The New York Times is carrying a high-profile article about a woman who was paralyzed from an e. coli infection.  Stephanie Smith is a 22 year old woman who follows a "mostly vegetarian diet," but ate a fateful hamburger at Sunday dinner with her family.  Within a week, "The convulsions grew so relentless that doctors had to put her in a coma for nine weeks." She awoke from her induced coma to find that the infection had left her paralyzed.

I'll spare you the details of how Ms. Smith's hamburger meat came to be infected with O157:H7, which is a lethal strain of e. coli that surfaced in the early 1980s to bedevil our food supply.  The article offers an excellent and absorbing account of where the bacterial contamination came from, how it probably got into the hamburger, and why Cargill (the supplier responsible for the contamination) is evil.  Okay, it doesn't go quite THAT far, but you can read between the lines.

(As a side note, one thing I learned from this article is that you can buy a slab of meat, then ask the butcher to grind it for you.  This is far safer than relying on a multinational agribusiness corporation like Cargill to grind up your meat for purchase as pre-ground hamburger. I will definitely be recommending that my meat-eating friends go this route instead of buying hamburger pre-ground.)

Eating a vegetarian diet is obviously a pretty good way to avoid O157:H7 contamination, but it isn't a guarantee.  This particular strain of e. coli has also infected strawberries and spinach.  It's the reason why Odwalla now pasteurizes all of their juices. And it's indirectly responsible for the proliferation of grape, cherry, and other oddball sized tomatoes at the supermarket.

As a mostly-vegetarian myself, I was really struck by this article.  The reporter doesn't mention any of the details of Smith's fateful hamburger meal, choosing instead to spend the bulk of the article talking about the corporate malfeasance involved.  And rightfully so!  

But I couldn't help but wonder how it went down.  Did Smith's family not provide her with a vegetarian option?  Did she feel uncomfortable about forgoing meat at a traditional family meal?  Or did she simply want to indulge in a delicious home-cooked hamburger?  Although several people were obviously present at the meal, Stephanie is the only one who got sick.  Is it just me, or does that seem particularly unfair?

A lot of people would - and probably have - taken Stephanie Smith's story as an anecdote against the evils of slipping from the vegetarian path.  I don't know if you have noticed but some vegetarians can get kinda militant about the whole thing.  (Where's that "deadpan" emoticon?)

If you're of a superstitious bent, it's easy to see Smith's illness as a lightning bolt from the heavens. But I would like to counter this with the proposition that anyone who gloats over Smith's illness will be first in line from a random case of e. coli infected salad greens.