E Coli and other reasons to be enraged

No bagged greens, no Taco Bell. Is there a pattern emerging here? After reading about how Louisville, KY is being affected by the E Coli outbreak, I googled 'E Coli source' to get to the bottom of this.

The CDC, Mayo Clinic, and University of Florida websites and recommendations about preventing the spread of E Coli 0157:H7 focus on cooking meat thoroughly and washing your hands a lot. (These are coincidentally the measures that made it into the Louisville paper that I read this morning.) But that was not satisfactory to me. I've read enough Michael Pollan to know that there is more to the story.

Nowhere mentioned in the paper was the part about the fact that this dangerous strain of E Coli is present only in cow feces, and that the chances of it reaching your mouth increase greatly (in fact I think there are no documented cases of infection from any other conditions) if the cows are fed grain and antibiotics and kept in a feed-lot and slaughtered in slaughterhouses with poor hygeine practices (as opposed to cows who eat grass, as is their custom, and wander outside all day). I can wash my hands all day and cook my meat until it is black, but I think it might behoove us to look at the real source: industrial agriculture.

And does it bother anyone else that the article I read this morning in the paper focused overwhelmingly on industry's profit losses and the long-term distrust of the public in their products? Are we not concerned about WHY the public would be distrustful? I don't want to know how many points the stock market went up or down as a result of this, I want to know this: What is our real, long-term, safe food plan?

(For an excellent, better-researched and more-well-articulated article on this topic, please see Michael Pollan's article at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/magazine/15wwln_lede.html?ei=5070&en=7b5676f63da643c3&ex=1165813200&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1165687368-zmHg/c4UPeapcaZO4pPSKg)