Mother Nature Knows Best

by Rhonda

Greetings-

I’m sure we’ve all heard about the spinach/e.coli issue and I’m guessing that there are people here who are as outraged as I am. As it happens, up until that time, I ate a spinach/baby greens salad everyday. I was an admitted addict who considered my daily salad a treat, rivaled only by my tofu and chocolate addictions. It’s purely by luck that I didn’t eat the salad when the contamination came to light. I had it in my fridge, but went on a soup kick and didn’t eat it for a few days. I don’t watch the news, so when my friend told me about it, the first question I asked was where the problem was occurring. Well, it was right here in the southwest and included the company whose organic spinach product I ate almost religiously. I ended up dumping the carton in my next pot of soup. Naturally, I had to do some research to find out the cause of the contamination. I was extremely annoyed to find out that, yet again, farmers have tampered with nature and this time the results were deadly.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/09/spinach_e_coli.php
Apparently, cows were designed to eat grass and hay. The farmers, who for reasons I can take a pretty good guess at, fed them grain. Because the cows could not digest it efficiently, the bacteria that would normally be destroyed with their stomach acid lived on and were carried to the spinach fields. What’s really sad is that the innocent spinach farmers will lose a huge portion of their livelihood while the cattle farmers will go about thier business as usual.
I don’t understand why we can’t allow nature to do the job and are arrogant enough to think that we can do better. Now, not only have the spinach farmers suffered and lives are lost and ruined, I personally am paranoid about eating the other fresh produce that I enjoy.
When I was growing up, nobody worried about salmonella and e.coli. I ate my burgers so rare they would say, “Ouch”, when I bit into them and loved sopping up egg yolks with my toast. I don’t have a problem with people trying to design a better mousetrap, but could you please leave the food alone?
Today’s affirmation is, (and this is for you livestock farmers), Nature knows better than I do. Say it 10 times and mean it.
Peace - Rhonda