There is shit in your hamburgers and pus in your milk.

Isn’t that a Patsy Cline song?

On another note, yesterday I ate some food out of my trash can at work. It was the little scrappy bits in the take out box, in my clean, otherwise empty trash can. It’s not any different that if I had left the box on my desk, but something about it felt “wrong”. But I don’t care.

Crunch, Crunch, Crunch.

Protein!

“That smell? It’s actual particles entering your body.”

It makes sense that we co-evolved with our parasites, and modern medicine with it’s antiseptic ideals automatically assumed any level of infestation should be eradicated.

The chance bit of inorganic matter in our foods is the least of our worries. It’s the inorganic stuff we spray and inject by choice that’s causing so many problems.

re: Zuzu @9; years ago I did a little social experiment. Ask some one to swallow. Then to spit in a glass and drink it. It’s exactly the same stuff…

Regarding Mickey D. I used to work with an engineer who worked there developing food processing machinery. He designed a machine that used a vision system to scan the sheet of processed fish paste that was eventually molded into a sandwich. When it detected a worm, it used a jet of air to remove it from the fish stream.

Now consider that most fine food restaurants or home cooks wouldn’t go to such efforts.

Better to eat unidentified protein or partially hydrogenated oils & preservatives?

I eat locally grown organically raised food when I can, but always remember that it’s just been sitting outside where anything can happen, and prepare it accordingly.

And I’ll take them any day over not being able to feed the population. Malnutrition/starvation is a much more immediate killer than a vaguely possible correlation of pesticides in general and health effects.

Let’s keep the toxic botulism, salmonella, lead and other nasty things out, and let a few high-protein maggots in. Casu Marzu anyone?

Among the avoidable problems are a regulatory agencies which work in the interests of corporations they’re supposed to be regulating. The agencies fail in serious ways. The USDA doesn’t do enough to prevent mad cow disease from breaking out in US meat supplies. Inspecting every cow costs more than the corporations they regulate want to pay for. As a result, we continue to risk circulating and exporting mad cow meat. In 2006 Japan banned US imported meat after finding carcass parts that could have contained BSE.

We don’t think of exporting harm to others so that chemical corporations can profit. Beth Gammie wrote a report called “Human Rights Implications of the Export of Banned Pesticides” on how the EPA’s pesticide export policy allows exporting pesticides we ban for domestic use (Gammie’s report mentioned DBCP being sold by American Vanguard corporation). This ends up being a two-fold problem: First, it’s unethical: our policy says it’s not safe enough for us to use and consume the banned chemicals, but it’s good enough for someone else in another country to use and consume. This unethical behavior comes back at us in the second problem: we end up consuming it anyway because we buy produce sprayed with the banned chemicals.

Then there’s the horrible worker conditions we tolerate because raising the minimum standard would be more expensive. Eric Schlosser documents these disasters in “Fast Food Nation” and in the movie of the same name (made with Schlosser’s cooperation). Worker sterility due to exposure to domestically banned chemicals is also mentioned in Gammie’s report.

It’s hard to overlook these things or rationalize them away by concluding that fixing them is too much to ask. We’re not dealing with organizations that fail to choose perfection. We’re dealing with preventable problems we choose not to solve because we favor corporate greed over our own lives.

Red Bull?

And I’m not too keen on feces in my food. Salmonella? Yeah, not keen on that. But the E. coli H7:0157 (I think I have that number correct) is what really alarms me.

Might I suggest two books by Nicols Fox to the Boing Boing readership?

“Spoiled: Why Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It.”

- and -

“It was Probably Something You Ate; A Practical Guide to Avoiding and Surviving Foodbourne Illness.”

These books aren’t the most recent on the subject, but they’re pretty good.

I have no patience for the germ-phobic and feel that, more often than not, cleaning products are worse for you than the organisms they are being used to destroy.

But I’m also really annoyed by the blustery, “Oh, our food is better now than it has ever been!” types.

Actually, it’s not. The methods used to manufacture more and more food for more and more profit have put our health and environment at risk in all kinds of ways.

Part of the reason that can happen is because of the strange creature that is the American consumer. Yep, we buy all kinds of hideous cleaning products for fear of “germs”. We’ll wipe down our toddlers’ toys with bleach products. But at the same time, we tolerate chicken dipped in fecal soup. We accept that all eggs are toxic unless they are cooked rubber-hard. We are so ignorant of history and of biology, that we just assume it was forever thus.

We’re fucking damn crazy, is what we are. So spray your kid down with Clorox before you sit him down to a meal of Feces McNuggets.

Ack.