Word: coli
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...safe, it's best not to eat any fresh spinach at all. On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration announced that consumers can eat fresh spinach as long as it's not from the three California counties - Monterey, San Benito and Santa Clara - implicated in the current E. coli outbreak. The problem is, there's no good way to tell where the spinach was grown since distributors get their produce from all over the country. Growers are currently working on a way to label or somehow indicate where spinach was grown to help consumers once the product returns to grocery...
...still can't do without your spinach, cook it. E. coli 0157 on fresh produce can be killed by heating at 160 F for at least 15 seconds...
...frozen spinach appears to be safe. It's been cooked, and is often cooked again after thawing, so should be unaffected by the current E. coli 0157 outbreak...
...Investigators still don't know how the greens became contaminated with E. coli 0157, but they have descended on the Salinas Valley, which local farmers proudly call the Salad Bowl to the World. Because E. coli normally originates from the feces of people or animals, a team from the FDA is inspecting sanitation procedures used both in the fields and in processing plants, and looking into water-quality logs and even weather patterns, to determine if flooding or poor drainage caused contaminated runoff to bring the bacteria into contact with produce...
...flooding seems to be a reasonable explanation for the contamination, and earlier studies have found that it doesn't take much to taint growing produce. In 2004, Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at University of Georgia, documented how long E. coli 0157 remained on produce such as carrots and green onions when these vegetables were planted in composted manure that his team had intentionally contaminated with E. coli. "We found that you only have to apply contaminated irrigation water once, and the E. coli can still get into the soil and then contaminate that produce...