https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/amid-pandemic-poopy-salads-still-pose-health-threat/
With pandemic stress-eating colliding with holiday feasts last week, many of us may be eyeing some healthy salads in the coming days. But if there's one constant we can rely upon in this year of upheaval—it's the enduring possibility that our leafy greens may be laced with poopy bacteria.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently has three open investigations on Escherichia coli outbreaks—two directly linked to leafy greens and the other involving a bacterial strain that caused an outbreak in 2018 linked to romaine lettuce.
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Poopy Salad Greens Still Plague Public Health
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(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @01:56AM (2 children)
Can we either say shitty for the joke, or faecal for the literalness, or another word?
Why use childish imprecise terms? They jar.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:32PM (1 child)
Um. Why is this flagged flamebait? That was a serious query. Childish terms are off-putting. Use one for a pun, or in another particularly appropriate way, and sure. Otherwise it is like having a dash of horseradish in the ice cream.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @09:24PM
Because whining about the Ars Technica headline is annoyingly dumb? Editors should change it out because of your overly indelicate sensitivities? They're just volunteers d00d.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/amid-pandemic-poopy-salads-still-pose-health-threat/ [arstechnica.com]
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:09AM (5 children)
Hopefully that'll teach a few folks not to eat vegetables. Vegetables are what food eats not food itself.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:31AM (1 child)
Vegetables eat YOU!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:59AM
I guess your right. I was going to ask for you to cite your statement; but I found the info already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Shop_of_Horrors_%28film%29 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 01 2020, @04:25AM (1 child)
Serving vegetables is how you lure herbivores within easy preparation distance of the kitchen.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @06:01AM
Eats shoots and leaves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @06:01AM
Dear god your colon must be nightmare fuel for the Old Ones themselves!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:21AM (4 children)
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/e-coli/symptoms-causes/syc-20372058 [mayoclinic.org]
After a bad experience in a famous "western hotel" in Seoul ("Sir, we have washed the salad in purified water") I always rinse salad greens, even the packaged greens that claim to be triple washed. So far so good.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:12AM (3 children)
What is it with E.Coli in produce in the US? Outside of less-developed countries where it's the norm, e.g. Montezuma's Revenge, I've never experienced this sort of thing in other countries. Is there some failure of regulation or control that causes this?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @09:20AM
USA = Corruption
Simples.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday December 01 2020, @10:21AM
> What is it with E.Coli in produce in the US?
I have never experienced it in the US. Is it more prevalent than other developed nations? Or is this just a media thing.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Booga1 on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:12AM
Two things are common.
First: Irrigation using water contaminated by nearby animal farms. [cnbc.com]
Second: Cheap employers not providing facilities for the workers. [komonews.com]
Although the linked story was talking to a dairy worker, I've heard the same thing about a farm where an E. Coli outbreak happened. Can't find the original, but basically the workers weren't being given bathroom facilities at all, forcing them to take a dump out in the fields they were harvesting.
In most of the cases I hear about, produce gets contaminated, people get sick. Insurance pays out for damages and lost product. The cost of it is all baked into the current business model. Nobody gets punished, working conditions never improve, so we keep seeing it happen over and over again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:23AM (10 children)
I wonder if clean greens are being inoculated by being rinsed in the same water as a small amount of contaminated greens? It seems like the prevalence of contaminated greens exploded around the same time as pre-washed greens became common.
Farmers have been spreading poop on their fields since there were farmers, so it seems the rate of contaminated produce would have remained relatively constant as a percentage of production.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:29AM (9 children)
It's amazing how easy it is to contaminate leafy greens and especially sprouts and how hard it is to clean them. An organic farm near the town I work in figured out that just the remaining manure on worker's boots when entering the grow area for them was the cause of a multi-state outbreak involving a well known sandwich chain.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:37AM (5 children)
You know what else is amazing? How easy it is to grow greens your own self. Even in an apartment. If you still end up with shit contaminated greens, that's a personal issue.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday December 01 2020, @03:07AM (3 children)
Salad?
