No Popeye Jokes Here

As a kid I’d have been ecstatic if the Feds warned everybody that the nation’s entire spinach supply might be contaminated with a deadly bacterium. “I can’t eat this, Mom, it might have e. coli!” Lucky, lucky kids of today, living in an America transformed (if only temporarily) into a spinach-free zone. Fields across the nation are being plowed under and spinach bags removed from supermarket shelves, while elsewhere investigators use DNA to track down the original source of contamination.

Fun fact about e. coli: it lives in the intestinal tracts of animals, and the main way it spreads to new places is via the animal’s poop. The resulting illness is bad enough, and can be fatal when the victim already has a vulnerable immune system or thinks too much about just where their illness originated from.

Terry Jones of Monty Python fame narrated an excellent eight-part documentary called Medieval Lives. That’s where I learned that, since the only fertilizer medieval farmers had was manure, they always boiled their vegetables into slime before eating them. Jones tasted the resulting glop and called it disgusting.

I have no real point here. However, I did have a birthday a couple of days ago so I’m working through some rationalizations about the long-term health implications of my continued vegetable avoidance. I can only tolerate them when they’ve been well-cooked and doused in cream sauce. But suppose I were one of those health-food fanatics who actually eats salads rather than merely picking cucumber slices out of them? The very state where I live had someone come down with e. coli from the contaminated spinach. That could’ve been me!

So I had a steak-and-cheese sandwich for dinner tonight and praised myself for my healthy eating habits.