It seems like when I was a kid, “food poisoning” was something that happened if Aunt Margaret left the macaroni salad in the sun too long, or what your brother got if he actually ate what came out of that puffed-up can in the pantry. Sure, Great Aunt Gertrude said that you should never ever lick the beaters when she made cookies because raw eggs carried a risk of salmonella, but you’d never heard of that actually happening to anybody, and you secretly beleived she told you that just to keep you out of the kitchen while she was baking.
Then we all got older. We would help out in the kitchen, and if a tablespoon or so of ground beef got put into our mouths intead of directly into the meatloaf mix, that was ok. Just don’t ever do that with pork or poultry, ok? Mom would say.
Maybe you remember Thanksgiving turkey. Mom would always get way-too-big a bird and you’d be eating turkey until December 1. And then she’d get a big roast beef for Christmas and the leftovers would last several days. Last year you cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving and the leftovers were barely palatable on the Saturday after. As much as you like roast beef, you didn’t have the courage to cook it yourself.
Then we got older still, and The Authorities said we must be sure we cook meat completely or we risk DEATH from food-bourne pathogens. Now, some of us who had paid attention in Social Studies remembered reading that in third world nations like Ethiopia, they eat raw beef all the time. Some of us started to wonder how exactly they could serve raw beef safely there when we had to cook it silly here, in the land of refrigerators and cattle drives.
Time continued to move, and now Great Aunt Gertrude’s caution is standard, and most people would never think to order a hamburger medium rare — assuming they are someplace where a burger is thick enough to be more than either “raw” or “well done”. I haven’t done beef since 2003, when the United States identified its first case of “mad cow disease.” Now, of course, we are all waiting to see if bird flu will effect poultry flocks in the Western Hemisphere, and whether or not it will spread to humans and become a pandemic.
As if the risk of pathogens was not enough, I first became aware that the food we were eating was maybe not as nutritious as might be optimum a dozen years ago after reading a book called “Please, Doctor, Do Something.” I quickly progressed to the writings of people like Andrew Weil, and came to think that just maybe, more of the household food should come from places that sold organic products. It turns out that many other households have decided the same thing, and now demand for organic products exceeds supply. We already risk weakened rules on organic food, and this news will put further pressure on the system.
My vegetarian friends know that around the beginning of the year, I started asking questions and prowling around for favorite cookbooks. I do not run a fully vegetarian household; it’s loosely pescatarian if not flexitarian. Nor do we eat this way for any kind of spiritual ideal. When I started to consider the idea that “all life is sacred,” I failed to come up with any reason why animal life should be more sacred than plant life. Since just about everything that humans can eat comes from animals or plants, I quickly decided that this was not an adequate yardstick by which I could measure a diet.
Nevertheless, it was clear that our food supply was in trouble, and meat was a riskier proposition than veggies, so we tried “going veggie” for a week. Then we went on a second week. I emptied the freezer of leftover meat one meal at a time, and we kept on eating a largely pescatarian menu. Week after week progressed, and we ate more veggies, fish a couple times a week, but no real meat except occasionally at restaurants. We don’t use a lot of meat substitutes, either.
Fast forward to last week, when for the first time in months, I bought and cooked chicken. More specifically, I bought frozen chicken, took it directly home, put it directly in the freezer, defrosted it days later, and immediately cooked it. If you care, I made Chicken Stroganov, a family favorite that just doesn’t work with tofu. We put the leftovers away immediately after dinner.
The next morning, the leftovers were not fit for human consumption. It was a plastic container of gamey, unappetizing goo.
Our food quality in this nation is continuing to decline. Casual conversations reveal that it is not my imagination that meat just doesn’t keep like it used to. For that matter, onions are much more bitter than they used to be, and tomatos are much mushier than they used to be. The very idea that food quality is declining in quality in “the richest nation on earth” is quite repugnant to me, but I am at a loss for what to do.
What has gone wrong with our food supply, and what can we do to fix it?
In closing, Dick Cheney betting on economic collapse; a late cartoon for Independence Day; we don’t have an illegal immigration problem but rather an illegal employer problem; 20 amazing facts about voting in the United States; maybe we can’t find Osama because we are no longer looking but at least he helped Bush win in 2004; and gas prices stall prices of big vehicles.
I agree that the monocrop, corporate farm, horrible slaughterhouse agriculture that we have is unsustainable and problematic. Also, many forms of produce are sold in forms that ship well rather than forms that taste good. However, I disagree about onions and tomatoes. Most grocery stores carry sweet onions, and the red onions I can get at Ralphs seem suitably oniony. Tomatoes are often bland when out of season, but I don’t have any problem getting firm ones.