Tuesday, September 19, 2006

The Newsworthiness of Leafy Green Vegetables

I have never been a big fan of spinach. Except for the fact that it screwed up my mathematical calculations as to the number of possible combinations of sauce, pasta and meatballs when I went to Olive Garden last weekend for Never Ending Pasta Bowl (aka Stuff Myself With Salad and Bread and Pasta and Bread and Salad and Have to be Rolled Out the Door), I was sort of happy that they had taken Spinach Alfredo off the list of sauce offerings.

No more spinach, yay. I was happy to end my thoughts on the matter there. But as CNN kept covering the issue as the main story on CNN.com because there is nothing more newsworthy going on, I got to thinking, "How the hell does e. coli get into spinach to begin with?" And as you know, thinking is a dangerous thing.

Lets run through the possibilities here. First, it has been suggested that the irrigation water was contaminated. Okay, I can buy that. Second, perhaps the fertilizer used in the fields somehow introduced the angry little bacteria into the spinach fields. After all, it is cow poop. Fine, I can deal with that too.

But then I had an epiphany - There are no Porta Potties in the spinach fields. And certainly you can understand the logical inference there. EW.

Please, CNN - Save me. Give me something better to think about so I don't have to conjecture about what migrant farm workers do in the spinach fields.

Sadly, I will never be able to look at spinach artichoke dip the same way ever again.

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