Organic Food Is Full Of Crap

Spinach, lettuce: people are getting very sick from eating healthy. But it's not industrial agriculture's leafy greens that are making munchers fall ill; it's the manure-laden organically-grown varieties that are sending folks to the hospital:

"Organic foods may be fresh, but they're also fresh from the manure fields."

Earthbound Farms, one of the biggest organic farms in North America, is also the source of the contaminated spinach that is suspected in three deaths and hospitalized at least 29 other people with kidney failure. In total, the poison spinach sickened nearly 200, in 23 states and Canada.

And now lettuce has been added to the potential E. coli contamination list.

Earthbound fertilizes its leafy vegetables with cow manure.

"Most conventional farmers fertilize their food crops with "chemical" fertilizer, and put their livestock manure on feed crops like corn," Hudson's Center for Global Food Issues Dennis T. Avery and Alex A. Avery wrote in canadafreepress.com on Oct. 3. "Organic farmers reject chemical fertilizer. Instead, they compost raw cattle manure for some weeks, hoping that will kill any dangerous organisms that could contaminate the food. Sometimes it doesn't.

"In the old days, when organic produce came from a few little farms, an occasional sick customer was no big deal. Often, the victim refused to believe organic food could cause the illness. But so many people now believe the organic hype that organic farms have gotten big and corporate and the manure-related consumer epidemics make national news."

As of 2004, while being only one percent of the American diet, organic foods already made up eight percent of all E. coli cases. With the popularity of organic food rising since, and the recent nation-wide outbreaks of organic-foodborne E. coli illness, those numbers are set to change very much for the worse.