Monkey Monday: food irradiation, breakfast cereal, and more! 8 September 2008 1:46 pm
Posted by Tracy in : books,breakfast,food safety,geekery,good news,Marion Nestle,milk,monkeys,news,nyc,politics,random,restaurants,school , trackbackUm, not necessarily in that order. Breakfast first, right? Right. Here goes. I had cereal for breakfast for the first time in a very long time today. Not oatmeal (it’s still way too hot for that), Tracy granola with yogurt, like I love, but something more in the muesli genre (hand-me-down free food from my parents) with milk. Turns out this was a bad idea, one which reminded me why I quit eating cold breakfast cereal. I’m just not a big fan of milk, unless it’s transformed in combination with something delicious, like tea or ice cream ingredients. (I’ll make an exception in the case of hot and fresh chocolatey baked goods, and tomato soup. For some reason I really love the contrast between a glass of cold milk and the savory acidity of hot tomato soup. But I digress.) If grains are going to be soggy, I want them warm, and soaked in delicious stir-fry sauce or something — old milk doesn’t count. So I was still hungry after forcing myself to finish the sad little bowl of milk-soaked oats and whatever. All told, cold breakfast cereal is still not my favorite: anything besides granola leaves much to be desired.
In other news of the disappointing, today the Ethicurean reminded me that the FDA now allows irradiation of spinach and lettuce. Their official press release is all about food lasting longer without spoiling, but really what it means is we’ve had one E. coli outbreak too many, so companies want (and now have) permission to sterilize produce before putting it out for sale. For now, they’ll be required to label irradiated foods, but if that freaks out consumers, no doubt some genius in marketing will come up with a new way to describe it, perhaps in terms of pasteurization, which has been around for a nice long time so people aren’t scared of it.
So here’s the thing (fun fact!): If food is produced under sanitary conditions, there’s no need to “pasteurize” it. But apparently growing conditions are way too hard to regulate, so it’s better to let food companies treat their products like they’re potentially toxic. Just like how eggs and meat are supposed to be cooked to death because so many of them are produced in ways that create a freaky-high risk of E. coli and Salmonella contamination! (By the way, before this the FDA already permitted irradiation of meat, poultry, shellfish and dried spices — in that last case I’m willing to believe it’s because of spoilage; the rest strike me as straight-up not trusting food to be sanitary.) For lots more on this, there’s always Marion Nestle’s excellent Food Politics, What to Eat and the encyclopedic Safe Food (my shameless Amazon store plugs, let me show you them):
Hey, shameless pluggery is more fun than complaining! So is being excited about the city I live in! So now I’ll do both, with a little school update as well! In the past week, I’ve discovered Sri Lankan and South African food, at Sigiri and Madiba, respectively, and been to dim sum in Chinatown! Yay! Also, tonight is the first meeting of the Steinhardt food studies new graduate student seminar. So far I’ve met maybe a third of the people starting the program this year, and I’m looking forward to seeing everybody in one place. But for now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find a coffeehouse to sit around for an hour or so. It’s for a class. (Seriously. Yay!)
