Turning Over a New Leaf
The week before last James brought home a giant (like practically five pounds) bag of spinach from Rossman Farms, the ghetto produce stand down Third Ave. I agree that $2.99 for that many greens is a bargain, but I hate waste and there's no value in buying food you can't possibly use. (When I was a kid, my grandpa would do things like buy cases of canned water chestnuts at grocery outlets because they were cheap even though no one in my family really ate water chestnuts. As a teen I decided to try one of his donated old cans of clam chowder as an after school snack and let's just say that is possible for canned food to expire. The contents had turned pinkish and smelled piney and medicinal, which was only enhanced as I warmed it up.) I made four calzones one night, he made creamed spinach another and that only used up half the bag. By that point I was already bored with spinach.
I was going to say that we had spinach coming out of our asses, then last night we were picking up jerk chicken at Peppa's after watching Half Nelson (there's something about harrowing drug movies that makes me want to use drugs rather than stay away from them. The only part of the movie that made me sad was that he let his cat die) and there was a news blurb about the e coli spinach outbreak, so apparently sick people literally had spinach coming out of theirs. Uh, and died. I was like "see, that's what happens when you go overboard with packaged spinach." I totally cheated death. Or at least violent diarrhea.
Follow
urgh, you had me on tenterhooks in your first few lines..
word is that the Dole (affiliate?) plant in Salinas is in a world of shit… I heard through the grapevine that they had a sewer line break in the fields some time ago, and well, there you go…
Someone should do a variant of “Cabbage Patch Kids”… “Spinach Patch Kids”, maybe…
Sewers are probably spewing on our food supply more than we know. So far, I don’t think any of the e coli cases have been in NYC so maybe the bad batches didn’t make it here.
I’ve never trusted the concept of ‘prewashed greens’… I was just lecturing David and my mother about this the other week, coincidentally. But if sewage literally gets into the food supply, I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
I heard a report today on CNN (fwiw) that e.coli has indeed hit NY. Don’t know the caseload. I also heard they’re doing some sort of specific testing/’fingerprinting’ to narrow down the cause.
Spinach, beef, lamb, eggs… let’s face it, our food supply is totally contaminated… I blame germicidal soaps…
I went to the Manhattan Trader Joes for the first time this week and all of their prepared sandwiches had little stickers advertising that they contained no spinach. I probably should be more concerned than I am.