Food safety scares in the US

There has been a spate of food safety scares in the US recently. The latest concerns an elevated level of salmonella infections in eggs. Several different products have been affected in previous scares, including spinach. What do you have to do to spinach to make it dangerous enough to spark a governmental response?

Increasing amounts of the food that Americans consume is produced in huge factories by a shrinking number of large companies. As the number of companies producing food drops the impact of a problem with a producer gets bigger. The food security of large sections of the developed world is left at the mercy of the directors of a small number of companies. The recent financial crisis has shown that leaders of corporations are not to be trusted with the greater good. Food giants will be no different, and the impact on society could be just as devastating.

At a recent inspection of an egg producer (they are not farmers any more) piles of dead rats, manure and maggots were found a short distance from the egg production area.

In a world where so few people know how to produce any of their own food, what would be the impact of the shutdown of a significant portion of the current manufacturing machinery?

How do ordinary people protect themselves against this threat?

It is difficult to see how a person can protect themselves fully against this without being self sufficient and I am not advocating that for most people. However growing some of your own food. Cooking as much of your food as you can and finding out where it all comes from are three steps that can make a big difference to your well being, both now and in the case of a bigger scale problem in the future.

Food rules

I have been trying to eat a bit healthier for the last while now. This means mostly vegetarian stuff. I found Michael Pollan's book very useful in deciding what's on the menu.

It all boils down to this pithy little line: Eat food, mostly plants, not too much . 

The eat food bit means stuff that has received little or nor processing. It turns out that by cooking from scratch you can stick reasonably well to this advice. It takes a while to change from using processed stuff to more natural equivalents, but it is worth the effort. Buying less meat saves money, so buying organic vegetables and oil becomes a more realistic choice. 

We threw out our Flora spread. Real butter for everything now. We had toast for breakfast with just butter. Delicious. No need for any jam or marmalade. Using fake spreads is just lubricant for your mouth really. I don't care what they say in the promotional material, factory produced stuff is not for eating.

Mostly plants. The garden is bursting with vegetables at the moment, so we are spoiled for choice. Made a mint and garlic dahl as part of dinner yesterday. Very nice. Good to find a use for the mint that is trying to take over my vegetable patch. Couple that with the huge range of fruit and vegetables at Lidl and Aldi and we don't have any excuse for not eating more vegetables. 

Not too much is a bit harder. I am a great believer in eating until you are full. Especially for the main meal of the day. As long as what you are filling up on is good food then it should not matter too much. Not that I am disagreeing with the evidence for calorie restriction, but I just don't want to suffer unnecessarily to be healthy.