Leaf And Let Die: The Price Of Bagged Spinach

摘要

That bag of prewashed salad in the supermarket may be convenient for you, but it's becoming less so for wild critters. After E. coli O157:H7 from bagged spinach killed three people and sickened nearly 200 in 2006, some producers of bagged leafy greens, among them Dole and the Chiquita subsidiary Fresh Express, developed proprietary standards known as "supermetrics" that require farmers to keep their fields totally free of wildlife. In California's Salinas Valley, the source of 80 percent of the nation's lettuce, the result has been an all-out assault on the natural world.