If you remember the e.coli spinach outbreak last year that killed three people, you might now be interested to discover that the outbreak has been traced to an organic farm. Greg Conko has more:

The organic industry poo-pooed the suggestion that the contamination arose on an organic farm, insisting that such a thing could only have happened on a big, conventional, “factory farm”. The fact of the matter is, however, that, while microbial contamination will likely always be with us, so-called factory farms tend to be cleaner, not dirtier, than anachronistic organic farms. Having been on lots of farms, organic and conventional, on all six inhabited continents, I am much more willing to trust my family’s health to the products of a typical factory farm than a typical organic one.

Indeed. There’s something of Rousseau in the romanticization of dirty, outdated farming methods.