I just got off the phone with the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. They totally deny claims that organic products have not been implicated in this outbreak. "We are not at all able to confirm that claim. It is not accurate."

In fact, CFSAN says the investigation is moving from the packaging level down to the farm/field level because two different packing facilities have been implicated -- yet the source for spinach in both instances was Natural Selection farms.

So how did the O157:H7 get onto Natural Selection's farm? Could it not be organic manure for fertilizer? Naw, that's ridiculous. Manure is only the primary reservior of pathogenic bacteria. Why on earth would we think that manure-based fertilizer might contaminate food growing on the ground?

This investigation is far from over. Moreover, it will never (and cannot ever) definitively determine the source of the contamination. Manure will always be a high-probability suspect, regardless of what conclusions are made.

Alex

"This investigation is far from over. Moreover, it will never (and cannot ever) definitively determine the source of the contamination. Manure will always be a high-probability suspect, regardless of what conclusions are made."

Really?  The FDA has DNA fingerprinting for E. coli that can trace back to the source, so I'm guessing they can track it down reasonably well.  Even if they can't find the contamination source, we can know which products were contaminated, and whether they were organic or conventional spinach, or both.  That won't be hard to do.  And even if manure is involved, that in itself doesn't prove whether it's organic or conventional.  As you well know, many conventional farmers use manure as a fertilizer.

I do have to give you credit for not using this occasion to falsely accuse organics of being the source of this, since we don't know yet.  Especially since Jay Lehr, longtime conventional ag cheerleader, has gone on record falsely claiming that this proves organic ag is unsafe (even though the FDA has not identified the source yet).

Yet the FDA is engaged in total overkill.  Since they have pinpointed the problem to bagged fresh spinach in California, why are they recommending that consumers eat no fresh spinach whatsoever?  

Dave

I'm sure Mr. Avery will post here soon to acknowledge that the tainted spinach has been traced to a conventional (NOT organic) operation.

One great irony about Mr. Avery is that he makes comments on this blog (which he is of course quite welcome to do), yet his own blog allows for no such comments.  Guess he doesn't really want to hear what people think about his opinions...

Dave

Perhaps it is the manure of bad ideas that caused this problem, Alex?  If we would have nuked this spinach with one of Monsanto's products we could get cancer instead of bacterial infections?

Good idea, cheers,

Ron Castle

Cheers.

I'm saddened to report that on Tuesday, a lawsuit was filed in federal court in Ohio directly (and credibly)implicating "Earthbound Farms brand Organic Baby Spinach Salad" as the source of E. coli O157:H7 that sickened three members of a family in Bowling Green, Ohio. The youngest family member has suffered permanent kidney damage and will require lifelong care.

The family's lawyer, who I spoke with, is adamant that the family exclusively ate Earthbound organic salad products and there is NO question that the source was the Earthbound Farms Organic Baby Spinach. The O157:H7 has been positively matched to the overall outbreak strain -- the standard used by the FDA.

So the question now is: how did TWO processing lines at Natural Selections Foods LLC get contaminated? Could it be from poor manure management or organic farming practices? Naw, that just anti-organic spin, right?

Then how do you explain the recent findings of the group at the U of Minnesota that certified organic products were more than 3 times more likely to be contaminated with E. coli than conventional? (They found E. coli in 7% of certified organic produce vs. 2% of conventional, J of Food Protection 69(8):1928-1936, 2006) Hmmmm. Actual science showing greater E. coli risk from organic farming? Naw, must be anti-organic spin, right?

Finally, the claim by Ron Castle above that we fabricated the quote published in 1997 in the Journal of the American Medical Association by the head of the CDC's Foodborne Diseases branch is as absurd and completely false now as it was when the accusation was first made. Dr. Robert V. Tauxe stated"'Organic' means a food is grown in animal manure," and suggested more oversight/regulation of manure use in light of the increase in outbreaks linked to produce (JAMA 277:97-98).

Even Karen Charmen at PR Watch who made that accusation retracted the claim after we pointed out that Dr. Tauxe was quoted a full year prior to us EVER writing about the issue. And doesn't his comment seem awfully prescient at the moment?

I'm sorry for the family in Ohio and all the other families that have suffered in this outbreak.

Alex Avery
Hudson Institute, Center for Global Food Issues
Author of: The Truth About Organic Foods
to be released in late October 2006

Alex

Alex, I've been dairy farmer of 30 years. The picture you are trying to paint, at least what it seems to me, and that is only organic uses cow manure for fertilizer which is not true. But the part that is most deceptive, is your insinuation that conventional farmers do not use cow manure. What do you think conventional farmers do with all that cow manure they produce, dump it in the river? No, they use it to fertilize fields.

he's under the pay of the petrochemical industry. He would prefer that the feedlot operators did dump all of that manure into rivers. That would give the petrochemical industry the opportunity to devise a solution to the resulting degradation of the water, and give the industry more acreage on which farmers would have to spread artificial fertilizers.

It's all very simple, Farmer; it is people like you and I who are mucking everything up.