Et Tu Cucumber?

drawing by marguerita One can't be absolutely certain about anything....
One of the problems with growing crops is that they grow.
You can't switch them off like you could a baked bean factory: they just keep coming.
There has already been a considerable drop in demand in Germany, where authorities are advising consumers not to eat salads because they still have not pinpointed the cause of the outbreak. This is affecting the area around Hamburg in particular; the rest of Europe appears to be OK. But the knock-on effect is that orders for cucumbers from Spain and Holland have been cancelled altogether, or at best reduced. For cucumbers from Holland, the obvious place to look is in the UK – we already take large volumes of cucumbers at this time of the year. Extra cucumbers will be "dumped" here rather than marketed, and this will drop the price paid to the grower. These price reductions, if they occur, are unlikely to affect the price in the shops but they do have a massive effect on the price paid to growers in the UK.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/01/cucumbers-e-coli-germany?intcmp=239