Spinach and E. coli

If you have bagged spinach in your refrigerator, throw it away.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/09/16/e_coli_prompts_spinach_warning/

luv,
chick

This is very scary. I had E.coli poisoning this summer and it was no fun. Step away from the bagged spinach!

Hello there, Early Risers! Just e-mailed my sisters on this, Chick. Thanks for the info as we are great spinach eaters. I presume frozen ones are okay?

I am not a spinach eater, so no worry there. But, last night we went out to dinner and I hadn't even thought of that end of this spinach thing until we sat down. We went to an Italian restaurant. I usually order a dish that has spinach, but I order it without the spinach. I told my husband NOT to order anything that has that in it. The waitress came over and the first thing she did was inform us that they have NO spinach. Must be making an impact on restaurants. This particular place has several dishes with spinach in it. Frozen and canned should be okay, but then again I don't eat any of it. On the other hand, if you have any that is in a bag that you froze yourself (if you can even do that) toss it.

Louisa

It's my understanding that frozen and canned IS NOT okay, UNLESS it is cooked. I'm assuming this is what you meant by your statement Louisa.

The only way it should be eaten is cooked. Cooking, according to this article, is the only way to kill the bacteria. So having it in a casserole would be fine, I would think?

JJ

Cooking does not kill e-coli. What I meant was if you bought a bag of fresh spinach and froze it, throw it out. But, the stuff that comes frozen like Birdseye, etc. I think is ok. Why am I giving advice on cooking?

Seriously, everything I have heard on the news and what I do know about e-coli, DON'T use it. Throw it out. Cooking will not kill e-coli.

Louisa

Sorry to burst anyones bubble here but 'thorough cooking' is the only way to kill E-Coli in a product like spinach. Frozen is okay if you've had it awhile and canned is cooked before it goes into the can. Pretty bad when something so healthy for us can be ruined by man....They said some sewer water got into the one crop. I still buy all my vegetables at the organic market but even they had to remove their spinach.

I ain't eatin' it, cooked, uncooked, or otherwise.
Louisa

Sounds like a good idea at least for awhile. I know I swore of shrimp and most fish that came from the gulf near New Orleans after Katrina, with the dead bodies and sewage in the water, yuk!!!

My hubby is in the retail food business and all bagged spinach has been removed off shelves indefinitely. We also just got back from dinner with friends and all menu items that had spinach were replaced with mixed veggies. They are not even substituting frozen or canned. Better safe than sorry I guess. Spinach is my favorite veggie, always was!

What I've been hearing and reading -- it's the bagged fresh in any type of container - bags, plastic container that they're saying to get rid of. And cooking doesn't help it. Can't guarantee that you'd cook all the Ecoli out of it. It's too difficult and not worth the negative consequences.

It's not affecting fresh from your back yard, canned, frozen.

I saw something on restaurants -- many are substituting other things or just not offering any sort of spinach. I think that's a good idea for a while

Not to distract form the spinach warnings, and unsure where this belongs, I received it in an email and thought it might be an important message to the boomer generation.


About the time our original thirteen states adopted
their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a
Scottish history professor at the University of
Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the
Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it
simply cannot exist as a permanent form of
government."

"A democracy will continue to exist up until the
time that voters discover they can vote themselves
generous gifts from the public treasury."

"From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from
the public treasury, with the result that every
democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal
policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the world's greatest
civilizations from the beginning of history, has been
about 200 years."

"During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. From courage to liberty;
4. From liberty to abundance;
5. From abundance to complacency;
6. From complacency to apathy;
7. From apathy to dependence;
8. From dependence back into bondage"

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School
of Law, St. Paul , believes the United States is now somewhere between the "complacency and apathy" phase of
Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some
forty percent of the nation's population already
having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.

Just so everyone knows how much is at stake and that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.

(Edited for Controversial content)

This will scare the bee-geebies out of you and if it doesn't, it should!!!

Just to clairfy -- I'M the one who edited my post for controversial content. There were some potentially political comments.

I was not censored by Dotsie or the website.

smile