Top 5 food safety myths
Top 5 Records presents Top 5 Food Safety Myths by Bee Wilson, the author of "Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud.”
• The American food supply has never been so dangerous.
Wrong. If you find it terrifying feeding your family now, try imagining yourself in Washington or New York from the 1850s to the 1900s. You try to buy vinegar; you are sold sulfuric acid. Your peas come greened with copper, giving you a dose of heavy metal poisoning with every bite. Spices are bulked with breadcrumbs or sawdust. Children's candies are colored with poisonous lead. Canned goods are laced with copper, tin and toxic preservatives.
• Packaged food is safer.
Packaged food is potentially less safe than unpackaged food. It passes through many hands before it reaches the consumer, increasing the odds that it has been tampered with at some point along the way. Plenty of packaged food is mislabeled — as is the case with the formula scandal in China, which has affected well-known brands.
• People who buy organic food don't have to worry.
As with any other culinary fetish, "organic" is a target for swindlers. There have been numerous cases of organic food fraud in recent years — mass-produced eggs passed off as "organic free-range," for example.
• Science makes our food less healthy.
We owe a huge amount to the quiet behind-the-scenes work of scientists — the food detectives who do their bit to uncover food fraud.
• Eating safely comes down to individual behavior.
If we all take personal responsibility for washing fruits and vegetables and cooking poultry until it's piping hot, surely we'll be safe? Not so. Food safety is largely a question of politics. The Chinese dairy scandal demonstrated what happens when a government fails catastrophically at regulating its food supply.
Puking Myths: How to tell the difference between foodborne illness and the flu
.jpg)
During the holidays I heard a couple of barf stories that were attributed to uncertain causes. At the same time, Doug and I were laid up with the flu for about two weeks, neither of us really puking but feeling exhausted, nauseated with chills and muscle aches. One woman said she had the flu, too … that it came on really fast, was coming out both ends, and then she felt better the next day. I asked her, “Are you sure it wasn’t foodborne illness?” “Might’ve been…” she replied thoughtfully, probably going over the list of things she had eaten. Another friend just got back from Chicago – a trip that she said was ruined by her husband puking his guts out. They thought it was the Polish buffet because while he chose some foods, she had others, and she assumed something he ate was off. Might’ve been. But how do you know when it’s food poisoning and when it’s the flu?
The following list of flu symptoms, which I looked up while I was laid up on the couch over break, comes from the CDC :
Flufacts.com suggests you know the FACTS (Fever, Aches, Chills, Tiredness,Influenza usually starts suddenly and may include the following symptoms:
* Fever (usually high)
* Headache
* Tiredness (can be extreme)
* Cough
* Sore throat
* Runny or stuffy nose
* Body aches
* Diarrhea and vomiting (more common among children than adults)
Sudden symptoms)
If you have foodborne illness, the FDA’s Bad Bug Book gives a comprehensive list of suspects by symptom and time of onset. It can be a little more complicated to diagnose as some toxins, such as shellfish toxin, can have an onset of diarrhea and vomiting in under an hour whereas salmonella takes on average 2-4 days to produce possible symptoms of abdominal cramps, diarrhea, vomiting, fever, chills, malaise, nausea, and/or headache.
Foodborne illness is not usually (although sometimes can be) caused by the last thing you ate, and the flu does not usually (but sometimes can) produce vomiting and diarrhea in adults. Next time you’re puking your guts out, if you can manage to concentrate, you might have to make a longer grocery list of items in your diet. Was it what you had three days ago? Might’ve been.
