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Though they have not published the information, FDA officials have been privately telling industry leaders they have determined that both organic and conventional product are implicated in the E. coli spinach situation.

If this information is true, then this already odd food safety crisis gets odder still. Organic and conventional product would be grown in separate fields and processed on separate machines in different parts of the plant. For the E. coli to be on both at the same time, there would have to be a coincidence of mind-boggling proportions.

Unless… what if all the product is actually organic? Sometimes organically grown product is sold as conventional because that was where the demand was that week, or perhaps because the product yields well when grown organically.

In any case, when the FDA says that product is conventionally grown, they probably mean that it was marketed as conventionally grown, not that they tested it for synthetic chemicals. What else could explain this oddity?

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Welcome
To
Jim Prevor's
Perishable Pundit

“We failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor not for want of the relevant materials but because of a plethora of irrelevant ones.”
-- Roberta Wohlstetter
Pearl Harbor: Warning
and Decision

Roberta Wohlsetter won the Bancroft Prize, the highest honor a historian can win, for her exhaustive study of the run up to Pearl Harbor. Her conclusion, highlighted above, was that there was so much “noise” — so much irrelevant, incorrect or misleading information — that the important information was ignored or misinterpreted.

This dilemma is known to historians as “The Roberta Wohlsetter Problem,” and it applies to business decisions just as well as military intelligence. Our job here at PerishablePundit.com is to ease the problem for executives by mining the information superhighway to select what is truly important to know and to provide insight as to its meaning and significance.

PerishablePundit.com is dedicated to three propositions:

• First, that perishables are, and for the foreseeable future will be, the crucial arena for differentiating competition in the food marketing business.

• Second, that looking at the business solely through the prism of long established departments specializing in different perishable areas such as produce, deli, meat, dairy, bakery, seafood and floral no longer is sufficient.

• Third, that executives, confronted with understanding the significance of perishables to their operations and directing the success of these operations, are presented with an over-abundance of information, and the challenge is to determine what information is important and what is its meaning and significance.

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