Scared silly
“Red meat is not bad for you. Now, blue-green meat, that’s bad for you!”
- Tommy Smothers
“You’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die.”
- my grandma
So how much of a daredevil are you? Have you gone skydiving? Rock climbing? How about eating that container of yoghurt that’s gone past its expiry date?
My sister lived with a woman from France years ago and would watch with equal measures of horror and admiration as she would routinely bring home two small chickens from the supermarket, roast them, eat one for dinner, then put the other one on a plate in the cupboard and pick away at it for another three or four days. She never showed the slightest hint of indelicacy and we took this as an obvious demonstration of the superior resilience of the Franco-gastro-intestinal tract, strengthened by years of eating weird stinky cheeses capable of sneaking out the door by themselves.
In the same vein, food writer Tim Hayward, writing in the Guardian, ponders the downside of that miracle of modern life–refrigeration:
“Have our fridges really made us weak? Have they made us forget how to buy and look after fresh food? Are we so afraid of decay that we’re chilling the life and character from our food? Does industrial quality refrigeration in our homes encourage us to to shop less often, buy more than we need, and ultimately throw more away? And the big question … are you happy to eat food you’ve scraped the fur off?”
Now, food poisoning is no joke, especially in these days of industrial livestock production and cross-contamination of vegetable produce. People do get desperately sick and even die from improperly grown, prepared or stored food. Yet one more reason to buy your food from a small, trusted local farmer! But I think it’s equally true that unfettered access to refrigeration and the dire warnings of food safety authorities have conspired to create a population that is so disconnected from how real food looks and behaves, and so fearful of eating something spoiled that we throw away billions of tons of food rather than just give it a quick sniff.
A friend once came to visit us after having just spent six months living in a Mongolian yurt drinking fermented mare’s milk and snacking on sheep eyes. I had accidentally left a pot of beef chilli out on the stove overnight and was staring doubtfully at it the next morning when he came in. ‘I guess I should probably throw this out,’ I told him. ‘Throw it out??’ he cried incredulously. ‘Westerners and their refrigeration! There’s nothing the matter with it!’ We ate it; we lived.* I was converted.
I’ll be posting tips on how to get more life out of your fresh food and how to sensibly gauge food freshness in the coming weeks!
* I must add that this was in cool weather and only involved consenting adults with healthy immune systems!
April 12th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Years ago I took a mandatory “food safety course” for a job I had. After sitting through several hours of slide presentations, I left wondering how it’s even possible we’re still alive after all the horrors they presented us about the dangers that lurk in our fridges… and pot of chili left on the stove over night. Lots of fear.
A few weeks ago on Quirks and Quarks (CBC Radio) there was a scientist talking about how we’ve sanitized every aspect of our lives and basically have made ourselves sick doing so. She stated the three “D”s — dirt, dung and diapers (I think I have those right) and the bacteria found in these that actually, when exposed to as children, strengthen the immune system. A daycare on a farm is a wonderful place to be!! She spoke about life before refrigerators and how slabs of meat once hung from rafters. The difference, however, was that that meat wasn’t injected with all sorts of vaccinations and steroids and such. Our food has actually changed.
Another thing that has changed is the mass quantities and large scale production. Buy local, buy small, really that’s the only answer. Also, liability seemed to be the major driving factor in the food safety course I took.
April 13th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
I’m the official food-sniffer in our household and it’s a role I take very seriously and insist on maintaining since my husband, bless his soul, is a slave to the best before date. I’ve been known to surreptitiously scoop out some mold from the sour cream, and pour the milk before he sees the carton. He knows I do this and doesn’t care, which proves that it’s the idea of the food being off that freaks him out, not an actual fear that that particular spoonful of sour cream is going to cause catastrophic gastro-intestinal harm.
Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, I’m driven to distraction by the bacteria-phobes going on and on about safe turkey defrosting - people are so freaked out that you can now buy cook-from-frozen turkeys! 15 pounds of frozen solid meat and stuffing? What, in the name of all that’s holy, are they injecting into those things so they aren’t dry as a bone after they’ve been in the oven long enough to defrost AND cook?!
