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FOOD SAFETY
Spoiled Food: Beware and Be Aware!
America’s food system rests on seriously unstable foundations
Years ago, my father told me he’d gotten very sick from salmonella after eating some bad oysters.
Our dog Jack routinely eats unidentifiable objects that he finds outside. They might be dead birds, gator feces, or rotten parts of baby rabbits killed by our neighborhood bobcat.
Both Jack and my father survived. But our entire society is built on trust: trust that food makers won’t be making and selling poisonous food. Trust that restaurants won’t serve spoiled food. Trust that the food we’re buying will at least meet our basic nutritional needs.
That trust is breaking down: in ways, the U.S. is returning to the days of Upton Sinclair’s 1905 muckraking expose, The Jungle, which detailed rat feces, insect parts, and severed fingers being ground up and made into hamburgers and hotdogs. Public outrage at Sinclair’s valid expose of horrible working conditions and unsafe meat led to a change in what people would accept, eat, and how food would be produced.
Because of corporate greed and social corruption, our society’s emphasis on safety and good nutrition has already deteriorated, and what little we have left is at-risk.
