insights into the world of caffeinated monkeys
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| javamonkey insights into the world of caffeinated monkeys |
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Friday, September 22, 2006 Bacteri-yum With spinach pulled from grocery store shelves because of the E.coli outbreaks, and way too much time spent at work reading the New York Times, I give you some interesting articles. First, this gem from the Times. Read parts 2 and 4 ("Keeping the Mystery in Meat" and "Ham and Virus on Rye, Please"). Follow with a nice big drink from this to wash it down. Is anyone but me disturbed by these articles? First, labeling of meat--I would like to know where my food is coming from. I would like to know if it's organic or genetically altered or Canadian, not because any of those things would prevent me from purchasing the product, but just because I'm curious. No, I'm not afraid of mad cow disease (some of you would probably say I'm already a mad cow), but the fact that our farmers, food packagers, and manufacturers don't want us to know is scary. What exactly is it that you don't want your consumers to know and why are you so afraid of a label? I think it is a means to avoid responsibility to the consumer--take the current ban on spinach due to the E.coli outbreak. If you look at the dates of when these cases of E.coli infection and death happened, it was not within a few days of the ban on spinach. It was about a month ago that people were getting sick. (Public health officials are now looking back through reported cases of food poisoning and food-bourne illnesses to see if they can track back to the start of the outbreak. More cases are being reported, yes, but these are not new cases. They are old cases that are now being linked to tainted spinach I think spinach is going to receive a lot of blame for sickness that it didn't cause, because it's the scapegoat now, but that's another issue.) So why did it take a month for the source of the E.coli to be found and pulled from the shelves? Because of the labelling--the producers of your food (for the most part) don't want you to know where your food is coming from, what they did to it, or where they're going to send it. It's taken a month to figure out that the sickness came from spinach, and to track it back to the brand. I doubt if they'll ever figure out why the spinach was tainted, which brings us to part two of article #1. The easiest way to prevent an E.Coli outbreak is good hygiene. Seriously, don't spread manure in your fields, make sure your food handlers wash their hands, keep your packaging plants clean--don't process meat and produce on the same equipment without thorough sanitation of the area first. Hygiene is apparently hard. Hot water and soap are apparently astronomically costly, and asking a food processor to use these two things is asking too much. So rather than focus on proper hygiene, someone has decided that the easier way to deal with bacteria that cause food-bourne illness is to spray the food with a bacteria-eating viral concoction. Just to be clear about this--it's easier to spray your food with viruses than to practice good hygiene. I find it disturbing that a food manufacturer sees that as the best idea. However, let's move onto article #2, and then come back to that thought. Article 2 wants the FDA to step in and regulate the amount of salt that food processers and manufacturers can use in food. I understand that a high sodium diet is linked to heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and a host of other problems. Should there be so much sodium in processed foods? Probably not, however, if you're concerned about it, make a different food choice. Do we really want the FDA to regulate the amount of salt that can be in a food? I don't. I like my cheeses to taste like cheese, my meat to be meaty, and my processed food choices to be salty and shelf stable. I think asking the FDA to regulate salt is a recipe for bland, horrible-tasting food. Perhaps the efforts being made to ask the FDA to regulate salt should be directed into asking the FDA to ban food manufacturers from spraying foods with viruses, to promoting good hygienic food-handling techniques both on the consumer level and at the processing level, to requiring labels on foods with basics like the origins of the food and the name and location of the processor/farmer. posted by jaime | 7:29 PM 0 comments |
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