Over the past several years, I’ve been conducting a poll around holiday times and, while my results may not be scientific, my anecdotal evidence gathering has told me that not one person I know and not one person that the people I know know has EVER gotten sick from a turkey at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Not ONE. That’s of course not to say that it doesn’t happen, and that, like you say, food poisoning shouldn’t be taken seriously, but I really think the general population needs a healthy dose of perspective, not Lysol.
I think a lot of the fear comes from not only a disconnect between people and their food, but from an increased alienation from a basic understanding of science. When you lose your faith in yourself to understand the fundamentals of how science affects your daily life, you are more vulnerable to messaging from companies that teach you to be afraid of everything so they can sell more antibacterial wipes. There are all kinds of really accessible sources of scientific information for the layperson - radio shows like Quirks and Quarks (mentioned by Chris), Daily Planet on Discovery Channel Canada, and innumerable websites, blogs, and online newsletters. Bigger than just realizing that salmonella doesn’t spontaneously appear in a bowl of potato salad that’s sat on a picnic table for twenty minutes (it doesn’t), many scientists believe that increasing the layperson’s understanding of science will lead to a greater public support of scientific research. Maybe with more funding and support, scientists could research things like how detrimental it is to not only try to kill all the bacteria around us, but how we’re inevitably creating super bugs that fall into the 0.01% that aren’t wiped out by your favourite spray, wipe, or hand sanitizer. And that maybe these chemicals are mutating them and making them even stronger. Wouldn’t it be amazing if the researchers had the same ability to get their message out as the cleaning product companies?
Armed with the confidence that comes from a basic knowledge and understanding of science, we can make more rational choices that aren’t controlled by messages in advertising and fear of lawsuits.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Our family did not have a fridge until I was maybe 12 years old; I remember an ice box for some foods and we kept our milk in our cool basement. We had milk delivered every couple of days or so from the local farmer. We never got sick from food far as I recall. My mom was a liberal user of javex and Lysol for some reason but I don’t think these disinfectants were used in our kitchen (javex for white sheets and Lysol for whatever). She would never throw away food although she never bought food in excess either so maybe there was no reason for it. Probably because of this upbringing I have never been fearful of a bit of mould or past-due dates not did I boil everything my kid would come into contact with. A little bit of dirt and germs are necessary for our health. Also I have never defrosted my turkey or chicken in the fridge but usually in cold water. And sometimes the Christmas turkey sits out for a couple of hours and no body gets sick the following week of left-overs. Its common sense. People tend to believe too much silliness. I love this site by-the-way!
April 15th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
>”And the big question … are you happy to eat food you’ve scraped the fur off?”
Only if it’s rabbit.
But this post is right on the money. We’re led to follow the rules on the side of the carton, rather than use our own senses, which shows just how endemic our separation from our food has become.
It all comes down to abstraction. Globalism and international supply chains abstract everything - the clothes we wear, the services we enjoy, and the food we eat - because the mechanics of production happen somewhere else, where we can’t relate to them.
We’ve been conditioned not to ask too many questions about where our food comes from and how it got here. It creates a culture that persuades us to trust some arbitrary safety framework imposed by the abstracted supply chain that delivers it.
And why is it that so many people are concerned about best before dates but will quite happily much away on GM foods without worrying about the unknown implications?
April 16th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
@Chris:
You’re right, liability is a huge issue, and obviously no health and safety official can really tell people in good conscience, ‘Enh, that’s probably ok to eat’ just in case that’s a 1 in a million chance it isn’t. You can see from the ridiculous warnings on every product that we buy that people have become completely trigger-happy with lawsuits. But I think it’s part of the overall disturbing trend towards people abandoning personal responsibility for their actions in general. We seem to have turned into a culture of finger-pointers. ‘It wasn’t my fault! They did it!’ But we then, for some unknown reason, place a ridiculous amount of blind trust in corporations whose number 1 reason for existing is to make money. We have become fearful, but I think people are afraid for all the wrong reasons (i.e. terrified of raw meat, but accepting of cruel and dangerous slaughterhouse practices that make the meat unsafe). It’s like complaining that the toilet in your stateroom on the Titanic is clogged after you’ve already hit the iceberg!
