Of course the killer cucumbers and tainted tomatoes were foreign, remember the way we blame the blameless Dutch for our Elm disease; in this case Spanish infidels had hatched this dastardly plot. The plot was cunning as the cucumbers were organic, they seduce the innocent, yet we all know those organic weirdos, (see picture) wearing straw hats while standing smugly on their sun baked soil, could not be trusted.

First the Spanish take all the Euros, then they spend it as though there is no tomorrow, no discipline, new properties on every shoreline with no room for an early towel on the beach, then they win the World cup on the way beating Germany, now they expose healthy-living German youth to the onslaught of a deadly disease. Franco would never have allowed this.

Now we are beginning to find out the truth. It was not some organised organic plot with Killer Cucumbers, but probably a dirty little producer south of Hamburg with some polluted beansprouts being soiled and sold in Lower Saxony and beyond. Amazingly now even these beansprout seeds have been labelled as foreign! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13663630 . (sorry no link) The seeds, protected in their safe shells by nature, will have nothing to do with the e-coli in the industrialised and infected food processing chain. It will have everything to do with long food chains, poor supervision, poor hygene, and our dependency on transporting large volumes of food from central sources. It may be a new e-coli strain, but that is not the issue, the real issue is the strained centralised system.

Suggesting that e-coli, a living organism, might creep into organic cucumbers is so biologically absurd, although it is always essential to wash salads in clean water with soap washed hands. In all this hysteria over killer cucumbers, one forgotten story is that the risks of unnatural chemicals passing into plants. This danger remains real.

Last month I lost my tomato plants, potatoes and some beans to a chemical, aminopyralid, that came under cover into my allotment -but more on that later. The risks from individual chemicals is likely to be small as they are subjected to trials over a few years, but their propensity for combining with other unnatural chemicals and affecting our immune system over time remains very concerning to any parent.

We will not know this, perhaps like the little known dangers of smoking tobacco 50 years ago, until it is too late. I am not prepared to take the risk; that’s why I only grow organic food.

The killer was the commercial food chain.

Cucumbers are cool. Chilled, locally grown, organic cucumbers are so cool.

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