CSI: Miami: Hold the Salad, Please.

After watching last night's CSI: Miami, I'm never eating salad again.

The poisoning of a young girl takes the CSI gang to a farm that supplies "organic" vegetables (in quotes because we later find out some of the veggies are genetically engineered) to a restaurant where the girl ate and contracted E. coli.

It doesn't take long for Wolfe and Eddie Cibrian and Walter (who is one of my favorite new additions to the show) to find the source of the E. coli. Basically the plants were being irrigated with water from a well. The well water was being contaminated by water from a drain pipe which came from a field in which a bazillion cows were pooping all day long.

The best part of the show was the really cool montage showing the path of the E. coli (shown as ominous magenta fuzzies) from the drainage pipe to the well to the irrigation to the illegal immigrant cutting the greens from the soil and loading it in the truck to the restaurant worker cutting up the greens to the waiter bringing it to the poor unsuspecting girl. Bon appetit!

Also, the girl's boyfriend, who had been about to propose to her, also died of brain failure. The cause? He had eaten corn on the cob, which had been genetically engineered to be easier to digest. (I've never actually found it difficult to digest corn, but maybe my intestines know something I don't.) Unfortunately, crossing the corn with the bacteria that digests it creates a botulism gene in 1 out of 100 cases. Something like that. So the guy got botulism poisoning from eating corn.

Moral of the story: Don't eat your vegetables.

The end of the episode was really weird. It showed Eddie Cibrian running along the beach with a surfboard. Along the way, he picks up a couple of empty cans and throws them in the recycling bin nearby. (Because in reality, recycling bins are always exactly where you need them, especially on a beach.) Then he runs into the surf. At first, I thought it was a gratuitous shot of Eddie Cibrian shirtless. Boy, that CBS sure knows its audience, I thought.

Then there were a couple of shots of Natalia (or Calleigh, I forget) watering plants at a community garden. And that's when I remembered something I had read earlier yesterday, about the networks all coming together to promote volunteering.

Now, I'm all for volunteering. But two things: 1. A random montage that makes no sense in the context of the episode will only serve to confuse the viewer, not inspire him/her to volunteer. 2. Why, why, why would they show a volunteer watering plants when the previous 40 minutes of the episode was about E. coli poisoning from watered plants? All I could think was, Gee, I hope they tested the water source at that community garden.