Farmers’ Market: Food-borne disease
There is nothing discerning about Escherichia coli; it is a normal part of the microbial population in the lower gastrointestinal tract of many familiar animals, ourselves included. When it stays where it belongs and when our immune systems are functioning normally, it poses no particular health problems.
Animals normally avoid fecal contamination, conduct both learned and “hard wired” by evolution. Natural selection favors behaviors that increase survivability of the species — cattle, horses and sheep carefully circumvent their respective cow flops, meadow muffins, and raisinettes while grazing; pigs and alpacas choose to use one corner of their enclosure as a “toilet zone” far from their living space if given a choice; dogs and other Canidae clean up after very young litters and quickly teach each pup to leave the den to make one’s toilette.
Ideally, humans flush and wash, also an early parental intervention. Additionally, our digestive system has a sort of “yellow and blue make green seal” to make sure that our gut fauna remains contained and does not affect our other organs.
So why do news sources discuss E. coli as a food-borne scourge currently resulting in horrific illnesses and mortality in Europe? The clue is “when it doesn’t stay where it belongs.”
While we as individuals may have mastered necessary personal hygiene, we collectively seem to have greater difficulty. Obviously, food needs to be handled responsibly. However, large scale food production may include the use of sewer sludge as fertilizer and irrigation water contaminated with fecal matter, or it may incorporate processing procedures in which “insides” and “outsides” are no longer safely contained in the above-mentioned green seal.
Epidemiologists are now suggesting scrubbing vegetables with antibacterial cleansers as varieties of E. coli seem to be evolving a noteworthy degree of “stickiness” enabling it to both cling to the food and to the gut lining of its host (symptoms of food poisoning like diarrhea and vomiting are in reality your body’s efforts to rid itself of unwelcome invaders). This recommendation, while sensible, is a bit tricky when considering vigorous scouring of leaf lettuce, fragile tomatoes, or wrinkly spinach leaves. How is that done, exactly?
This is another reason to become a local-vore and purchase food from farms close enough to visit and see for yourself what growing and handling practices are in place. Confidence in the safety of the food increases when you realize that products you are purchasing are also consumed by the farm family that produce them.
Members of the Presque Isle Farmers Market gather on Saturday mornings in the Aroostook Centre Shopping Mall parking lot with fruits, vegetables, dairy products, eggs, meat, and bakery products that they produced and that they eat. Stop by, ask questions, and head home with purchases that are fresh, flavorful, and safe.
Editor’s note: This weekly column is written by members of the Presque Isle Farmers’ Market. For more information or to join, contact their secretary/treasurer Steve Miller of Westmanland at 896-5860 or via e-mail at beetree@xpressamerica.net. The group’s website is https://sites.google.com/site/presqueislefarmersmarket/
