EcoWorld - Guest Commentary

For the last few weeks it’s tomatos, those wonderful fruits. Over 300 cases of salmonella poisoning from eating tomatoes (maybe) were reported all over the U.S., a country of 300 million people.

Were you afraid to eat a tomato? You do the math of your odds of getting sick from eating one (hint: odds similiar to you winning the lottery). So naturally, we removed all tomatoes from market shelves all over the country and restaurants stopped serving tomatoes on burgers and in your salad.

No matter that nobody died, and probably AT LEAST 50,000 cases of food poisoning occur every DAY from an assortment of bacteria in your food. Maybe you ate a bad oyster or clam, the food server in the restaurant didn’t wash his hands, you ate a chicken sandwich that sat out at room temperature for a few hours, an ecoli burger, etc. So you spend the whole night not sleeping, but barfing and having diarrhea and the next day you feel awful. You don’t report to some doctor because if you have any brains you know what happened and you know you will be fine the day after tomorrow.

To top it off, on June 17 the FDA said all those junked tomatoes would have been safe to eat after all!! The only food scare more stupid than this latest one is the mad cow scare in the U.S. a few years ago. ONE, count em, one cow was discovered to have mad cow disease in  Washington state. Nobody would eat beef and it was a DAIRY cow, not even slated to enter the food supply.

Because of that one sick cow, Japan and South Korea stopped importing all U.S. beef. Of course, the whole mad cow thing started in Europe in the 1980’s. It was hypothesized, and it is still just a hypothesis, that eating mad cow meat could cause  Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in human meat eaters, maybe perhaps.

For more than a decade, 60 million meat eaters in Great Britain had been eating mad cow meat without knowing it. The result? Around 300 people got that disease, maybe from the meat but maybe not, and the whole British beef industry was destroyed (Germany too). I’ll let you do the math on that as well as the tomatoes! I invite comments, especially from readers who might have more good examples of how easily the public can be fooled and terrified by the scare du hour, du week, du month, du year.

In the U.S., Memorial day is BBQ day, especially this year when gasoline prices make lots of folks prefer to stay home and have a cookout with friends instead of travelling somewhere. Get out that lighter fluid, squirt in on your mesquite charcoal briquettes, and fire up. Then grill those hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks, chicken, or whatever and enjoy. BUT WAIT! Grilling or frying any meats creates chemicals that when ingested in really, really high doses causes cancer in laboratory rats. What to do? I lived in Texas for a few years, a state in which proper BBQ (which includes slow smoking of meats in addition to grilling (both producing carcinogens) is a religion. Now I live in California, where many people actually worry about carcinogens in grilled meats.

This post was inspired by an article in my local newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, called “cue tips” http://www.sacbee.com/165/story/960506.html. The article gives advice about how to minimize exposure to these putative nasty chemicals when you grill. Unfortunately, if you follow their advice, the meat you cook will taste like cardboard! First they would have you use lean meats,  trim off all fat, and flip the meat often. They would even have you microwave your steaks awhile before grilling. This is all supposed to reduce the amount of carcinogens formed. A dead Texan would be turning over in his grave reading the Bee article! You might as well cook the steak or burger in boiling water. They would even have you clean your grill with dish detergent!!!

The reason I must post this BBQ blasphemy is because these cautions are just another example of our national obsessive fear-mongering about anything that might be enjoyable.  For more information, readers should read my essay from a few years back on Ecoworld entitled “Chemophobia” http://ecoworld.com/home/articles2.cfm?tid=366. Toward the end of the article I describe research I did on benzo-a-pyrene, a rat carcinogen formed during the frying of meats. Although the fear mongers will say otherwise, NOBODY will EVER get cancer simply from eating fried or grilled meats. I know of no epidemiology study that has compared cancer rates in people who eat lots of BBQ meats vs. those who perhaps eat their meat prepared otherwise (perhaps raw?). If anyone can show me one that purports to show that BBQers have an increased risk of some cancer, please send it to me for critique.  For more about how “scientific” studies are abused, read “Studies Show” http://ecoworld.com/home/articles2.cfm?tid=458.