Funny, we don’t worry about Mad Romaine Disease
lettuce. At least five people died this year from romaine tainted with E. coli bacteria. With the suspect lettuce – grown in Yuma, Arizona – now out of the food supply, the crisis is being forgotten. By the way, how many recall the spinach E. coli outbreak of 2006, tied to at least three deaths?
It’s a safe bet that there will be no four-page color exposes in national magazines about leafy vegetable safety as there were about the imagined threat of mad cows roaming the heartland. Never mind that cows afflicted with BSE were largely a foreign problem.
Europeans put the parts of the cow that caused trouble in humans, the brain and spinal cord, into their meat pies. Americans generally eat only the muscle. In addition, the U.S. beef supply was better regulated.
Not that this got into the reportage. The reason for this unequal treatment of animal and vegetable had to do with politics, vegetarian activism and a century-old hangover from “The Jungle,” the 1906 muckraking novel that exposed shocking unsanitary practices in the meat industry from long ago. cow to test positive for mad cow disease in the U.S. was found in Washington state (and it came from Canada), sales of American beef products cratered here and abroad. As one Nebraska rancher told me, that was “the cow that stole Christmas.”
Fourteen years from now, few will remember the romaine concerns of 2018. But the staying power of mad cow hysteria could be seen in The Daily Beast’s decision to run a recent update on that non-crisis. The reporting was solid, but the subhead showed that meat is never quite off the hook. “It’s not likely to hit the U.S. — but it could happen,” the line read.
A giant meteor could happen to downtown Chicago. And who knows what new surprises the Kilauea volcano has in store for Hawaii’s Big Island?
Better science writing would put health scares in perspective. Meanwhile, whether you prefer hamburger or veggie burger this Fourth, feel free to dig in. Even the salad is unlikely to hurt you.