Unnatural Selection, Part I

I must admit, I find it a bit ironic that the grower / processor responsible for the contaminated spinach is named Natural Selection.  Not to make light of children, the elderly and the immuno-compromised dying, but you couldn't create a more apropos name if you were writing this as fiction. 

With the weekend's "precautionary" recall of lettuce and beef, this whole situation seems almost fictional.  Or should I say farcical?  Obviously, multiple recalls involving different types of food products seem to indicate a systemic issue rather than isolated instances of bad practices.  However, we must remember that adherence to current guidelines is voluntary.  Despite multiple produce recalls in the near past.  And several deaths. 

The FDA guidelines — known as "good agricultural practices" — include irrigating with clean water, providing toilet facilities for pickers, making sure animals don't contaminate produce in packing sheds, properly washing fresh produce and maintaining correct temperatures during shipping. Since 2004, the FDA has been urging closer adherence to these practices among California growers of leafy greens, including spinach.

OK, I understand clean-water irrigation (and personally, I'm voting for this as the contaminating agent in the current scare), pest control, proper washing and temperature control.  However, the lack of toilet facilities had never before occurred to me. 

You have workers in the fields?  Well then, of course, there must be Port-A-Potties around.  What do you mean, "there aren't any?"  Then where do the workers...uhh, do their business?  Wait.  Don't tell me.  I don't want to know.

I might never eat a salad ever again.

OK, that might be going a bit overboard.  Honestly, Escherichia coli is everywhere.  Unless you are elderly, a child or immuno-compromised, you're probably not going to be drastically affected by E. coli poisoning.  Also, our friendly neighborhood E. coli can be killed by simple boiling, so well-cooked greens should be fine.  Not tasty, but fine.

If you're still concerned about bacteria living on your lettuce, you can super-wash your veggies at home -- Brandy and I spray white vinegar on all our fruits and vegetables before rinsing them, and we'll be adding the peroxide step now -- which should eliminate most bacterial guests.  If you've got some extra cash, you could always try ozonated water (and be sure to tell us how it works because we're curious).

Which brings us to the socioeconomic rant (yes, it did take an awful long time to get here, didn't it?).  The gist of my feelings on the current state of affairs?

Everything has a price, and there are always trade-offs.

This holds true from the daily purchases made by each individual to policy decisions made for the entire country.  Dole spinach or Earthbound Farms organic spinach (that would be a lose / lose decision)?  Domestic car or foreign car (or foreign car made domestically)?  Subsidies going to agro-industrial giants or free trade undermining the ability of domestic farms to compete?

To take the spinach analogy a little further while referencing the first post, farms could insure the cleanliness of their spinach by investing in different growing or harvesting methods, be they hydroponics or better monitoring of water and soil.  But that would cost money, and the producer could only raise prices so much before the public would stop buying their spinach.  And buying imported spinach doesn't negate the possibility of contamination.  How many other countries have cleaner farms than the U.S., do you think? 

Let's move to a different product to further illustrate the point.  It is possible for most wineries to make a 95-point wine on an almost yearly basis.  However, that would mean paying obsessive attention to the fruit in the vineyard, discarding more of the borderline fruit that usually makes it into the wine, using only the finest oak barrels on the best lots of juice, and selling only the best of the resulting wine.  And each of those bottles would cost about $500.

Obviously, that is the sort of thing that Screaming Eagle would have you believe they do.

Automakers could make cars last much longer than they do now.  However, it's not just planned obsolescence that's keeping our cars from being built like tanks.  While the complex web of corporate ethics, supply, demand, and market saturation might imply some degree of quality manipulation, the fact remains that better quality products generally cost more money.

Part II (dealing with the social aspect of these economics) soon, seeing as how this is already way long.