The surgeon general, noting the widely publicized outbreak of e.coli in 20 or so states, has issued a new health warning on spinach.

There were, of course, comments aplenty in the press about the possible effects on Popeye, The Sailor Man. But what about Olive Oil? Could she escape, especially since she, no doubt, made the salad the sailor man got his grand mal from? T

he FDA finally tracked down the source of the bacterium, which is an outfit in California known, appropriately enough, as Earthbound Foods, aka Natural Selection Foods, where, it seems, cleanliness is next to nonexistent.

Now, we don’t want to blame the whole company. No doubt most of management endorses squeaky clean work habits, while only a worker or a few are not yet entirely convinced of the germ theory of disease. So they failed to see the advisability of washing their hands.

Given the enormity of the food supply chain we all now depend on and the wages generally paid along the points of it, the wonder may be that such wretched alarms only come along as infrequently as spinach is declared unhealthy.

We assume that for some time there will be less of the leafy green nutrient embellishing America’s tables.

We humans of normal strength simply do not have Popeye’s ability to deal with a villain that afflicts us with, as we have heard the usual debility light-heartedly called, the trots.