Yanking spinach off of grocery store shelves has served to anger growers, and suggestions for solutions to the problem range from labeling spinach in the same manner that wine is labeled, with very specific origin information, to “more sanitary” mechanical harvesters. I’m not sure what exactly that means, but I think it means that they will use more liquid sanitizers on the equipment. Spray it with more chemicals, yes, that will fix it!

The outbreak has been traced to Natural Selection Foods, which processes spinach for over 30 brands of bagged salad, including Dole. A bag of Dole spinach was found in a New Mexico victim’s refrigerator, which tested positive for the E. Coli O157:H7, the strain responsible for the wave of sickness sweeping the country.

What should you do if you think you’ve eaten some tainted spinach? According to the CDC, nothing. At least at first. The incubation period for E. Coli is anywhere from 3-12 days. If you do develop diarrhea, especially bloody diarrhea, see your doctor and request that a stool sample be tested for the bacteria. Do not take anti-diarrhea medication such as Imodium, and do not take antibiotics either.

E. Coli can cause hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can lead to kidney failure. According the CDC’s data, about 8% of those who develop hemolytic uremic syndrome end up with other complications, including high blood pressure, paralysis, and blindness. So this is pretty serious stuff, folks.

To protect yourself, eat local! I know the allure of bagged salad’s convenience, but unfortunately, in this case, that ease of use could cost you; your good health or even your life could be the price. Try to buy spinach that is locally grown, and wash it well if you plan to eat it raw. E. Coli is killed at 160°F, and since water boils at 212°, blanching spinach for a few minutes in boiling water will kill it.

I’ll be watching with great interest what steps the FDA and mega-growers will take to prevent future outbreaks. In the meantime, buyer beware!

Halweil is a senior researcher with Worldwatch Institute, and it shows in the book, which reads more like a technical paper being presented at a scholarly conference than straight non-fiction. The constant annotations about sources are annoying, but easily ignored if you’re not interested. I was interested and from time to time, found myself flipping back and forth from the text to the bibliography out of mild curiosity.

He makes a heck of a case for seeking out food that is produced in your local area; I do highly recommend the book for anyone interested in global supply chains or how your food gets from the farmer to your table. It is a rather circuitous journey; if, for example, a farmer growing lettuce in Nebraska wants to sell that lettuce to his local Wal-Mart, (world’s largest seller of groceries, according to Halweil) that lettuce must first be shipped to a distribution center in Colorado for “quality inspections” and then shipped back to Nebraska. Bewildering, isn’t it? The waste of fuel, time and money to ship the lettuce around a significant portion of the United States, just to sell it a few miles down the road from where it was grown.

He also spends quite a bit of time talking about bio-engineered food, how the push for easily crated and shipped food has made endangered species of certain kinds of tomatoes and corn, just to name two. Personally, I’ve never thought too much about food production; at least, I didn’t until I started writing for Growers & Grocers. Food came from the grocery store, plain and simple. I no longer see it that way. There are many references in the book to the few large producers of food, Con-Agra, Monsanto, ADM, and I realized that the seemingly dizzying array of food at the local mega-mart is in fact manufactured entirely by just a few really large companies, which fool us all into thinking that we have such a wide assortment of choices when we’re shopping for food.

The book isn’t all doom and gloom; Halweil devotes significant portions of the book to people who are working hard all over the world to keep local food, well, local. He also offers a list of suggestions at the end of the book for readers who are interested in eating local; what to do, where to go, questions to ask at your favorite restaurant and grocery store.

I read really fast, always have. This book took me a little over 2 hours to read cover to cover, and gave me so much to think about that my brand new copy looks like it has been around for several years - I highlighted, underlined, turned pages down and marked pages with sticky-note flags to return to for future reference. So that second copy that is waiting for me at the store at home in Ohio will probably come home with me as well, so that I have a “nice” copy to share with friends. And believe me, I will be trying to get like-minded friends to read this book; it has changed the way that I think about making food purchases.

Pasture Perfect, by Jo Robinson, could easily be categorized as an infomercial about grass-fed everything; beef, lamb, poultry, even bison. But that easy categorization would be an oversimplification. Her detailed description, in chapter 3 (Down on the Pharm), of a typical factory chicken farm actually made me nauseous. I never want to eat factory-raised chicken again.

I expected the book to be a series of plugs for her website, eatwild.com, but she avoided mentioning the website until the last chapter of text, which is about where to buy grass-fed meats and dairy. The final six chapters are filled with recipes, many of which are from many of the farms that the author visited during her research.

