Agurketid and the Media

Agurketid is a Danish word that denotes the boring and inconsequential television programming that often sprouts in midsummer, when everyone is on vacation, but the airwaves still need to be filled with something. Literally, agurketid means "cucumber time." So it is fitting that we were in Denmark when we first heard reports that killer cucumbers from Spain had infected several people in northern Germany with E.coli bacteria.

I have to admit that initially I was glad to be out of Spain and in a place where I could still comfortably indulge in cucumber salad such as the one I had enjoyed just one or two days previously with friends from Tåsinge, an island in the south of Denmark. But then I remembered that we were not very far from northern Germany and that Denmark, like Germany, gets a lot of fresh produce from Spain. And the reports got worse. Soon cucumbers from Holland were also suspect, and then it wasn't just cucumbers, but tomatoes, and lettuce, and--according to some reports--any fresh vegetable.

By this time we had moved on to Warsaw and the only news reports we could understand were from CNN. Perhaps the Polish news was not reporting on the cucumber story, or not taking the danger seriously, or not being as alarmist as some media outlets, because at our first evening dinner in Warsaw, while we waited for some elegant entrees, we were offered complimentary appetizers, one of which was a spread of white cheese on huge slabs of raw cucumber. (I declined, but my friends and family know that it was the cheese, not the cucumbers, that turned me off.) A couple days later, I enjoyed a lunchtime green salad of mixed vegtables, and I continued to eat raw vegetables in moderation.

The agurk problem kept on spreading, affecting people in other countries (though almost all were reported to have visited northern Germany recently) and the story escalated. We were, of course, aware of the economic impact on farmers in Spain, where people are already suffering severely from the financial crisis. Soon reports began saying that Spanish cucumbers were not to blame. Now Germany is promising financial compensation to Spain for its premature and erroneous accusations, but how much money will trickle down to the individual farmers? And the cultural cracks between countries in the European Union are surfacing again.

I'm back in Spain. One of the first things I had to do was to buy fresh fruits and vegetables for our lunchtime salads. I filled my shopping cart with iceberg lettuce, spinach, multi-colored peppers, carrots, mushrooms, and a pepino holandés, as the long, thin cucumbers are called here. We are once again enjoying a little agurketid.

But the TV pictures of European farmers sweeping unsellable cucumbers into dumps are still disturbing. The Perishable Pundit has a good report on the serious consequences and causes of this agurketid, which has been anything but boring and inconsequential.