There was a time, not that many years ago, in which I thought that my being lacto-ovo-vegetarian would protect me against most if not all food poisoning. No more. I still have reasons to be a sprout-eater, but food safety is no longer among them.
Guess who I blame.
Not that long ago my grandfather and great-grandfather had pretty much 100% control over the food that their families consumed. They either grew it or traded for it from the producer or collected it from the wild.
Sure seems like we have slipped backwards in some ways and I am not so sure that being able to get fresh food off season from the other hemisphere is all that it is cracked up to be. Nor does it seem such and advantage to have all of your foods enriched and ready to eat and shelf stable and all that.
I already reject prepared foods and foods where I do not know the origin but it looks like I am going to have to be even pickier...that or give it up and just let it goes where it goes.
The other hidden danger in this arrangement is that we are in real trouble if there is a transportation breakdown, as occurs on the Gulf Coast during hurricanes.
This was also a major problem for the Soviet Union, the centralization of production with only an limited number of suppliers for critical items.
If there is a major petroleum shortage due to conflicts in the Persian Gulf, how do these components get to the US?
The military refers to this as logistics, and no commander would be happy to have his supply lines this stretched.
That is definitely the other side of the coin Bryan. I have thought more and more about starting my garden up again. I am already the subject of some derision because I keep a rotating 6 months supply of staples like flour, corn meal, salt, dried beans, dried milk, canned tomatoes, broths etc. on the shelf at all times. It won't be fancy but I can feed myself and Madam for 5 or six months without having to depend on outside input. As we used to say in the Navy...it can turn to into a world of shit in a heartbeat.
As I'm sure all of us on this thread do, because we live in areas vulnerable to hurricanes, I keep a rotating stock of canned goods and bottled water; I'm eating and drinking my way through the last of the 2005 stock at the moment. But at some point, we cannot even depend on that to be safe, and I'm not talking only about the age of the food: at some point, the canned goods may have been contaminated before they were canned.
I've said the following on some site this week; Fallenmonk, please pardon me if it was here... I repeat myself a lot lately...
Public health has been a science for something over a century now, and the mathematics of epidemiology have been well understood for at least half that period. This is not, forgive the expression, rocket science: we understand how disease, contamination, etc. spread, and in many cases, we know what measures can prevent the spread. Certainly in cases of food contamination, we know how to detect them and what to do about them. That knowledge is deliberately not being deployed against some problems, because doing so would inconvenience some corporate suppliers, disturb some international trade relationships, etc. This must end. Science must be allowed to do what its practitioners know how to do to protect us... corporate inconvenience be damned.
Steve you're so lucky...you get to eat sprouts! People with Lupus can't eat sprouts...it's high in (something)that causes problems...such as flares. No more sprout sandwiches for me. Now I'll have to stop eating pork...there goes my Chili Verde burritos...damnit. We all know this administration has cut back on every conceivable thing they could to put money somewhere else that it won't do any good...why change now? We'll be like the Empires of the past that couldn't sustain themselves. What a thing to look forward to.
We have incompetent figureheads running things and they got those jobs for only one reason. They sucked up!
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