People are touchy about their food. If a cookie falls on the floor, many of us don’t think twice before we toss it in the trash.
Adults love to encourage children to wash their presumably filthy hands before dinner. And I just noticed that the Ralph’s where I shop for groceries has installed a new dispenser of sanitizing wipes for the handles of the grocery carts.
So why is it that we’re being so casual about the fact that our food has, as of late, been coming into regular contact with cow feces?
During the latter half of 2006, almost 200 people became ill and three people died because of spinach infected with E. coli bacteria. The scare was so bad that UCLA dining halls stopped serving the green stuff.
The cause of the contamination was cow manure, which was tracked into the spinach by wild pigs (why wild pigs are allowed to frolic in our produce in the first place is another column entirely).
Just last week, ConAgra Foods recalled their Peter Pan Peanut Butter and some batches of Wal-Mart’s Great Value house brand of peanut butter. The reason: salmonella contamination, which probably came from post-processing contact with fecal matter.
And these words and phrases ““ contact with fecal matter, contamination from manure ““ are just nice, technical ways of saying that there’s cow crap in our food.
There hasn’t been much outrage in response to the string of food contaminations, and the Food and Drug Administration has cut the number of food safety inspections it conducts in half in the past three years.
“We have a food safety crisis on the horizon,” said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, in an Associated Press story. He needs to send a telegram to the FDA.
Other than creating stricter regulations or conducting more frequent inspections, a new technology by the name of irradiation could also help to dramatically cut back on the number of food contamination incidents.
Irradiation involves subjecting food to gamma rays which kill the DNA in bacteria, including salmonella and E. coli.
Although it sounds like something I stole from a sci-fi novel, irradiation has been deemed safe and effective by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, FDA, World Health Organization, American Medical Association, and European Commission Scientific Committee on Food.
Irradiation may sound like an expensive, complicated process, but according to the FDA’s Web site, the process would cost no more than five cents per pound of food.
It also has the added benefit of making food, including fresh produce, last much longer than it usually does. Surprisingly, however, irradiation has many opponents, like Food & Water Watch’s Executive Director Wenonah Hauter.
Hauter told Consumer Reports that irradiation is unnecessary because food contamination is preventable by raising cleanliness standards. She also added that irradiating food will allow companies to be less concerned about cleanliness.
Unless hundreds of people become ill due to unsanitary conditions, what will keep food processors from dragging their products through filth before shipping them out to us?
Obviously the FDA would still need to conduct its inspections and, ideally, increase the amount and frequency of them. But Hauter’s analogy is akin to asking why we should vaccinate children against the flu. After all, if they would just wash their hands, they wouldn’t need to worry about getting sick.
Other opponents have claimed that food contamination is an overblown problem, which is partly true.
It’s certainly not an epidemic, and only the very young and very old are at serious risk.
But it’s difficult to ignore the fact that this preventable phenomenon is responsible for the deaths of hundreds each year, and it sickens people many times more.
Only three people died from the E. coli-contaminated spinach last year, but no one’s life should have to end because we refuse to implement a simple, safe and effective procedure to process our food, or because the FDA doesn’t have enough time to make sure there isn’t any fecal matter in our produce.
When I die, it’s going to be for a good reason. Like because I tried to climb the Matterhorn at Disneyland, or I thought base jumping was a great career move.
Not because I decided to order the salad instead of the soup at lunch.
If you’ve ever bitten into a gamma ray, e-mail Strickland at kstrickland@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.