Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Food Safety Guide

[Sharon Villines (sharonvillines]

> RAW SPROUTS. Bacteria and seeds like
> precisely the same conditions - warmth & moisture - to grow well.
> The FDA says there is no way to guarantee the safety of sprouts
> and recommended not eating them raw.(July'99) Sprouts
> contaminated by e coli may get it from food handlers but some of
> the really big outbreaks have been traced to debris in seed bags
> imported from Italy, Hungary, or Pakistan, and from rodents and
> birds in a shipper's warehouse in the Netherlands.

I would suggest that what this says is to be careful where you buy your
food. I recently discovered the "raw food" people and started eating sprouts
and drinking green juice which has done wonders for my Diabetes Type II
which has essentially disappeared. I eat 3-4 cups of sprouts a day so was
concerned about this and couldn't imagine where the e-coli was coming from.
You don't need soil to grow sprouts.

Cooking sprouts defeats the purpose of eating them. It kills all the
enzymes, good as well as bad. The good ones are what makes them worth eating
in the first place.

I grow my own (the store varieties are much less tasty because they are old)
and get seeds from an organic supplier in California. This is their main
business so they are careful. One outbreak and they are dead.

Sharon.
-- 
Sharon Villines
MacGuffin Guide to Detective Fiction, http://www.macguffin.net
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington, DC
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~takomavillag/