Hey, FDA! Ethnic Americans Eat Spinach, Too

SAN FRANCISCO--What's with the Food and Drug Administration? When they sounded the alarm on E. coli-contaminated spinach last week, using the media to put the word out, they seemed not to think that the ethnic press mattered. It looks like the Korean Daily, Ming Pao, The World Journal, and Sing Tao Daily -- all newspapers with large circulations, with the latter two read by hundreds of thousands of Chinese Americans each day -- were not on the FDA's radar. Nor were scores of other ethnic media outlets across the country.

When I asked the FDA this question at a Sept. 19 press teleconference on the tainted spinach, using up my one question per reporter privilege, Julie Zawisza, the agency's communications person had this brusque response: "We did an extensive outreach with the national and local media." A click at the other end told me that my time was up.

A 2005 New America Media poll indicated that 29 million Americans -- about 12 percent of the adult U.S. population -- prefer ethnic television, ethnic radio or ethnic newspapers to their mainstream counterparts. Another 22 million people, according to the poll, read, watch or listen to ethnic media regularly.

The E. coli outbreak is a national emergency. Does the FDA think that Koreans, South Asians, Japanese, Filipinos, Thais, Chinese and Latinos don't eat spinach, and that restaurants operated by these communities don't serve spinach to their customers? In fact, there are very few Indian restaurants in the United States or elsewhere that don't include saag aloo (spinach-potatoes) and paalak-paneer (spinach and cottage cheese) in their menu. Koreans love their sikumchi-na-mul, a dish of par-boiled spinach-and-garlic-and-sesame seed. The Chinese salivate over stir-fried spinach with garlic.

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