The terrifying things that I learned from this book are really too numerous to mention; but here’s one ridiculous thing; did you know that a study was done to find out if feeding cattle STALE BUBBLE GUM would be a good thing? Turns out that bubble gum factories give away stale gum by the truckload; a cheap and easy way to feed the cattle, right? Yuck.

In the preface, she tells a story about giving a speech for about 500 cattle ranchers in 1999. She had written a precursor to the book that was for sale after the speech; when she announced that fact during the question & answer session, about half of her audience left to begin lining up to purchase the book. People become evangelical about grass-fed after one taste; ranchers like it because it means that they can make more money, and it is more environmentally responsible.

The problem seems to me to be that people who are concerned about things like this will read this book and books like it; those who really NEED to be informed about these topics won’t pick it up, which is really a shame.

I grew up in rural Ohio, so farms are nothing new to me. When people tell me about “Fresh Country Air” as if it were something sacred, all I can think of are the horse barns, and sheep pens of the county fair, which never ever smelled fresh to me. This farm, however, was vastly different than any I’ve ever been on. It didn’t stink, for one thing. And another difference, as I said, was that there is no barn. The homestead sits at the top of a hill; the land was once a strip mine, and the views from the farm are amazing.

It is owned and operated by Max and Mary Van Buren. They had owned a conventinal dairy farm, but decided to go organic. When I asked Max Van Buren about the lack of a barn, he smiled, and said, “I got tired of shoveling manure.” But he hastened to add that the Highland cattle that they breed are happiest in cold weather, and have no need of a barn. The breed is shaggy, horned, fiercely protective of their young, and loud.

I had the opportunity to question both of the Van Burens about their operations, and the biggest question on my mind was: How do they make sure that the cattle get enough to eat, enough of the right things, if the farm is all organic? They don’t fertilize the fields where the cattle graze, they don’t supplement the cattle’s diet with any form of artificial supplements; and Ohio’s winters are not known for being mild. How do they feed the cattle in winter? And what does “free range” mean?

I found both of the Van Burens to be very knowledgeable about their subject matter, and evangelical about the methods that they use. “Free range” means that the cattle are welcome to roam over the entire farm. There are fences, of course, to keep the cattle from straying off of the Van Buren’s land. But within the boundaries of the property are several different pastures and different pasture types. The Van Burens seed the grazing pastures every spring with red and white clover. Some of the farm is heavily wooded; we spent about half an hour standing in the woods amongst the cows listening to Max lecture. The cows dislike the heat and seek shade on sunny days, and while we couldn’t have asked for nicer weather on the day we visited, the highland cows seemed to think it was hot, seeking shade in the woods.

In the winter, they feed the cows organic hay, but never grain. Grain fed beef, according to the Van Burens, has none of the same benefits of their grass fed cattle, which include omega 3 fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid, and much lower fat.

Like many other things that the USDA does not regulate, “grass fed” labels on beef in your local mega-mart could mean almost anything. The same with “free range”. Free range chicken could mean only that the cages they’re kept in are larger than normal; free range beef could mean that there’s a window in the barn. This, then, is why KNOWING your producer is of such vital importance. I can tell you that the beef that I brought home from the farm is without a doubt grass fed, organic, and free range, because I saw the operation.

I quit eating red meat and pork in 1992 because I don’t like pork chops, steaks, hamburgers and most other cuts of both beef and pork. I will occasionally spear a bite of my husband’s steak off of his plate at a restaurant to remind myself that no, I really don’t like it. After visiting Van Buren’s farm, I think that maybe I don’t like the dyes and pesticides and chemicals that come along with your typical package of ground chuck at the mega-mart, rather than the actual taste of beef.

While you are welcome to roam over the entire farm on the visitation day, the smell of cooking food will draw you back to the house. With their own ground beef, they made sloppy joes that smelled too good to turn down. I ate two. That’s probably the most beef I’ve eaten in 10 years or more. They were wonderful.

After visiting with the Van Burens, I can’t say that I will be returning to the ranks of happy beef eaters anytime soon, but I did bring home more than 10 pound of various cuts of meat to experiment with. And as I continue to research articles for Growers and Grocers, I become more and more convinced to avoid my local mega-mart and instead patronize local growers when and were I can. The superiority of the products is without a doubt, worth the time and effort to seek them out.

A funny thing has happened on the way to eating healthier over much of 2006. Organics have positively exploded on grocery store shelves, making well-informed consumer decisions more difficult than ever. A while back, I wrote about the USDA’s organic standards, and how skeptical I am of anything with that USDA: Organic sticker on it. Wal-Mart has entered the organic market, and their ad about the organics available at Wal-Mart is in super-heavy rotation in my local television market. And the latest news is that Kellogg’s has entered into the game, making an organic version of Raisin-Bran ®, Rice Krispies ®, Frosted Mini-Wheats ® and Toasted Harvest Wheats ® crackers.

