Chez Pim has a special guest blogger today, his name is Andy Griffin. Andy and his
wife Julia operates Mariquita Farm in Santa Cruz county, growing an
amazing array of delectable vegetables including rare and heirloom
varieties.
Andy was the original owner of Riverside Farms, a pioneer in the bagged baby greens market. Ten years ago he sold Riverside Farms to the company which later became Natural Selections, the company at the very center of the current fiasco. Needless to say Andy has both the knowledge and the perspective to offer a commentary about the situation, and he's agreed to do that here on Chez Pim.
Read it in its entirety. This is the best and most informative piece of writing about this mess I've seen since this whole thing began. It certainly explains a lot of things for me, and I hope it will for you too.
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Spinach!?
by Andy Griffin
Deborah
Schot, a reporter from the L.A. Times, called me to ask for an opinion
about the e coli outbreak in prepackaged fresh spinach that has killed
one person and sickened hundreds more. And yes, I have an opinion. I
think the F.D.A. employee that I heard on the radio yesterday urging
people to play it safe and not eat fresh spinach is ignorant. Although
the victims got sick by eating spinach from a sealed bag it’s wrong to
seize on spinach as the culprit in the controversy; it makes more sense
to look at the processing and handling of pre-packaged greens in
general. Put another way, it’s the harvest procedures that were
followed, the pre-washed claim made for the greens, and the bagged
environment the greens are in that are the relevant issues, not the
specific variety of leafy greens that were actually contaminated at
some point during the harvest and post harvest handling. By fingering
any spinach as suspicious, even bunched fresh spinach, the F.D.A. isn’t
educating anyone, or solving the problem. They’re just spreading fear
on a national scale.
The L.A. Times called me
because I’m a farmer and I’m quick with a sound bite, but also because
I have a background in the baby spinach and salad business. Back in the
dark ages when I started farming organically people bought their
spinach in bunches and their salad as heads of lettuce. My first career
in farming was in the production of the then new baby salad greens and
baby spinach. We harvested the crops by hand, washed them, and packed
them loose in unsealed bags. In 1996 my partners and I sold our
company, Riverside Farms, to the company that became Natural
Selections, which happens to be the company at the heart of the current
controversy. Their packing plant was once the packing plant for our
farm, though it was a lot smaller and less sophisticated back then. Our
former label, Riverside Farms, was one of the labels pulled from the
shelves this week. Ready Pac and Earthbound Farms, two of the other
labels pulled, were labels that I once grew and harvested raw products
for so, for me, this bad news has a personal angle.
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