Yes, Yes, We Are What We Eat

Do Republicans want you and your family to die? Not necessarily. Republican Party orthodoxy adamantly opposes federal regulatory protections and has steadfastly claimed that the market-- which they worship far more assiduously than Jesus-- should correct health and safety issues, not the government. And if we lived in a rural 18th century setting they might be at least partially correct. But we don't; and they're not. Sure poisonous food will tend to put a company out of business-- the market forces in action-- but how about if a hundred or a thousand children die first?

Today's NY Times has a very different kind of editorial: "Food Safety For People Who Don't Cook." Being a raw foodist, I couldn't wait to read it. But it wasn't about people looking for nutritious diets by avoiding cooking and cancer-causing oils. It's about the polar opposite-- people who eat processed fast food-- and how avoiding outbreaks of foodborne illnesses is lately being called part of consumers' personal responsibility by the lucrative food processing industry. The Times assembled an impressive panel to debate the issue.

First up was Douglas Powell, an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University and the editor of barfblog.com. He makes the point that self-serving irresponsible companies like ConAgra are being ingenuous when they try to shove responsibility onto consumers.

Food safety isn’t simple-- it’s hard. For decades, consumers have been blamed for foodborne illness-- with unsubstantiated statements like, “the majority of foodborne illness happens in the home.” Yet increasingly the outbreaks in foods like peanut butter, pot pies, pet food, pizza, spinach and tomatoes have little to do with how consumers handle the food.

Everyone from farm-to-fork has a food safety responsibility, but putting the onus on consumers for processed foods or fresh produce is disingenuous-- especially for those who profit from the sale of these products.

Ann Cooper is a chef and author of Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children. For someone who eats cooked food her perspective is remarkably sane:

Large multi-national corporations started taking over our food supply a generation ago, convincing consumers that processed food would be safer and easier. If we look at advertisements from the 1950s, the message was that processed food would help mothers get out of the kitchen while providing nutritional food to their kids. The notion that processed is safer has carried over to school food service administrators all across the country, causing them to switch from roasting fresh chicken to highly processed chicken nuggets, pizza pockets and burritos, all hermetically sealed.

These plastic wrapped frozen lunch items are touted as safer because you heat them in the plastic, hold them in the plastic and serve them in the plastic, never needing to worry about contamination.

In fact these companies have gotten so good at marketing the safety of these products that most schools in our country are truly afraid of cooking raw chicken–- as if it’s a foreign object from another planet–- as opposed to a food that families have been cooking for eons.

And now, these food manufacturers-- the ones that convinced us to stop cooking and that good food can come frozen in plastic-- have realized that mass production can lead to unsafe food, and so they are trying to transfer the responsibility back to consumers who no longer know how to cook.

This is crazy. We now have a generation that doesn’t cook. If the companies are selling a fully cooked highly processed product, they-- not the eater-- should bear responsibility for its safety.

If we want a safe, healthy and delicious food supply we need to cook. We need to realize that highly processed foods aren’t better and even the companies are realizing that they’re not safer.

They close-- fair and balanced-- with right-wing ideologue Walter Olson, an apologist for Big Business: [W]hat seems to be increasing is not so much food-borne illness itself as our ability to trace its origins accurately, and get the word out about it widely and quickly. As for why food processors are moving to more conservative (higher-temperature) cooking recommendations, wouldn’t you do that too if faced with mounting political pressure and lawsuit risk? ...There has never been a guarantee that nasty bugs would not grow on food, and there isn’t one now."

I travel a lot and I prefer renting a house or apartment to staying in a hotel partially because it is so much more healthful in every way to prepare your own food than to eat out all the time. The apartment I rent in Bangkok is over a McDonald's and although the main entrance to the building is not through the McDonald's, it's a shortcut. It's also the only times I've ever been in a McDonald's. I don't eat that stuff; I don't even think of it as "food," just manufactured feeding materials. Have a great weekend. Here's your chance to learn something about eating healthy raw food as an alternative to the processed stuff that will make you sick and kill you.