With all the other stuff going on to people around me, and all the other problems in the world, I feel kind of petty getting upset over this, but: FDA warns against eating bagged spinach.

Apparently there's an E. coli breakout. (From the "horse's mouth," here)

I guess it's not even safe if you wash the spinach first. And they don't know what company or for sure what states are affected. I have one bag I've been eating on - and I guess I will finish as I have suffered no ill effects and I ate on it first on Monday.

And not to make too much light of this - lots of people are very sick and one has died - but this is just like the last straw for me. It feels like a dependable friend has turned against me.

This is upsetting to me - spinach salad is a big big part of my life. There are few vegetables I either like or can eat. Raw broccoli and cauliflower are out because I can't digest them. Artichokes are out because of my other sunflower-family allergies. Carrots and celery, either raw or cooked, are out, because of my food intolerance. Any of the cabbage-family vegetables, save for red cabbage, cooked - I cannot get past the "smell" issue no matter how hard I've tried. I've tried to eat cooked brocolli many times and I cannot do it without gagging on the first bite. Ditto on asparagus. Cooked spinach is only edible by me if it's encased in pasta and surrounded with ricotta.

And spinach salad is so EASY - you don't even have to have time to cook.

Sweet potatoes are good but this is the WORST time of year for them - the new crop hasn't come in yet and what's left from last year is mealy or tough or insect-infested. And if you get home at 8:30 pm and haven't eaten dinner yet, good luck. (I've never had luck microwaving sweet potatoes. I know some do. But when I do them, they seem to become bricklike in the center and burned on the outside).

I tend to regard white potatoes and corn more as a starch than a vegetable. And I tend to think of tomatoes more as a condiment (as in, pizza sauce), than a vegetable.

But spinach salad. Spinach salad was dependable. There was a lot you could do with it - if you had leftover chicken or cooked tofu, you could toss it on top. It worked well with nuts or hardboiled eggs or canned beans.

And it's supposed to help slow down the onset of macular degeneration, something I very likely carry the gene for.

It frustrates me - we get yammered at all the time to eat 9 or 12 or some damn number of vegetables every day, lest we die. And now it turns out those vegetables might very well kill us. (I'm not going to go onto my irradiation rant right now - which would quickly devolve into a "the majority of Americans not only don't understand science, but refuse to understand science, and thus reject things that could help with a great many problems"). (I'm also not going to go into my "where the hell are the food inspectors" rant, or my "Did they use the cheap kind of sterilizer for their wash-water rant, just to save 3 cents per bag?" rant because that's another pointless one.)

I guess it's time to pull out my fossilized bag of frozen edameme and try to force-feed them to myself again. Or something. Or say 'to hell with it' and eat peanut butter or pancakes or something for a couple of weeks until they claim spinach is safe again.

Or maybe I should make another batch of pickled beets. I got kind of tired of the last one. Or a batch of the 'fall pumpkin soup' I used to make - even though it's not fall yet and it's supposed to be like 96* tomorrow.

I realize this is an extreme overreaction to the story, but seriously, sometimes things just feel like totally "the hell?" Like, do we REALLY need to be coping with THIS, too?