Alton Brown on Contaminated Food

Alton Brown is a well known host on the Food Network. His main show, Good Eats, mixes science, history, and cooking tips to demystify cooking. He also rates high on the geek meter.

Here is his take on the e. Coli outbreak from last fall.

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In short, a lot of people are sick and one person has died in Wisconsin. This is a bad thing. And yet, it was going to happen. It was bound to happen

I don’t want to sound like some crazy, anti-establishment bio-terrorist but maybe, just maybe this is a wakeup call. Truth is our food system has major flaws which point to one reoccurring theme: too much of our food is produced by centralized, industrial concerns. At this hour the continued suspicion is that the spinach, which may have been infected by irrigation water in a field, incorrectly composted manure used as fertilizer on organic crops, or by water used in processing. It may be quite a while before we know.

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Had the big chain grocers and restaurant suppliers purchased locally grown produce, this wouldn’t have happened. But don’t blame them. Nope. Blame us. By demanding fresh spinach year round (or anything else for that matter) we create the monster.

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And to make matters worse, our ever-wise government has told us to eat no fresh spinach at all. They could have advised us to eat only locally grown spinach but Noooooooo. Let’s shoot every poor farmer in America that’s doing his or her job in the foot.

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