INTESTINES FOR VEGANS

           By now you’ve no doubt heard about the two children in France killed and many sickened by E. coli in pizza made from Nestle wheat dough.  According to the Wall Street Journal, France has “launched a criminal investigation into Nestle for involuntary manslaughter, deceitful practices and endangering others.”

             The humorous part of this story to me is the holier-than-thou position of vegans who can’t escape rodent intestines in wheat.  For the record, wheat is in almost everything processed.  The story, like most sanitized urban narratives, does not get into the nitty-gritty of how this happened so I will elucidate.

             E. coli does not live in wheat.  It lives in intestines.  When the article says the flour and wheat “could have been contaminated in fields or during the milling process,” that’s a sanitized way to say that when you run a John Deere combine through a wheat field, it inadvertently chops up thousands of mice and rats into the grain bin. 

             The other main entry point apparently is in the milling process, which again fails to mention that grain storage and milling is an inherently rat-friendly environment.  Keeping rodents out of the grain bins and eliminating hiding places is well nigh impossible.  Stray wheat grains and flour siftings can keep a whole family of mice and rats nourished.  In fact, it provides more nourishment than the denatured flour that eventually finds its way into the human food chain.  Those rodents sometimes end up in the flour as ground up bits and pieces—small to be sure, but E. coli is pretty small.

             I wonder how many vegans are aware that they routinely eat intestines from animals their diet killed?  I also wonder if this is a case of Nestle mismanagement or rather symptomatic of a debilitated and weakened immune system.  Thousands of people—perhaps millions—ate this pizza dough and only a handful got sick; two children died.  Is anyone asking about the immune function of these susceptible people?  Did these two children live a life in an antimicrobial bubble and never play  in the dirt?  Nobody cares to ask.

             The fact is, we can’t escape intestines in our food supply, no matter how sanctified we may think we are.  This does not give companies a license to be filthy, of course.  But it does beg the question about immunological function and holiness.

                                  What’s the number one way you exercise your immune system?