Vegetables bad: "After days of confusion, German authorities finally concluded on Friday that an E. coli infection, which has claimed at least 29 lives, unsettled the nation and thrown European agriculture into disarray, had been caused by contaminated bean sprouts and not, as first was feared, by other produce. But, at a news conference here, Reinhard Burger, the head of the Robert Koch Institute — the country’s disease control agency — said the outbreak was 'not yet over' because 'there will be new cases coming up.'"

"People become ill from E. coli by eating shit. Simple, right? Little attention is given to the likeliest reason so many people have been affected by the German strain—they probably ingested unusually large amounts of the bacteria. Whatever (bean sprouts or cucumbers or whatever) was contaminated was really contaminated. But try getting Anderson Cooper to explain that your illness is due to the fact that too much bacteria from an animal's colon have ended up in your stomach."

"In an opaque interconnected system, once toxins are identified then all goods become suspect. As with 'toxic' subprime assets, so with suspect vegetable products, there is an indiscriminate reaction against anything and everything that could be contaminated. In the same way that many 'good' mortgage-backed securities became unsaleable, so farmers selling cucumbers from Spain suffer because of a problem with beansprouts at one German farm." READ MORE

"I'm scared. But I already paid for this."
-Queens resident Sai Lawrence, before tucking into a salad of romaine lettuce yesterday. Lawrence had just been informed of a romaine recall in the metropolitan area due to an E. coli contamination, the health effects of which range from diarrhea to kidney disease to death.