A few days ago I posted the first few lines of an adaptation of a poem:
The love song of J. Romaine Lettuce:
Lettuce go then, E. coli,
While evenly spread out your counts are high
Make a patient etherized upon a table;
Lettuce go, through certain half-soiled sheets,
The muttering retweets …
I did this both because I used to be obsessed with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but also because I wanted to call some attention in a different way to the lettuce contamination story. And today I think it is better to switch on over to more conventional means of getting people to think about this story. And there is an article I just read that might be of interest to those out there thinking about food and microbes and water:
Lettuce contaminated with pathogens have sickened and killed people. But the FDA has shelved Obama-era plans to test the culprit: farms’ irrigation water.
Source: The Science Is Clear: Dirty Farm Water Is Making Us Sick
The article, in Wired by Elizabeth Shogren and Susie Neilson is worth a look because not only does it discuss the current romaine lettuce related outbreak but it also discusses some of the recent history of regulation related to water quality on farms. From my reading of this it seems like it would be a great time for an expansion of projects to help farmers sample more often and more accurately the water being used on their farms.