I found two different black widows in the organic grapes, though, the framer out there love the black widows because it keeps the insects under control. (I took them to my biology professor for a verification, but it was hard to not see the perfect bright red hour glass shape on it's belly.)

All Hail Humanure!

But I agree the idea of some birds having at it on my spinach is kinda funny. :-)

get a grip. just rinse your veggies and get on with life.

@IrisMR: Bingo. Where there's a feather, there might be a claw. We didn't feel like sorting through the whole bag looking for talons and beaks.

yea. Feathers fall in fields. But you know, it's supposed to be sorted and cleaned.

Putting aside the organic debate we've got goin' on here, its just a freakin' "feather" (if it was that). Take it out, examine it, throw it away, eat the spinach, simple. Why customer service was called & products taken off the shelves, who knows. Seems a bit much for one measly "feather".

@floydianslip6: Crows are quite common.

@veraikon: Okay, but...spider web versus pesticides? I'm not to the point of buying 100% organic, but even so, I think when weighing organic (as in, not man-made) stuff on your food against pesticides, I'm not so sure why we'd make the choice to ingest pesticides. Organic is a buzzword because it's been abused by manufacturers and we don't yet have a solid accrediting system. Which is a shame and, yeah, it means that what is labeled organic may not really be so. But that's different than whether or not a feather in your spinach is a big deal or not.

@AnnieGetYourFun: I haven't seen birds going at it, but I've seen ducks. To see one duck swoop down from out of nowhere onto another was a little bit funny, a little bit shocking.

@veraikon: It's only largely a "buzzword" because the industrial food lobbyists stripped the gov't definition of "organic" of all true meaning.

But hey, you enjoy those pesticides and genetically-modified crops. You know the ones that the gov't studies - funded by the same industry that produces and relies on them - tells you are "safe for human consumption". I'll take a few spiderwebs and feathers over cancer anyday.

Anyway, yeesh, it's just a bird feather. It's not the bird's severed head or anything. Pick it out. Get over it. Move on.

@Eric1285: I'd prefer tainted with bird feathers to tainted with irradiation and genetic modification, but what's the difference anyway, right?

I was thinking the same thing.

Let's see...

Spinich is grown outside. Birds exist outside. Spinich and birds might exist in same outside. Whoila.

A feather?

I'll be the first to say that I wouldn't eat the feather but big deal! Just wash the spinach and eat it.

This stuff grows outside and as another person posted, there are bird droppings, animal pee, and all kinds of bugs and slugs on your food before you eat it.

@ancientsociety: At the risk of being gross, I was in danger of death from a massive kidney infection last year. My pee was emphatically not sterile.

As for the object found in the spinach... it does not look like a bird feather to me. It looks like a wad of fiber. Such a fibrous mass could have come from a disintegrating spinach stem. Spinach stems are pretty fibrous.

When we start fearing feathers, we know we've got problems.

@just_paranoid: Wow, that's certainly the surest way to get all those organic health nuts sick! Except for the fact that pee is sterile and washes off veggies easily....

I had a friend who worked at a supermarket, he said dead frogs, mud, etc... always came in with fresh produce, they would rinse it and put it on the shelf. This food is from a farm and cut and packaged by machines, that is why i always wash fresh produce and even pre-washed items, no one is going to take care of your food as well as you do. This type of stuff is bound to happen and I am just glad the family decided to just file a complaint and accept their apology instead of trying to launch a lawsuit.

@youbastid: And I like it that way.
The day my spinach costs $20 per lb because some worker had to stand there all day and inspect it for bird feathers and bug love-deposits is the day I grow my own damn spinach.

i like to pee on the organic crop fields in my area.

Oh man, food outside getting mixed with other outside things... Guess minimal processing has it's downside. Personally I'd be happy with a refund and a new bag of spinach. We all know the amount of bugs and other crud we ingest due to most foods, right?

@noquarter: It's got what plants crave.

They should use Brawndo instead.

@HeyThereKiller: not sure what that means, either.

I prefer my errant contaminants so highly processed that I dont even know its there! That's whY I prefer processed foods over organic.

Ignorance is bliss.

@Antediluvian: What!? My food comes from nature! *gasp*

I need to call my senator! All food should be grown in hermetically-sealed and climate-controlled industrial warehouses where workers have to wear full-body white suits and be "de-contaminated" before and after entering lest they spoil my perfect spinach!

@darkened: i'm not sure i understand what you mean. pesticides don't lessen your chances of getting a bird feather in your foods. bugs and dirt, yes, anything else....no.

@darkened: This isn't a problem of food being labeled organic. It's a symptom of what happens when food is processed with little or no direct human supervision. There is no such thing as high quality chopped/processed/frozen veggies, organic or not.

How? Because it's a vegetable grown outdoors in sunshine, rain, and dirt.

Nothing related to organic or conventional production methods AT ALL.

In spite of enhancements to mechanical washing and packaging, it's very difficult to completely clean natural items (fruit, vegetable, leafy green, root crop, berry, etc) and REMOVE ALL TRACES OF NATURE FROM IT, no matter how hard some folks try.

Part of it is because the items are grown, not manufactured, so they're lumpy, non-uniform, and subject to the whims of Nature.

In fact, unless you're eating something you peeled (banana, inside of a potato, corn, avocado, squash, melon, etc), it's pretty much a given that SOMETHING (animal or insect) pooped on it, walked across it, or maybe even had sex on it.

People's removal from the source of their food is becoming more and more problematic. As a culture, America is forgetting where eggs, milk, chicken breasts, pork chops, hamburgers, and ketchup come from, and apparently spinach and lettuce, too.

err....maybe it was e.Coli....it doesn't matter! It was in rehab, it is trying to put that behind it, that was in the past...DAMMIT LEAVE SPINACH ALONE!

@noquarter:

Exactly. Especially if that pesticide is DDT.

Leave spinach ALONE!!!...all you people trying to sell your fresh and frozen, even your baby varieties...Spinach is a living thing! It had salmonella for Christ's sake, don't you have any decency, it needs privacy. And now this...bird feathers are organic dammit! LEAVE SPINACH ALONE! LEAVE SPINACH ALONEEEEEEE!

I like the photo of the "sell by" date. Is this what happens when spinach goes bad? :D

Well, birds are organic...so I don't see the problem here.