzzle that Gore presented in An Inconvenient Truth. Here's her intro: "This book is dedicated to the thousands of small farmers who are valiently struggling to survive, especially those who have embraced organic practices; to those who stand up to speak out against the bullying tactics of agribusiness; to the men and women who work tirelessly to reintroduce the citizens of the fast food nations to real, wholesome food.... And to the billions of farm animals held in torment around the world." This is such an amazing book that I bought 15 copies to send to friends. It presents disturbing facts, but also HOPE, and what we can do. Please read it!

We have nothing to fear. Every year millions of Americans die from the diseases caused by and exacerbated by junk food (hydrogenated oils, dyes, preservatives, refined sugar, pesticides, etc.) -- but even those people live to be 80 years old. Eating the food that Tom and I advocate might not extend your life, but we are convinced that they will drastically reduce your chances of suffering from these "chronic diseases", and guarantee you will enjoy your food more. I see nothing to worry about, even if every few years "manure-based fertilizer" (which Tom and I advocate) or any other aspect of natural foods takes down some old person (the only person to die so far, predictably, was over 70 years old).

The benefits of eating these foods in terms of (perhaps) extending lives or (most certainly) improving life quality certainly more than out-weighs 0.1 old people dying each year (one every decade?). I thus reject Tom's urgent plea to avoid this e. coli risk by taking the special pains to switch from Mega Spinach to Local Spinach: there's nothing to worry about to begin with, so I see no reason to change.

I agree with Tom's advocacy of hippie-farm-to-table greens; I've eaten Tom's greens at his table that he picked that morning at his hippie farm. Is there a practical way to get such greens to my table in subburban Detroit every day of the year? No. Ten years ago getting any real greens to my table was a chore; now I can get real greens at WalMart. This means that we natural food freaks are winning. One baby step remains, and that is to get the people buying real greens now at WalMart to value hippie greens... when they can get them. But on a daily basis, working for Mr. Charlie, cleaning your house, regulating your kids, fixing your lawn sprinkler, ferrying your kid to and from soccer... and now you want me to bypass WalMart for my greens, and... what? Wait until Saturday morning during a 4-hour window and drive to the single location of my local farmer's market?

More likely, I reckon, is that places like WalMart will start contracting with local hippies for special, just-picked, local foods, once we get "the people" to take that one extra baby step.

Bart is right: I believe that the E. coli outbreak from Salinas Valley spinach can be traced back to agricultural runoff from feedlots where grain-fed cattle are "finished."

We need to be clear about what kind of E. coli we are talking about, because there are many, some of which live happily in human and bovine guts all our lives without causing us a single unhappy thought.

The one to watch out for is E. coli 0157:H7. This type of E. coli only occurs in the guts of cows who have been fed grain. Strictly pasture-fed animals never have it.

So: grain-fed cattle operations near water supplies which irrigate spinach. That's your culprit. As much as Monsanto would like you to believe that organic food is dangerous, the truth is that large-scale industrial farming is what's dangerous: to the environment as well as to human health.

(Posting from Central Valley, California, and eating Blue Heron Farms organic spinach from the Berkeley farmers' market)