As jalapeños are yanked from produce departments and restaurant menus nationwide, I continue to be agitated by the FDA and this Salmonella Saintpaul situation. There are a lot of things about this whole mess causing my agitation.

OK, I went on and on about food. What follows is over 2,000 words on the subject that I will not be proofreading, and I have to go live life for a while and get away from the computer. I encourage everyone to read it, but be aware, it’s very, very long.

My current annoyance is caused by the fact jalapeños everywhere are now off the menu due to one jalapeño carrying that particular strain of Salmonella having been found at one small distributorship in Texas — a distributorship so small, it only imports one truckload of peppers from Mexico a week and serves only one or two cities. That pepper hardly solves the problem of 1,256 people being infected over the course of months. In my eyes, it isn’t even a signpost on the road to a solution. I would be willing to bet, if I went to my local grocery store, bought one of each produce item available, I would find something disgusting on some of them, even with such a small sample size. I’d even go so far as to say if they tested all the produce in stores in just one of the major outbreak areas, they might be surprised by what they find. No, one jalapeño does not an outbreak solution make.

I also find myself bothered by the fact that as I read news stories about this outbreak, which I have been doing daily since it began, every so often there is the mention of “restaurants” or “restaurant clusters” yet no mention of which restaurants. Most stories don’t mention people having become ill after having a meal outside their own home, and the FDA hasn’t been talking about it either. The focus of attention has continued to be the produce bought in stores. I’d like to see some statistics on how many of the reported cases of Salmonella Saintpaul were verified in people eating at restaurants versus how many were verified in people having bought produce for home consumption. I’d also like to know about these mysterious restaurants that occasionally get mentioned off-handedly in news stories mostly from smaller news outlets.

Then there are the current complaints that retailers haven’t been pulling peppers off their shelves fast enough. The FDA has apparently never heard the tale of the boy who cried wolf. It’s tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes!!! Wait, we found a single jalapeño. It’s peppers, peppers, peppers!!! And which agricultural item will be targeted next week or next month, and how many retail stores, restaurants, and farmers will take another economic ding … for nothing. The FDA has, over the course of the last few years, lost any faith anyone may have had in the agency, and this last crisis has really brought home to many people just how very little they do and can do to make sure the food you eat is safe. It isn’t entirely their fault, but they should claim some of the blame for the fact no one is moving too quickly to jump on the Evil Jalapeño bandwagon. They cry wolf a little too loudly and too often, and after the waste and cost of the tomato recall, I’m not at all surprised people would be skeptical about believing anything they have to say about peppers, especially considering they are holding up one small pepper as evidence.

Additionally, I’d like to say that unlike the breathless news reports I keep hearing and reading, I do not think our food distribution system is broken. It is what it is. There is no possible way for every mouthful of food we consume to be tested for all possible contaminations at all levels of sale on a regular basis. The scale of doing so is beyond our ability and budget, and even if we somehow found a way to have both the manpower and money to accomplish this impossible task, the end result would be nearly empty produce departments on a regular basis. There is, simply put, shit on and in food — at all times and everywhere — that will make people sick. This is a fact. I don’t obsess about it, and I wouldn’t suggest anyone else do so either, but I am aware that it’s true, and I make the best choices I can about what to eat with what little information I am given and do my best to mitigate the problem on my own by using proper food handling measures. That’s really the only thing any of us can do to protect ourselves, unless we all want to become food independent and provide all our own foodstuffs from the sweat of our own brow. That task would be as insurmountable as testing every piece of food eaten in the USA. It’s simply not possible.

I do believe a better system of tracking foodstuffs needs to be put into place, and country-of-origin labeling needs to be implemented broadly with as much information given to the consumer as possible. It’s great I can pick up a tomato and see it’s from the USA or it’s from Mexico, but which state in the respective country? Maybe I don’t really need the information I receive about the foods I buy to be that specific, but someone somewhere should have this information at their fingertips in a moment’s notice. Currently, due to a variety of reasons, they don’t. Creating and maintaining a tracking system for all foodstuffs sounds like another one of those insurmountable and impossible tasks, and I will admit it will be a pain in the butt to set up, but it needs to be done, and once done, it will at least make it feasible to track down the source of contamination or infection quickly enough and accurately enough to put a quick end to any outbreaks, and would help avoid the expense and aggravation of unwarranted recalls — such as throwing out tomatoes by the truckloads for months on end with no evidence whatsoever that tomatoes were ever the cause of illness.

