Never mind how many people got sick from bagged spinach — how many of you are sick of the spinach outbreak? But before you move on to the raw-milk controversy, take a minute to read what spinach farmers themselves are saying.
The most widely blogged right now is Andy Griffin of Mariquita Farms, writing in the LadyBug newsletter. Andy helped start the whole baby-lettuce craze back in the day, and in 1996 he sold his company, Riverside Farms, to the company that became Natural Selections. Yup, the one with the FDA inspectors trampling its spinach fields right now and peering around its processing plant.
Andy’s rant is so wonderfully pissed off — at the FDA for not distinguishing between bagged and bunched spinach, at consumers who choose chlorine-soaked, prewashed convenience — that I can’t possibly do it justice. (I’ll never look at a “baby carrot” the same way again.) Read it.
Andy is also quoted in a Santa Cruz Sentinel article about how Watsonville area residents are defiantly continuing to buy spinach from a local stand.
Paul “Pablito” Underhill, writing in the Terra Firma Farms’ CSA newsletter, is also less than impressed with the FDA and the media coverage of the outbreak. He has a good rant about the difference between manure and compost.
And in an article on the ANG newspapers’ site InsideBayArea, several small Bay Area farmers say they’re are unfazed by the spinach debacle, and are briskly selling the leafy greens. Michael Pollan is quoted as recycling his “national kitchen sink” complaint about the dangers of centralized processing; he also echoes Nina Planck’s point about this strain of E. coli being the child of bad cattle practices.
At the Berkeley farmers market today, there was plenty of spinach, and plenty of takers. Happy Boy Farms, which has wonderful salad mixes (some with edible flowers) and spinach, had posted a reassuring letter about its farm practices next to its loose spinach (see photo above): they don’t use manure in their compost, and all the lettuces are harvested by hand and sold within 24 hours of picking.
I filled a bag with spinach, and asked the woman at the scales how sales were.
“Great!” she said. “Better than usual, actually. I think people get that we’re different.”
Photo by the Potato Non Grata.
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