Today's Lunch Special: E. Coli

In a society fueled by trans-fats, processed foods, and fast food, some of us choose to chart a different course and eat spinach. We want ORGANIC spinach. Uncooked organic spinach --as in spinach salad, not the tastier creamed spinach.

For our taste buds' noble sacrifice, do we get stronger muscles a la Popeye? No. We get a heaping helping of E. coli, a strain of bacteria that can cause bloody diarrhea, abdominal pain, fever and even death.

An E. coli outbreak linked to bagged spinach has so far sickened dozens of people in 19 states, with one death reported in Wisconsin.

The FDA has linked the outbreak to a California company, Natural Selection Foods, which sells products under the name Earthbound Farm Organic and also processes spinach for numerous other companies, including Dole. The company has announced a voluntary recall for bagged spinach products with "sell by" dates August 17 through October 21.

In 1993, another high-profile E. coli outbreak killed four children and sickened hundreds of others who ate undercooked hamburgers from Jack-in-the-Box fast food restaurants.

Not that anyone ever deserves to get E. coli, but whenever I eat fast food hamburgers, a certain part of me accepts that I am not making the best choice for my health.

But to eat uncooked triple washed organic spinach? It would seem like one of the most clear cut good decisions a discerning eater could make in this crazy world. Fearless lunching. Or so we thought.

The sad part is that the health-food-eating spinach consumers who fell ill probably would have preferred the spinach to be bubbling hot with saturated fat-laden cream cheese and lots of sodium, and served alongside fried chicken and a biscuit-- hell, even a well-done cheeseburger. Their intestines would have thanked them because proper cooking kills E. coli.

Maybe we are once again paying the price for food convenience. Perhaps there's no getting around the fact that humans were intended to slice, dice, wash by hand, or cook things from scratch. We can't outsource healthy eating.

The bagged spinach incident may also be just one of the first negative effects of rapid growth and change in the organic foods industry. Many fear that quality and safety standards will suffer as organic farms try to meet growing demands in the marketplace to mass-produce convenience foods. Anything made on a large scale puts at risk the very philosophy of eating organic foods, which is to support smaller farms that don't resort to techniques that have made conventional foods so unhealthy and so unappetizing.

In our busy, modern lives, deciding what to eat for lunch if you want something convenient and healthy is a dicey proposition.

I used to love tuna salad. Now it's swimming in mercury. Hot dog? A nostalgic nosh of nitrates. Egg salad? Dill-flavored cholesterol. Soup? Ladles of sodium.

Bagged, prewashed salads combined the convenience of junk food with the healthiness of raw veggies. It felt like you were having your cake and eating it too.

Now it seems we'd be better off with the cake. Hey, if we made it with whole wheat flour and canola oil, it would be okay to eat, right?

Help. It's lunchtime. I'm hungry and I'm afraid.