There are many niggling questions lingering around in the inner recesses of my mind concerning this whole Salmonella outbreak and how it’s been handled by the FDA and the news outlets. I doubt many of them will ever be answered. In fact, I suspect, provided no more cases of Salmonella Saintpaul crop up, jalapeños will take the blame for a while longer, and then it will all quietly go away with no resolution whatsoever. It will be forgotten by the FDA, the news outlets, and the public, and we will all move on to a new crisis of some sort. And there’s a crisis a day in the world of food! I don’t imagine anyone reads as many import reports or recall announcements as I do, except perhaps some agents with the FDA. If anyone thinks this Salmonella outbreak is scary, they shouldn’t read as much about the state of food in the USA as I do. It’ll put a person off their feed.

If there is one thing I want anyone reading this lengthy diatribe to walk away with, it is merely the awareness that the current outbreak of Samonella Saintpaul is only the tip of the iceberg lettuce, so let me repeat myself: there is, simply put, shit on and in food — at all times and everywhere^† — that will make people sick. People get sick from food all the time. I personally don’t know anyone who has never gotten sick from something they have eaten, and I’d bet that statistic holds true for everyone reading this. We all either know someone who has encountered bad food, or we have encountered it ourselves.

This problem isn’t going to go away, and it will not be solved in our lifetime. The only thing we can do is make educated choices about what to eat, handle our food properly and only eat food handled by people who know how to do so properly, maintain a healthy immune system and body, and demand that our food distribution system give us as much information about where our food comes from, what’s in it, and when it was produced. I know these things all seem as impossible for each person to implement as it would to test every foodstuff bought and sold. All it requires is a little self-education, a small amount of keeping up with what’s going on in the world of foodstuffs, and maintaining awareness that the word “safe” tends to have multiple meanings, not all of which may line up with each individuals personal meaning of that word.

For example, every time I sit down to eat canned ravioli, I am completely aware that for each serving I consume, I am putting levels of BPA into my body that have been shown to cause adverse effects in animal testing. Considering I tend to eat an entire can, which I believe is listed as slightly more than two servings, I would describe my exposure to BPA from my consumption of canned ravioli to be well beyond safe and healthy. Does this stop me from eating canned ravioli? No, but I am aware of the consequences^††, and I have limited how often I consume that particular product. Eventually, I may decide the potential for negative health effects outweighs my addiction to canned ravioli. Currently, that is not the case, but I am at least aware of what I am putting into my body when I do.

The only options we have at the current time is to be aware of the situation and make good choices or to decide to believe that ignorance is bliss and not care what’s going on with our food. Both choices are valid. I can’t fault someone for not wanting to know about the negative health effects of canned ravioli^†††, or the reasons I don’t eat seafood from China^††††.

I am certain the majority of people out there carry around a whole lot less food-related stress than I do. I wouldn’t say I obsessively stress out about in on a daily or even weekly basis, but I do maintain constant awareness that whatever I put into my body can have effects other than nourishment and potential weight gain, and over the past year or so, that has lead me to making changes in what and how we eat. The end result of my changes has been that both my husband and myself are feeling fitter than ever, and that right there should be reason enough for everyone to put in at least some effort to educate themselves on their eating habits and food sources. Even the smallest changes can bring great benefit.

So ends this morning’s lengthy treatise on food. I certainly didn’t mean to sit here for hours writing nearly 2,000 words on this subject, but I did. I’ll be amazed if anyone makes it through the whole article, but once I got started, I couldn’t stop. I promise not to mention it again … for at least a few days.

1. † Even at my precious farmers market. The only differences between the produce there and the produce at my HEB are I know the people growing the food, I trust them to be doing the best they can, and if something does make me sick, I know exactly who to blame for it. [↩]
2. †† The Wikipedia article has a nice rundown of the effects of BPA in low doses in animal testing. Please note all the negative effects, and then note the allowed human exposure rate is far higher than any of the levels that cause negative effects in animal testing. [↩]
3. ††† BPA, originally discovered in the 1930’s during a search for cheap synthetic hormones for use as hormone replacement therapies for menopausal women, did in fact have a negative effect on my reproductive cycle and system due to my near daily consumption of canned pasta products. Since limiting my intake of things which may expose me to high levels of BPA, I have seen some rather dramatic changes in the functioning of that particular body system, the details of which I shall spare my dear readers. [↩]
4. †††† Reasons which I will spare anyone reading this. In some cases, ignorance really is bliss. I can no longer eat seafood at all, because I know too much about it. [↩]