Don't eat that, there could be germs

Don't eat that, there could be germs

Picture this with me: you are the owner of a small toy store in a major city. Your store is quite successful – you have a steady income and many loyal customers, and you even get a few tourists every week or so. You’ve been lucky: no one has ever been harmed by a toy from your store. One day, a large chain toy store on the other side of town sells a toy that puts several children in the hospital. You don’t even sell the toy that hurt the children, but suddenly, nobody wants to buy toys from you. Even your best customers stop coming by to buy a toy for their children.

Sound familiar? If you thought of the 2006 spinach scare, you’d be right. During the spinach scare, batches of spinach contaminated with E. coli sickened more than 150 people across the US. The story was an example of consumer hysteria, and how fear of one product in a market can harm the entire market needlessly. Customers knew which toy was harmful and which store was selling the toy, yet a toy store that didn’t stock the toy suffered losses in sales. A similar situation arose during the spinach scare. Government investigators narrowed the origin of the contaminated spinach down to an area in Salinas Valley, California, which has had a rate of two incidents of contaminated spinach per year for the last decade. However, spinach farms everywhere, not just in areas with back track records, suffered. Spinach farms as far away as New Jersey faced a market unwilling to buy any spinach.

Those farms didn’t have to lose that money. Had consumers done research, they would have known which farms were at high risk for E. coli contamination and which farms were likely to be safe. Instead, food hysteria took over, and spinach farms everywhere suffered. Nobody was making informed buying decisions; people heard that some spinach was unsafe to eat and stopped eating the plant altogether. The power of food hysteria to devastate a market with the slightest hint of contamination is overwhelming. Hopefully, we can overcome this tendency to jump to conclusions about food-borne illnesses.