Gayla
Jan 2, 2006, 11:51 AM
Post #23 of 46
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Re: [Mexcan] Treating Veggies and Fruit
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After 30 years in various segments of the food business I've learned alot about food safety -- - Most fruits and vegetables are contaminated with the naturally occuring flora and fauna of the environment in which they were grown. Some of this flora and fauna the human body can adapt to, some it can not. Why risk your health, better to be safe than sorry, or at the least very sick.
- Microdyn, chlorine, etc. will kill the harmful stuff on the outside of the fruit or veg.
- All harmful pathogens are not created equal. Some are bacteria, some are viruses and some are spores. They don't all die at the same rate, spores, for instance, are hard to kill. Ergo, you need to soak your stuff in order to give the killing agents time to kill what they are intended to kill
- Food can be contaminated from many different sources. Odwalla Juices found out the hard way and it almost put them out of business. They were producing one of the only natural, unpurified, organic apple juices in the U.S...........that is until they killed a couple of kids with it. Turns out that they were using organic apples that had fallen off of organic trees into, well, organic matter. Even though they thoroughly washed their apples before processing, the temperature and duration of the wash were not long enough to get rid of the harmful organic pests. Odwalla no long makes organic, unpurified, unfiltered, naturally raw apple juice. Even the most carefully/ecologically grown produce can be unsafe. What you can't see can hurt you.
- Why do the infamous they warn you to wash fruits and vegetables with a thick rind or outer coating since you're just going to peel it and toss it anyway? Picture it -- you've just scored a perfectly ripe melon, wiped it off any residual dirt, it looks to be perfectly fine. Consider this, it's not the melon that's the problem here, it's the knife you use to cut the melon. If the skin of the melon, or other fruit, is contaminated, as you continually cut through the rind, skin, shell, whatever, you are depositing whatever bacteria, virus or spore that may have been on the out rind of the fruit/vegetable on the inside flesh that you're going to eat. There was a Sizzler in central Oregon that learned this lesson the hard way several years ago. Made a bunch of people sick because their pantry cook had not washed the melons that had contaminated rinds. As the cook cut the melons s/he transferred the contaminate from the outside of the fruit to the inside. It's that simple. BTW, that Sizzler went out of business.
- Chi-chi's is still trying to recover from the contaminated green onions that had been received from a grower in Mexico. Something the grower used. And then there was the very popular taqueria in Redwood City, CA that had a dynamite lunch business and an equally dynamite salsa cruda. Killed 2 people before the local health authorities figured out that the cilantro used in the salsa was contaminated.
- Oh, and the idea that Mexican's seem more immune to the local food contaminates is only partially accurate. The human body is an amazing thing, it will adapt to what's in the local environment to a large extent, but not to everything. But even Mexican's get sick too, and some die each year from food contaminates. And after many years, I can also say that my Mexican employees that went home for holidays usually got sick when they got home because their body had adapted to their American environment. And many Mexican's get sick when they first come to the hygeine-phobic States.
Sadly, a vast majority of Americans have no understanding or concept of how the food chain really works. The connection to the land and the food chain is still apparent in Mexico. You probably have a way better idea of where your food came from, how it was grown, produced or slaughtered, and possible who even did the growing, producing or slaughtering in Mexico than you do in the U.S. It doesn't necessarily make your food any safer, just more personal. Last year I had the opportunity to visit a sausage maker in Teotitlan del Valle in Oaxaca and see how he made his product. I love sausage, any kind of sausage and I often feel that it's probably better that I don't knwo what's in it. Having visited several U.S. packing plants it's generally not a happy experience. The little sausage maker in Teotitlan was a 3rd generation salchichero, his shop was spotless clean (you could literally eat off the floor) as was his entire method of making and stuffing sausages. Someone remarked about how clean his operation was and his answer was equally telling - "this is a small village, everyone knows my product, the risk to my reputation and business is too big for me to take shortcuts and make someone sick". It's not exactly the same story with U.S. agribusiness ;-)
Germs are a fact of life no matter where you live and no matter what you eat. Some are good, some not so good, and a few - like spores - that can ultimately kill you. And, unfortunately, like everything else germs are mutating in order to survive the onslaught of antibacterials with which we humans keep trying to kill them. Judicious use of safegards such as Microdyne and a little common sense will prevent a large majority of food borne illnesses.
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