BellaOnline Forums Food and Wine Low Carb Spinach and E Coli

As stated above, thoroughly washing spinach will help to remove the e. coli, although heat is required to kill it. However, to say that you are never going to eat raw spinach again is a bit foolish. Spinach just happened to be the culprit of the latest issue... any raw produce is a potential source of e. coli contamination. I, for one, plan to continue eating my raw fruits and veggies. A person is far more likely to die from a life time of eating processed junk food than from e. coli on the produce :-)

E.Coli is a nasty bug to get. Until this is more contained, I think we are all safe to not eat any spinach for now. I feel for the spinach farms of our country - this will be a tough one to recoop from. Having taking care of kids with the E.Coli illness the news is talking about (called hemolytic uremic syndrome), it really is as difficult to treat as the news is reporting. Some of the sickest folks I've seen, especially kids, have been HUS patients.

So, I post this just to help keep everyone safe. This is one time the news is not exaggerating.

Best,

Just to be clear, the boy who died, died back in September, from the "old outbreak". That was related to that one Salinas County outbreak which is over with.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-05-spinach-outbreak_x.htm?csp=34

Again I personally think eating no spinach from anywhere in the world does not make sense, when Salinas County is known for being bad for *all* food it makes. Why would you eat fresh non-spinach from Salinas County, when that is also probably contaminated? Why would you avoid Spinach from Equador, just because it's "green"? When there was the beef scare, I don't imagine people stopped eating "any brown food" because it was brown <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Sure, avoid Salinas County food. I am all for that. But don't stop eating Spinach from other locations! It has NOTHING to do with spinach. It has EVERYTHING to do with Salinas County *fertilizing* practices, on EVERYTHING they make there.

There are a total of 3 deaths now. They added a woman who actually died in August. The newscast last night said there was talk of a second recall on ALL spinach--regardless of source. My local stores have signs up indicating they will no longer carry spinach until all sources are cleared.

I've never tried, but is Spinach hard to grow? Can you put it in a container garden? Or is it one of those items that needs special soil/conditions?

also, a LOT of things are made in Salinas, I grew up close to there so I'm familiar with the area. Now I live in Northern CA so most of our produce is still from there of course. I don't see why thier farming practices would be any different from other mass-production farms because they all use pesticides and other [censored] things. It is best to buy organic if you can afford it I think.

There are lots of other interesting greens we can all explore right now - so maybe this spinach thing will introduce us all to new kinds of green, leafy veggies. That could be the silver lining. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I read today that they think the e coli came from the water source multiple farms are using, and buying organic isn't going to help since it's the same water and same soil.

In fact, most of the lettuce currently being recalled is organic from what I read (not that I trust the news 100%)

All the news I've read said that Salinas County is the cause for all spinach issues right now. It wouldn't make any sense that spinach in Canada - which has been fine for decades - would suddenly be unsafe because of evil practices being done in Salinas County.

I was in the store yesterday and *every* single bag of spinach was clearly labelled with where it came from. There were Washington State, Canada, Nevada and others. So you can very easily buy spinach from a location hundreds of miles from Salinas County and be 100% safe. Well, I mean as safe as buying any food that you do not grow yourself. Again with spinach being so healthy it makes no sense to me to stop eating that but to continue eating other vegetables. And I would certainly never stop eating vegetables!

Spinach is REALLY really easy to grow. When we grew it last year, we didn't take care of it at all, and we had way more than we could possibly eat.