E. coli outbreak: A taste of the future

The world has just been given “painful real-life evidence that natural foods are not always better,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Europe’s recent E. coli epidemic—which killed 37 people and made thousands more ill—has been traced to an organic German bean-sprout farm “that shuns modern farming techniques.” The spread of this unusually deadly strain of bacteria could easily have been prevented with a process reviled by natural-food faddists: irradiation. By briefly bathing produce or meat in gamma rays or electron beams, irradiation can “deactivate up to 99.999 percent of E. coli,” salmonella, and other germs, and is utterly harmless to humans. But because of baseless scare propaganda spread by eco-activists, less than 10 percent of the global food supply is irradiated today. For the sake of world health, it’s time we put such “hysterical fears” aside.

For the sake of world health, it’s also time to stop cramming livestock with antibiotics, said Nicholas D. Kristof in The New York Times. In the U.S.—where 325,000 people are hospitalized and 5,000 people die each year because of food-borne illnesses—factory farmers routinely douse cattle, pigs, and other animals with antibiotics, to make them grow faster and not get sick in overcrowded pens. This “cavalier use of low-level antibiotics” creates the perfect breeding ground for deadly, antibiotic-resistant pathogens like the one causing havoc in Europe. Bugs found in animal feces are hard to avoid because our food is “awash with s--t,” said Kent Sepkowitz in Slate.com. When a pig or cow is slaughtered, its intestinal contents “can end up on their prized carcass” and thus, in your dinner. Vegetarians might think they’re immune, but they’re not. Animal excrement makes “marvelous fertilizer,” and is spread on everything from tomatoes to bean sprouts.

You’d think this would be a bad time to let “our food safety guard down,” said The Baltimore Sun. And yet congressional Republicans want to cut $205 million from President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which just last year was given more powers to monitor fresh produce. That cut would make it harder for the FDA to “conduct more frequent inspections domestically and abroad and order recalls of tainted foods,” said The New York Times. So who needs Big Government? You do—if you prefer not to get deathly ill simply by eating a salad or a burger.

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