I bought a bunch of green onions a few days ago and now I’m afraid to eat them, which is ridiculous, right?
With dozens of people in six states stricken with E. coli food poisoning apparently from eating green onions at Taco Bell, and with three other cases of E. coli reported in Boulder County, I can’t help but look at those scallions suspiciously.
How badly do I want that fresh salsa?
I called Alicia Cronquist, food-borne epidemiologist for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, seeking advice. As a scientist, Cronquist steadfastly adheres to the facts, and so far there aren’t many.
The source of the E. coli contamination is still a mystery, she said. The data aren’t in to confirm that all the cases actually can be traced to Taco Bell onions, and nobody knows what made the three people in Boulder County sick.
DNA tests must be completed to see if the same strain of E. coli is involved, interviews of the victims will determine what they’ve been eating, and investigators must track the bacteria to their source conclusively. It could take weeks.
In the meantime, she said, wash vegetables thoroughly and hope for the best.
I started to wonder about the cilantro next to the onions in the vegetable drawer. So next I called Sue Jarrett, a small farmer in Wray who has been warning me for years about the increasing risk of E. coli 0157.
Her phone has been ringing incessantly. The farm community is in a lather over this E. coli outbreak, especially coming so soon after the spinach debacle in September. So I asked, how do farmers think the E. coli got on the vegetables?
The best guess is that waste from some big livestock operations is contaminating the water, she said.
Sprawling dairy farms are using flushing systems to clear manure, she said. The water can run off into streams or nearby fields, carrying bacteria with it.
“I’ve never tied 0157 to dairy cattle so much as beef,” she said, “but dairy operations are changing a lot, so who knows?”
All right, by now I’m worried about the mixed greens and the bell peppers I have ready for salad, and I’m thinking about decontaminating the whole refrigerator.
So I called Marion Nestle, a molecular biologist who teaches nutrition, food science and public health at New York University. She’s the author of “What to Eat,” and I figured that alone qualifies her to counsel me on my scallion anxiety.
It’s a healthy concern, she said. What’s happened with spinach and green onions was no surprise to anyone familiar with the food industry. “It was a disaster waiting to happen.”
Dairy farms have moved into California’s central valley in a big way, and the cows are being fed grain and soybeans instead of grass. “That promotes the growth of bad bacteria,” including E. coli 0157, she said. E. coli is a hardy bacteria and, with the widespread flooding, it may have traveled quite a distance.
That scenario may explain how it got into the fields, but just as worrisome is how the vegetables are distributed.
It’s very much like what happened a few years ago when tons of hamburger contaminated with E. coli had to be recalled, she said.
Much of the vegetable crop in California is washed in large, centralized plants, where it is packaged in plastic bags and shipped nationwide. One small batch of contaminated spinach or green onions can become mixed with hundreds of pounds of uncontaminated produce, spoiling the output of the whole plant.
“It’s a really serious problem,” she said. And unlike the meat industry, there are few regulations on vegetable farms.
The tremendous financial losses after two recent outbreaks of food poisoning surely will provide incentives for cleaning up the process, she said, but in the meantime, buy local as much as possible to avoid the industrial farm processing and wash all produce thoroughly.
As for that bunch of green onions in the vegetable drawer, they’re outta here.
It’s just my imagination, I know, but the more I looked at them, the more I thought they smelled like manure.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