That's what food eats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @06:03AM (1 child)
Shit. That's what you eat, shiteater.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hartree on Tuesday December 01 2020, @09:49AM
Well, the water that you drink was once dinosaur pee and the food was (at least partly) once shit, so join the club. That yummy honey? Bee vomit.
Even worse, plants recycle dead animals that decay, so even the most scrupulous vegan eats dead rotted animals, they just launder them through bacterial, fungal and or plant metabolism first. So, relax and eat what you think best. In truth it's just as disgusting as what everyone else eats.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 01 2020, @11:56PM
Baiting the hole.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:15AM
Friends of mine used to do that, before it was decriminalized. Landlord got pissy when he noticed the grow lamps, but they gave him a cut and he said he never saw anything.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:31AM (2 children)
That's nothing. Germany outbreak of e-coli on sprouts was caused by contaminated *seeds* from Egypt. The plants were grown with manure and so the seeds of the plants became contaminated too,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ecoli-europe-egypt-idUSTRE75T1N020110630 [reuters.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:45PM (1 child)
It's not possible for food borne illness to happen in Europe, because they are social democracies that have regulations and people who always wash their hands and follow the rules. Contaminated produce only happens in America, because Americans are stupid and don't do what the government tells them.
There, your flawed version of reality has been adjusted so you can again be on-message. You are welcome.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @04:55PM
To be fair, Americans are pretty stupid... uninformed/ignorant/willfully ignorant, poorly educated, taught hero worship rather than their real history, propagandized to death in all media to be patriotic and unquestioning, anti-intellectual, anti-science, prone to belief in conspiracies/religion, allow their "leaders" to pass outrageous laws, under the guise of protecting religion and patriotism, such as the far-right in Texas outlawing teaching of critical thinking in schools because, "it leads to disobedience and questioning authority", etc.
(American here who is disgusted by the trajectory Christian Fascists have been taking this shithole country)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hartree on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:25AM
This is free range grown e-coli expressing organic shigatoxin. Charge a premium for it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:28AM (8 children)
I take my mother - a centenarian - to little local places when I can... or did, before that stupid virus struck. She loves salad, but we cannot go to El Pollo Loco, because either they can't handle lettuce, or they can't figure out how to separate raw and cooked chicken. It's flat-out death-defying. Chick-fil-A seems to have clean salads, but that's about it.
I make her salads at home, now, and all the vegetables get scalded. The only time she's gotten Imodium-level sick is from a cheap 9-inch pumpkin pie from the grocery store last week.
I worked in restaurants in my youth, and still shudder about the number of times you train and watch and explain to workers, then you come back an hour later and they're back trying to kill the customers. It's hard to get food workers (field or kitchen) who are skilled enough in ordinary life skills to trust with a salad. I'm afraid it's not going to get any better, because somebody will have to keep those robots clean, and somebody will have to watch the robot cleaners.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @03:03AM
Just make them eat the food they prep and the problem will die or quit. Ether way it's solved.
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Tuesday December 01 2020, @03:33AM (6 children)
As well as his more famous books, George Orwell wrote a very entertaining and disturbing account of the time he spent working in restaurants. Not just the practices, some of which I hope have changed since then, but also the attitudes, which probably haven't.
Anyway it's called Down and Out in Paris and London [archive.org] and I recommend it.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @06:12AM (4 children)
Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, about the meat industry before all those pesky regulations.
You could tell some people's professions by their physical impairments. The people moving the meat walked in the rafters using chains and rails and they had to duck under roof beams, thus they were hunchbacked. Butchers would often be missing the tips of fingers because their knives were so sharp they would cut little slices off over time. I think the thumb was the most common.
But wait, there's more! Stores would sell hams according to their freshness. The most expensive hams were well cured and even sporting a green tinge from their time aging to perfection. Thank Civilization for modern food inspectors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:08AM (3 children)
Stop you had me at green tinge. The more the better frankly. The US is starting to get a taste of blue cheeses at Trader Joe's and Raplhs (the expensive ones). Look out for Rustique a camembert at Trader Joes. Also good are the aged Goudas. I haven't found a recommendable blue although St Agur is a useful fallback..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @06:39PM (2 children)
TBH, most people can't afford fancy cheese in any significant quantity. That's before you consider the cultural issues surrounding who eats it. You can get a ton of the cheaper stuff for what you get from the more expensive stuff and you generally have to eat a relatively large selection of cheeses before you really start to develop a real appreciation for it. Which is great if you're well off, but for the increasing share of Americans that don't have anything at all to eat, it's not likely. Right now, there's millions of Americans that are doing without food because they lost their jobs and don't have money to get enough. This year, Christmas may not just be lacking in terms of presents, for many, it may also be lacking in terms of just basic nutritional food.
