The guy who runs the nursery is really POed. He’s a vegen and organic farmer. He points out that he doesn’t use animal-based fertilizers, and the sprouts are just stuck in the ground and watered, so there is no way for them to be contaminated.

He is wrong, of course, the water could be contaminated without his knowing anything about it, but I doubt it because most dairy farms in Germany are grass based, and the E. coli needs the grain feeding to get bad. Digesting grass produces acids that destroy most of the worst forms of E. coli inside the cows.

I’m putting my bet on a distributor and cross contamination. They should be checking the delivery trucks and warehouses.

I don’t know. Some of the salads I’ve occasionally been subjected to…

In younger days I dutifully tried to cultivate a taste for bean sprouts: after all, am I not a “sprout-eater”? But that fondness just didn’t take. Sprouts are bland when they are fresh, and a positive horror when they spoil in the fridge. Why bother?

I am glad they discovered the source of the E. coli. But it just proves what I already knew: eating sprouts is its own punishment.