Wendy WilliamsA GRANADA farmer has stripped off for a television campaign aimed at restoring confidence in Andalucian produce following the e-coli scare.
Nicolas Chica, general secretary of the Small Farmers Association, bares all in the advert to emphasise that eating home grown Spanish produce is perfectly safe and natural.
Last month it was (wrongly) claimed that Spanish cucumbers had E Coli.
The last sentence is incorrect.
Tests on the Spanish cucumbers found that they did test positive for a shiga toxin-producing E.coli (STEC) strain, but that it was not the STEC strain responsible for causing the larger and more deadly outbreak in Northern Europe.
Right said Fred, but how many more infected foods are there out there from other EU nations that are eaten with gusto? I feel really peeved for Spanish farmers that they have been made to pay such a high economical price for the Germans speaking out before the evidence was there.
Infected foods are found all over the place, and E.Coli is a lot more common than most people know, indeed it lives in our lower intestine for much of our lives.
In the case of Germany, some evidence was there when they issued the alert. Remember that they detected E.Coli in the midst of people dying, and they sent out the alert on that basis. In hindsight the E.Coli was not the one that was deadly, but say if had been? What would have been the reaction if Germany had not called the alert in such a case? Germany did the correct thing here, in my opinion. Hindsight is a beautiful thing Vicky, is it not?
Of course, no one in any authority has mentioned that the strain of this E.coli was highly, highly resistent, so much so that it was not affected by over half a dozen different (and powerful) antibiotics. Such a strain could only have been made in a laboratory. It smacks of food terrorism; potentially much more effective than detonating bombs.
Another bigger picture of the “cucumber incident” that is often hushed up, is the terrible working conditions of the (mostly) illegal immigrants who pick them, and who live in little plastic cubes on the hillside in baking temperatures, earning not even a minimum wage from their Spanish masters.
It was also funny to see how Spain was so vociferous about compensation, but then hardly any of the companies filled the compensation forms in on time, mainly because most of them were operating illegally, of course. It was also strange to see the total compensation amount put at such a vast figure initially, until someone pointed out that Spain’s total income from vegetables could only produce such a sum lol. People who engage in all these activities and then cry foul for compensation are at their core, unethical.