The E. coli outbreak in Europe is serious business—a food-borne illness that so far has struck down 1150 people and killed more than 15. And apparently the spinning wheel of blame has stopped with the pointer aimed at cucumbers from Spain.
Spaniards, however, are having none of it. They’re demanding to know what makes their agriculture methods culpable when who knows what those vegetables picked up in transit between Spain and Northern Europe.
Now what I find really intriguing is the image of the Andalucian minister of agriculture defiantly eating a cucumber to demonstrate her confidence in the complete healthfulness of the veg. (I’m not even going to touch the Freudian possibilities in this image.)
This is so reminiscent of the 1990 photo of Tory agriculture minister John Gummer cheerfully chowing down on a British beef hamburger to prove that the whole Mad Cow thing was just a load of old cobbers.
You’ll notice, however, that Gummer got his four-year-old daughter into the act: he’s holding a burger for her to eat because her hands are too small to grasp it on her own. Both give the appearance that there’s nothing they’d rather eat than these sandwiches, because there’s nothing—absolutely nothing, I say—questionable, much less lethal, about British beef, so everyone should tuck in.
What I always wondered was how many armed guards it took to keep Gummer’s wife from ripping that burger out of her daughter’s hand and ramming it up her husband’s nose, all the while screaming imprecations at him for putting the girl at risk for a bloody photo op? Because there’s no mother in the universe who would put her child in harm’s way for the sake of a political statement.
The Spanish minister, of course, is only risking her own health, and it’s her job to do whatever she can to promote the image of Spanish agriculture, which has taken a severe beating in the wake of the E. coli outbreak. But I’m wondering if she’s feeling any little twinges in her tummy.
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