As with any story, there are two sides. On the one hand, anytime the organic market expands, theoretically, more people will pick the organics off of the grocery store shelves to take home. Any time more people are eating foods that contain fewer pesticides and fewer fertilizers, that’s a great thing. When more and more people choose organic, that allows the market to expand further, which guarantees that there will be more organic choices for all consumers.

On the other hand, as I’ve mentioned previously, the enforcement of organic standards is haphazard at best. So can you trust that organic label? My own personal answer is “not really.” And I’m too much of a skeptic to think that anything other than the almighty dollar is behind Kellogg’s move into the organics market. Kellogg’s own website says the following about price points for the new organics, “the organic ingredients we use are more expensive, making the cereals more costly to produce.”

To me, the interesting part of Kellogg’s Organics website are the links to several organic trade groups. I’ve spent some considerable time searching and am surprised to report that there does not seem to be a huge amount of money flowing back and forth between Kellogg’s and these industry groups; there seem to be no board members who work directly for Kelloggs. Among the links you’ll find on Kelloggs.com: The Organic Trade Association, The Organic Center, All Organic Links, and Organic.org I wonder how Kellogg’s negotiates such things, and if money does indeed change hands, or if hundreds of lawyers are involved.

I don’t eat cold cereals for breakfast, so asking if I plan to begin purchasing these instead of my “usual” breakfast cereal is a bit of a moot point. For me, the caloric value is too high for most servings of cereal (usually 1/4 to 3/4 of a cup for a serving of your typical cold cereal) to be worth it. And I’m hungry by 10 AM if I have a bowl of cereal instead of some protein. While I’m pleased that the organic market is expanding, I’m very wary of that expansion. And if price is the overriding factor in your grocery store decision making process, then I suspect that you won’t be picking up Kellogg’s Organics either.

Fair Trade is an innovative, market-based approach to sustainable development. Fair Trade helps family farmers in developing countries to gain direct access to international markets, as well as to develop the business capacity necessary to compete in the global marketplace. By learning how to market their own harvests, Fair Trade farmers are able to bootstrap their own businesses and receive a fair price for their products. This leads to higher family living standards, thriving communities and more sustainable farming practices. Fair Trade empowers farming families to take care of themselves - without developing dependency on foreign aid.

Fair trade means that coffee growers are paid $1.26 per pound. Considering that retail coffee prices are much higher than that, how fair is it? Turns out that without fair trade coffee producers can be paid less than fifty cents per pound by middlemen and exporters that strive to keep retail prices low.

While I knew that traditional coffee growers were in tropical areas, I didn’t know that the coffee plants are easily killed by frost, so that limits the growing areas to places where frost doesn’t happen. Fair trade growers gather in co-operatives to better leverage their resources in Latin America, Africa, and Indonesia and the fair trade movement has expanded to include chocolate, tea, sugar and rice growers as well.

Find Fair Trade Coffee at this link, which lists importers in the US and Canada and also includes tea and cocoa. Most, but not all, fair trade growers are also organic, which means to me that it is a value worth paying for.

Testing is voluntary, and slaughterhouses and producers have big incentives to send samples for testing from cows that are not likely to turn up positive. Because BSE is such a high-profile disease, slaughterhouses that get positive results could be shut down, and the bad publicity surrounding a positive result would send tremors through the entire beef industry, which has powerful lobbyist connections in Washington.

Testing is expensive; until the cuts were made in the number of tests, it cost US taxpayers about a million dollars a week to pay for testing approximately 1,000 cows. 35 million cows are slaughtered annually for food consumption in the United States, making that 1000 a week figure about 1%. The new watered down testing will be for 100 cows a week. While I think it is a good thing to save taxpayer money, I don’t think that it is safe in this instance.

US exporters of beef have been the biggest losers in the whole mad cow debacle. Japan, South Korea, and more than 48 other countries have banned US beef imports, citing concerns over BSE. Japanese consumers demand that every slaughtered animal be tested; Americans should too. Companies are not allowed to perform their own tests; the USDA conducts all testing. Slaughterhouses are paid $100 for each sample they send in for testing, and the government argues that if universal testing were allowed, US consumers might think untested beef wasn’t safe. Wow, John and Jane Q. Public, isn’t that a ringing endorsement of what your government thinks of your intelligence level?

In a free market economy, consumers make decisions based on many different factors, but price is always a driving force. I would pay more for tested beef for the peace of mind that comes with knowing that I’m not going to contract the human form of BSE.

