When freshman journalism major James Evans saw yesterday the salad bar was out of spinach, he wasn’t too surprised.

After all, diners desperate to spend their meal points before focus dates tend to lead to food shortages. But the focus date passed Friday, and Evans was at the North Campus Diner on Sunday.

“Where’s all the spinach?” Evans demanded.

The fresh spinach had been recalled early Friday morning as a preventive measure in the wake of a nationwide E. coli breakout that resulted in more than 100 illnesses and one fatality, a Dining Services official said.

With officials unsure of how long the nationwide recall will persist, two items available at both diners, the fresh spinach and mesclun salad mix, will remain vacant from salad bars until the Food and Drug Administration declares the food safe, Dining Services spokesman Bart Hipple said. While frozen spinach, which is unaffected by the breakout, will continue to be served as side dishes, those students who had come to expect fresh spinach from the salad bars on a day-to-day basis will just have to wait.

“Occasionally I like a little spinach,” Evans said. “Spinach isn’t really that big a part of my life, [but] I’m mad that there’s been an E. coli breakout.”

For Dining Services officials, the breakout’s impact was minimal. They don’t know exactly how many bags of spinach were dumped, but because fresh spinach arrives five days a week, only one day’s supply was affected, Hipple said.

“It’s not a huge deal,” he said.

At the Route 1 Shoppers Food Warehouse, however, a tinge of paranoia has set in, said a store manager. The grocery store has returned 60 bags of spinach so far, an amount that’s still growing as affected customers continue to return spinach, said the manager, who refused to reveal his name because he was not permitted to talk to the media.

Even beyond the spinach aisle, some fearful customers have begun to avoid all packaged salads, the manager said.

“It’s just something that plays on their minds,” he said. “Right now people are just being cautious.”

Contact reporter Ben Slivnick at slivnickdbk@gmail.com.