The contagious madness of E. coli

Another 60 people in Germany fell ill overnight Friday to E. coli bacteria. Roughly 82 million woke up feeling fine. Newspapers in The Local's media roundup ask whether the reaction to the latest food scare is rational.

More people die every day in car accidents than are likely to perish from the current E. coli outbreak. Yet we know every time we get behind the wheel of a car that we are taking a small risk. We don't, on the other hand, expect to die from eating a cucumber.

The human psychology of any food scare is at once irrational and quite understandable. Plenty of people point to the reassuring statistics, but are any of them eating Spanish cucumbers this week after three such vegetables from the southern nation were identified as sources of the bacteria?

As the death toll of the E. coli contamination rose to five this week, and 60 new people fell ill on Friday, the German media tended to gravitate to one or the other corner: either the whole episode was overwrought hysterics or a grim reminder that food scandals were part of modern life with its hi-tech farming and long-distance food imports.

The left-wing Berliner Zeitung was the strongest proponent of the latter case, arguing that 21st-century consumers were so geographically and psychologically disconnected from their food production that they had only themselves to blame.

“We no longer eat food that arrives from the fields outside the city onto our table. We eat what is on the shelf in front of us. The grocery chains spare no effort to be able to offer us this convenience. No road is too far and no farming method too absurd. The fact that it’s worth it for cucumbers to come from Andalusia to Lower Saxony is ultimately because of us, the customers.