ESU says no to spinach

The E.coli spinich scare may officially be over, but it has still left its mark on ESU. The spinach scare affected both ESU's dining services and the students on campus after 108 people in the United States became sick, and one died, from E. coli. Brian Crawford, ESU Food Director, said all spinach had to be destroyed as soon as the outbreak was announced. All dishes that included spinach were thrown out. Since all the dishes are made fresh on a daily basis, the cooks could not prepare anything with spinach in it such as the mixed green salad or a quiche. Spinach, delivered through Aramark, the school's main food provider, comes to ESU pre-cleaned and bagged, but they were forced to drop them in favor of collard greens during the scare. Crawford said many health-conscious students miss the spinach because it is a healthy food that contains iron oppose to iceberg lettuce, which has no value. Aramark brings in ten cases a week of spinach, which comes to 600 servings a week. But regardless of their loss in spinach supply, ESU food services are doing exceptionally well, he said. "We feed 3,200 students a day," Crawford said. "There are 150 more people a year to feed." There were no reported complaints about the lack of spinach in the Union or cafeteria. According to the health center, no one reported to be ill from the outbreak neither. On Friday, the U.S. and Drug Administration revised the fresh spinach alert to now cover only specific brands packaged on certain dates. According to CNN, Kevin Reilly of the California health department said the warning now applies only to spinach recalled earlier this month by Natural Selection Foods of San Juan Bautista California and four companies that supplied it. The FDA linked a California company to the fresh spinach outbreak. The state's major produce-growing area, Salinas Valley, is known to be the site where the irrigation water was contaminated. According to the California Farm Bureau Federation, about 74 percent of spinach in the U.S. comes from California. Once contacted by the Food and Drug Administration, California farmers were told they needed to do more to increase the safety of the fresh leafy greens they grow. Tainted spinach was reported in 19 states, although it is still uncertain if the spinach was contaminated in the field or during processing.

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