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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could buy irradiated salad which would solve this problem. Organic cannot be treated this way and people are convinced organic is better so I can't get what is really safe.

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I wish I could buy salad uncontaminated by feces but I guess I'll take irradiated if feces salad is all we can get.

A co-worker (I work for John Deere) went to look at a lettuce farm during harvest. He had to wear gloves and a hair net. He looked up and there were birds flying overhead with not even a diaper!

Moral of this story: all greens are contaminated with feces - wash your greens.

Birds typically poop as they take off to fly. Less weight to carry. E. coli outbreaks are typically caused by animal farm runoff, especially from hog or cattle farms.

Birds can poop in the air at anytime. Takeoff is the most common one of course - but that isn't even an out as the birds are feeding in that field and thus landing.

Oh, I gotcha. I thought the birds were only flying above, not landing and eating. In that case, wouldn't the onus be on the harvester to not pick produce that has obvious bird poop on it?

yeah, but the rain last week washed the visible poop off - but there are invisible residues left. (others have pointed out you cannot wash e.coli off - I'm not qualified to evalueate that claim but if true washing isn't enough)

A biology major coworker explained that it’s even deeper than that. Most birds optimize for weight by not having muscles for controlling bowel movements. Rather they take advantage of inertia and let their initial dive provide the bulk of the energy for solid waste evacuation.

> wash your greens.

Washing greens will not remove E. coli contamination.

> birds

The contamination causing the current E. Coli outbreak was almost certainly caused by feces from an animal farm and has nothing to do with wild birds.

Most of the fresh greens at the grocery store nearest to me are not organic. None are irradiated. Whatever prevents romaine from being irradiated, it's not exclusive to organic certification.

The only grocery items I can specifically recall seeing marked irradiated are spices. I'm speaking of grocery stores in Oregon and Washington.

This paper from 2010 has some info on why this may be the case [0]: "These results indicate that the protection of bacteria on the leaf surface by biofilm formation and stomatal colonization can reduce the antimicrobial efficacy of irradiation on leafy green vegetables."

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20629883

And zergling free.

A nice Protossed salad.

I hate you. Have an upvote.

Why not require the animal farmers to irradiate all poop that they put into their lagoons?

For context, it is my understanding that E. coli breakouts are caused by those lagoons overflowing during rainstorms if they are not managed correctly.

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