@Jen:
I totally agree with you about the ‘ew’ factor with the cook-from-frozen turkeys. It reminds me of another column by Tim Dowling in the Guardian last year where he was talking about convenience food and, in particular, pre-cooked bacon that can sit on an unrefrigerated shelf for six months. He said, no one is THAT time-starved–how much do you have to despise food to eat such a disgusting thing? I also concur about the woeful (and increasingly willful, despite the availability of the information sources you talked about) lack of basic scientific knowledge in the average person, which I think is part and parcel of the decline of basic educational foundations over the past 40 years (now that is a rant for another day!).
@Phyllis:
I think yours is a very sensible approach. I am not a big believer in boiling/sanitising everything that the kids come in contact with either. How else can you build up a healthy immune system–especially if, as Jen says, you’re wiping out all the harmless bacteria with an antiseptic wipe and leaving the 0.01% that are truly evil plenty of space to reproduce? It leaves us more vulnerable to infection, not less. There does seem to be an increasing amount of evidence that lack of the 3 ‘Ds’ that Chris talks about are associated with the increase in asthma rates. Awhile back I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed, where she tried to subsist on various minimum wage jobs in cities across the US (surprise, she couldn’t manage it without descending to a shocking standard of living). She was shocked in particular by the house cleaning firms, which made their cleaners use the same cloth to clean almost everything, spreading some truly disgusting stuff all over the house. No hot water, no detergent, just a mystery bottle of ‘cleaner’ and a single grey rag. I think everyone needs to learn to wash their hands and follow basic hygiene principles, and save their worrying for the really important stuff (see reply to Chris above!).
@Danny:
>We’ve been conditioned not to ask too many questions about where our food comes from and how it got here. It creates a culture that persuades us to trust some arbitrary safety framework imposed by the abstracted supply chain that delivers it.
You’re right, the invented safety framework has become completely necessary to sustain the industrial food production system. Why does food so often go off exactly when they say it will? Because they leave themselves such a small margins. They’ll warehouse food for god knows how long, ship it thousands of miles, then sell it to us suckers at the grocery store right at the end of its unnatural life. I bought cucumbers at the market at the beginning of December that tasted delicious at our Christmas dinner. No way would a Mexican cucumber from the grocery store last more than 10 days. It’s disturbing to see vegetables that you’ve just bought start to decompose almost as soon as you get them home. I’ve ripened green cherry tomatoes in a cardboard box in the basement and they tasted fresh and lovely 2 months after I harvested them! I think it’s one more reason for pervasive food waste–if the food we bought at the store was truly fresh, we’d have more than 3-4 days to use it before it turned to slime in the crisper drawer. Shopping at the farmers’ market or growing your own produce just gives you so much more room for error if you happen to forget something at the back of the fridge for a week.
April 16th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
>”And the big question … are you happy to eat food you’ve scraped the fur off?”
A little belated I realize what “fur” did not mean animal fur.(no points for quickness here!)
In any case - regarding how far removed we are from how food is grown and how the majority of meat is produced is of major import to me. I stopped eating commercially produced pork and chicken some time ago; factory farming is completely inhumane. I try to buy free-range over free-run whenever I can (eggs as well as carcass) and never buy battery chickens. My adult son worked for a few days at one of those massive pig-barn facilities and that ended his pork-eating days. For one thing it was the filth these animals live in due to over-crowding and for another it was the visable excitement demonstrated by the pigs when he stood at the pen and talked to them. “Mom, they have such intelligent faces!” Their short unhappy lives are filled with utter boredom but meat comes in packages right? We have no connect with the animal we consume. Very sad.And speaking of “best by dates”, live flesh starts to rot the moment it dies. Yummmy.