E.Coli and food proccessing |
Green | |||
Written by John Eager | |||
Saturday, 25 June 2011 09:47 | |||
The Ledbury Portal asked Caroline Handley of Handley Organics about the recent E.Coli outbreak in Germany. Her response reveals why local food production is important in the supply of uncontaminated food, while criticising the role played by processed foods. Caroline's response in full: "If you walk around the modern food emporiums you should be horrified by some of the food processing that many people now take for granted. With salad bags, to a certain extent a disaster waiting to happen. There are too many unknowns in the equation of how it has been washed and processed, packaged and transported and whether or not the cold chain has been broken. "On display as a chilled product the salad bags are easy to pick, (we pick every day and we do not pretend to wash), but then, they are put in the shopping basket, carried around the store and once paid for, they are often in warm cars and submitted to the drive home. By the time they get to the domestic fridge they could be several days old and reached several temperatures."
"Then the German authorities pointed the finger at Spanish salad produce and a 20,000 ton per week export industry, worth over 200 million euros, ground to a halt with over 70,000 jobs at risk. A few days later the same authorities said that it was unlikely that Spanish produce was to blame as no Spanish cases had been confirmed and they then transferred their investigations to an area 62 miles south of Hamburg in northern Germany. "This finger of suspicion is still as I understand pointed at a German bean sprout nursery. But as more details are revealed, there is a still a lot of scientific investigation to be done as E.coli is associated with human/animal manures and how this got into the fresh vegetable produce is still a mystery. Studies show this can take a minimum of three months from start of culture .
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Last Updated on Sunday, 03 July 2011 09:58 |