{Big Agribusiness Contaminates Organic Spinach with E. Coli}

Most likely there will be a backlash against organic produce as a result of recent deaths and illness linked to E.coli-contaminated spinach grown on an organic industrial farm in California.

The truth, however, is that no matter what the ultimate source of contamination -- water or manure or even the droppings of birds that nibbled on cow manure -- big agribusiness is to blame.

Consider this: E. coli has become a problem only recently, since industrial agriculture changed the way American cattle are fed. As Michael Pollan points out in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, when cattle graze on pasture lands, nibbbling a natural diet of grasses and plants, the E. coli that lives in their stomachs are less harmful to humans. But back in the halcyon days of pasteured cattle, E. coli bacteria could not survive the acid environment of the human stomach.

What happened to change things? The acid environment of the cow’s stomach changed.

The stomach of a cow grazing in a field is relatively neutral -- low in acid. But if you place that cow in a feedlot and feed it an unnatural diet of corn, the cow’s stomach becomes acidified. Now, thanks to the corn-based diet of industrially raised cattle, E. coli has evolved to endure the acidification of not only the cow's stomach but also the human stomach. It passes through the human digestive system and attacks the kidneys.

So taking things a step further, we can say that manure from pasteurized, grass-fed cattle would not have contaminated our food supply. However, as organic goes large scale, they have had to rely on manure from corn-fed feedlot cattle rather than from a symbiotic small farm system.

Of course, the culprit may not have been manure. Another theory is that the E. coli bacteria was found in water used to irrigate the organic spinach fields -- caused by corn-fed feedlot cattle, this time contaminating the water supply with their manure.

The bottom line here is that organic food is not the problem. The problem, once again, is our broken-down, unnatural industrial agriculture system that treats farm animals like so many widgets stamped out in a factory.