Just in case you need a primer on BSE, here’s the quick reference guide. BSE causes holes in the brain of cattle, which breaks down various systems until death follows. Humans who eat diseased tissue from cattle may develop the human form of BSE known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) or new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD). Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in normal form usually occurs in older adults through a tendency of the brain to change spontaneously for no apparent reason. New variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob occurs in younger people and has slightly different symptoms; such as psychiatric episodes or sensory deprivation, and abnormalities in the nervous system. These abnormalities include ataxia (failure of muscle control) within weeks or months, dementia (loss of memory and confusion) and eventually result in death, although comfortingly, that doesn’t happen until years later.

The US has had one verifiable case of nvCJD, in a Florida man who was born and raised in England. There is no cure.

Suggestions for avoiding BSE are simple. Avoid eating the spinal cord or brains of infected cattle. Studies seem to imply that muscle meat (which is what ground beef, pot roasts, and steaks are made of) do not transmit the prions that cause nvCJD or vCJD. Or avoid beef all together, until testing standards are revised to protect against this disease.

Prohibition hit the area hard, however, and the re-birth of winemaking in Ohio didn’t pick up until the mid 1960s. Today there are five viticultural appellations for the state, and 75 wineries registered with the Ohio Wine Producers Association.

I’d heard that a winery had opened in Mahoning County, which is someplace that is better known for a crazy congressman and a very shady past than wine production. I wanted to check this out for myself, but my expectations were low.

Rural Mahoning County isn’t very well marked, and we had left the address of the winery at home. Which is a recipe for disaster. For those of you who are city dwellers and don’t get out on country roads too often, there’s no wi-fi or much of a mobile signal out there. But we eventually found it, and from the instant we walked in the door, we were welcomed like family.

Mastropietro Winery is a small operation, as vineyards go, run by the Mastropietro family. They made their first batch of wine as amateur winemakers with 7 crates of grapes, and eventually had a semi-truckload of grapes delivered to make wine, before becoming professional winemakers. Currently, they are pressing and bottling all wines that bear their label on site, although their vineyards are not yet producing all of the grapes.

They bottle eleven different wines. For just $3 total, you can sample all eleven types. I’m not a wine expert, by a long shot. But I know what I like, and I liked most of what I tasted. They purchase grapes from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and New York, to produce a diverse group of wines, from a dry Chardonnay to a very sweet red, called Dolce Rosso. My husband and I rarely agree on a particular bottle or vintage; if he likes it, I don’t, and vice versa. But we found 4 in common that we both liked, two of them well enough to take home bottles. The Chardonnay, which is buttery, with wonderful fruit and honey flavors, paired well with both a chicken sandwich and fresh blueberries purchased that day from a roadside stand. We also purchased a bottle of Sangiovese, which has a delightful cherry nose and will be served at a dinner party later this summer.

Our hosts were very gracious, showing us their entire operation, from pressing to bottling. Dan is the winemaker, and Marianne is the master gardener, tending to all 3 acres of vines by hand. Of all the things to grow, wine grapes might be the best! Marianne told us that she didn’t realize when they first began operations how much work it would be to tend to 3 acres of vines by hand, but the small vines are growing beautifully and they expect to have a large enough harvest to make wine from their own grapes next summer.

Dan showed us the operations side, where the huge vats of wine age, and the family gathers to bottle the wines. We ended up spending more than two hours at the winery, and intend to return whenever we’re in the area. Our expectations were exceeded at every turn; being able to speak with the winemakers as we sampled each varietal made a huge difference in the experience. I look forward to more great things from the Mastropietro family.

But how does the United States government enforce those standards? They have 56 certifying agents for the whole country; in my home state of Ohio, which covers 40,948 square miles, there are TWO certifying agents. (There are also 40 agents overseas) Enforcement, therefore, can’t be anything but haphazard at best and terrifyingly sloppy at worst. While the USDA’s web site says that they fine $10,000 for each violation of the organic labeling standards, how can they possibly keep up with every organic producer? The simple answer is that they can’t.

I was very surprised to learn that conventionally produced fruits and vegetables retain pesticides even after washing and cooking; a great reason to go organic, especially if you have children. The Environmental Working Group, a consumer watchdog group, lists 12 fruits and vegetables that you should always buy organic, because they absorb the most pesticides during the growing process.

In the summertime, finding organic produce is easier, relatively speaking, than in the winter, at least in my northern neighborhood. Locally grown corn, tomatoes, watermelon and strawberries can be found on country roads being sold by the farmers who produced them. And while they definitely taste better than what I can pick up in the grocery store, they’re not usually organically produced.

Keep watching this space for an upcoming article on Community Supported Agriculture, one of the best ways to make sure that you’re buying locally produced fruits and veggies.