That’s my rough translation.

Madeleine Ferrieres’ 2002 book, Mad Cow Sacred Cow is my favorite food safety book. And she’s French. So that puts me in good with Amy.

As the death toll from E. coli O104 reached 43 in Europe, with 3,688 people sick in Germany, including 823 suffering from hemolytic uremic syndrome and an additional 114 cases in other countries, Madeleine Ferrières, professor of modern history at the University of Avignon told Le Point, “There is a curious game of ping-pong where the consumer discards the health authorities and the authorities send us back to our own behavior.”

That’s fairly astute, even if the translation might be slightly off.

There’s lots of media noise about this new strain of E. coli O104, but no one seems to be asking questions of the farming practices: if this organic sprout farm was the source of the E. coli O104, how did it get there? Was the farm fertilizing with night soil (human crap); was the irrigation water on the farm ever tested; were the seeds contaminated and another outbreak will show up somewhere?

As Ferrieres wrote in her book,

"All human beings before us questioned the contents of their plates. … And we are often too blinded by this amnesia to view our present food situation clearly. This amnesia is very convenient. It allows us to reinvent the past and construct a complaisant, retrospective mythology."