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How Safe is Your Supper? Part 2.

© Bob Ewing

Most food-borne disease in the United States have been attributed to improper storage/holding temperatures, inadequate cooking, poor personal hygiene, cross contamination, improper reheating, and poor storage practices. Most of these are human errors that can be easly corrected. This week we are going to look at the more complex threats to food safety. Threats that won't go away no matter how clean the kitchen, food processing plant, storage or your hands are.

For example, just last year there was considerable turmoil in England over mad cow disease. How safe was British beef? This speculation almost ruined the beef industry in Engalnd. In the United States, popular Talk Show host Oprah Winfrey was sued for a comment on her show that called into question the safety of American beef. Oprah won and freedom of speech triumphed but what about the beef?

Is there a relationship between animal health and the quality of the food we consume? Personally, I believe there is a direct relationship between what we eat and how healthy we are and this includes potential threats to human health from diseased or tainted food sources. If the concerns about BSE (mad cow disease) are valid then I think we need to know more.

Beef is not the only issue.There is a possibility that the pesticides that we use to spray our vegetable crops with in order to protect them from pests and diseases are threatening us. The easiest answer here would be to go organic and not have to worry about mad cows or pesticides. You can begin by asking your butcher or green grocer for organic products. For the moment, they may cost a little more but when the issue may be safety, is the price too high?

Of course, even going organic cannot protect us from e. coli 157 if we fail to ensure that proper sanitary measures are taken from the field to the table. So you see it is all connected and what goes on in the field where the food is grown can have a direct effect on the person sitting at the table allegedly enjoying dinner.

Another issue that needs more public discussion and involvement is food irradiation. I feel that the more steps that there are invloved in the production of food, the greater is the danger that something will go wrong. There is one more threat that I haven't mentioned but cannot be forgotten because it poses a serious threat - salmonella is very much in evidence in our food system.

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