Summer Share week #8 of 20: 7/28+7/30- Clean Veggies

I was avoiding posting about Cyclospora in hopes that the news media would do their job, but here we are. So I'm gonna break this down and it is just gonna be blunt because all the fluff confuses people.

Whenever there is an outbreak of any food-borne illness it usually relates to wash water and it's cleanliness. Almost all the time it has to do with water. A lot of our produce is grown in desert conditions where water is costly so corporate farms reuse/recycle wash water. When poop (yes literal poop) is on say a head of lettuce and gets washed in a huge factory, the wash line then reuses the wash water that now has poop in it to wash thousands of pounds of other produce. This spreads the literal poop water on everything else in the wash line. That is how almost every single food-borne illness outbreak happens. The differences come from the animal the poop originated from. For example salmonella comes from chickens (not limited to them though), and cyclospora comes from human feces.

Small farms are your best bet for clean and traceable produce. Every. Single. Time. We wash our produce with drinking water and don't reuse it.

Alright. I hope that with that info the next time a foodborne illness spreads you can 'decode' what is being said. I'll also add that it is important for the federal government to employ people who help inspect, trace, and stop these bacteria from an outbreak. There were people in those positions who were fired by the current administration in 2025. Now there is a second outbreak of cylcospora as well as an egg recall. Just stating facts.

This is an odd transition, but we gotta do it :)

This week's share will include- new potatoes!!, carrots, beets, zucchini, summer squashes, cucumbers, fresh onions, fennel, turnips, head lettuce, the first of the peppers and melons, cabbage, tomatoes, sweet corn and garlic!

The Fruit Share will include cherries, apricots and plums hopefully. Another thing people may not know is how difficult of a fruit year this is. A lot of fruit got wiped out by frosts after yet another warm Spring. The amount of harvest-able crops is waaaaay down, and prices are waaaay up. So sometimes the actual fruit share will differ from what is here on the blog.