It's all well and good to be concerned that people aren't interested in snooty foods, but it's a fucked up priority with so many about to become homeless and lacking decent nutritionally sound foods.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:41PM (1 child)
Only in the USA is milk left to not-spoil considered a luxury. Almost everywhere else with a dairy industry, cheese is per-calorie inexpensive. Calorie for calorie, as food that doesn't need preparation, it's one of the cheapest foods in most markets in the world.
And by cheese I don't mean processed cheese or rennet-sped or "cheddar" that's hastened, I mean the real things.
The USA has weird dairy protectionism and a "value" gap that lets your poor only afford crap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @01:30PM
You can blame big milk for that, one of the many industries ruined by too much concentration of power.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:37PM
Great recommendation. Orwell's lesser known books are actually gems of insight! Though to a first reading they seem a little plain, it's like adding a fixed 50mm lens to the kit which previously only had 600mm zoom and 14mm fisheye. Grounding, truthful, universal, revealing.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:35AM (2 children)
Gosh, it's almost like all those pesticides and chemical agents were used for a reason, no?
I know they also caused damage elsewhere, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was due to not being able to use chemicals to clean the product because people don't want to buy those with them on.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:37PM (1 child)
This made me smile. When I started growing greens at my father-in-law's house in the suburbs for saengchu, my city slicker wife and brother-in-law complained about the insect holes in the lettuce. I explained that's what vegetables look like when they haven't been soaked in pesticides, a.k.a. it's what real organic produce looks like. Their faces shone with that curious look a person gets when he cannot overcome the cognitive dissonance over which food is, and isn't, good for him.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @04:48PM
I agree with the sentiment, I used to have my own allotment.
Trouble is that the cost of getting something that most people consider lesser in quality is prohibitive.
Organic's fine and I'm not squeamish (hell, go camping, you can't be squeamish eating while camping), but the cost / value is enormously disproportionate.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 01 2020, @02:50PM (2 children)
I didn't know this before, but TFA prompted me to read up on the bacterium and there are many strains; some strains we even need in our gut to be healthy. One we need to be able to produce the blood clotting factor. A small handful can harm you, such as the one that causes Crohn's Disease. Most strains are harmless.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @05:06PM (1 child)
Probiotics... that's what they call the kind ob bugs you want to keep. There's a whole society of creatures living in our guts to keep things... moving smoothly.
Unfortunately when you go to the hospital they put you on antibiotics to stop the diseases that you get... at hospitals. I mentioned Imodium, earlier, which settles the gut without killing-off the beneficial bugs. As we get older, the stomach is in a delicate balance of good vs bad bugs. And hopefully not to belabor the point, something like Imodium can save your mother from a trip to the hospital, and avoid that annoying cycle of pro-/anti-biotics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @06:01PM
Type fast, regret in leisure. That was supposed to say "of bugs." It almost makes sense, that way.
I'm not promoting one product over another There's a new flavor of Pepto-Bismol addressing the issue that includes a well-targeted anti-biotic, and probably a dozen more brands just as good.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday December 01 2020, @03:22PM
We've had the technology to prevent this for over a hundred years, Food Irradiation [wikipedia.org] Using an electron beam or X-rays you can sterilize the food and all but eliminate this risk.
(Score: 3, Funny) by srobert on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:13PM (1 child)
This is all about control folks. So-called scientists issuing directives about washing our vegetables is just the beginning. They're out to take our liberty. Hell No! I'm not washing the lettuce. I'm eating it right out of the bag like God intended. Never give in! They're trying to destroy America with their Godless "science"!
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 01 2020, @11:59PM
If god had intended me to eat lettuce, he would have given me big floppy ears and a cotton tail.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.