Though they have not published the information, FDA officials have been privately telling industry leaders they have determined that both organic and conventional product are implicated in the E. coli spinach situation.
If this information is true, then this already odd food safety crisis gets odder still. Organic and conventional product would be grown in separate fields and processed on separate machines in different parts of the plant. For the E. coli to be on both at the same time, there would have to be a coincidence of mind-boggling proportions.
Unless… what if all the product is actually organic? Sometimes organically grown product is sold as conventional because that was where the demand was that week, or perhaps because the product yields well when grown organically.
In any case, when the FDA says that product is conventionally grown, they probably mean that it was marketed as conventionally grown, not that they tested it for synthetic chemicals. What else could explain this oddity?
