The other day I read an article I
felt was a great incentive for losing weight – because it instantly made me
want to quit eating. It said there are
approximately 76 million cases of food poisoning and food-borne illnesses in
America each year.
The article went on to list methods
of prevention, such as never leaving food unrefrigerated for longer than two
hours, and cooking food until its inner temperature reaches a minimum of 160
degrees.
All I can say is I’m pretty sure I
should have been dead years ago.
Back when I was in grammar school,
I used to carry tuna-salad sandwiches in my lunchbox, which I kept in my
desk. There was nothing in the lunchbox
to keep the sandwiches cold, like an ice pack. And in May and June the
classroom usually was about the temperature of the Sahara.
My sandwiches just sat around from
the time I left home at 7:30 in the morning until I finally ate them at noon.
According to the article I just read, the tuna salad should have been so full
of live bacteria by then, the sandwich could have jumped out of the lunchbox
and danced across the lunch table.
In my younger days, I also drank
eggnog, and when my mother baked cakes, I licked the cake-batter bowl, not even
knowing (or caring) that both contained raw, and perhaps salmonella-infested,
eggs.
And I remember one summer when I
visited Jill, a friend of mine who lived near London. We left her house at 7:00
one morning for a full day of sightseeing, and didn’t stop to rest until about
2:00 that afternoon.
“I’m starving,” I said to her as we
plunked down on a park bench.
Jill smiled, reached into her
handbag and pulled out two egg-salad sandwiches wrapped in plastic. “I made these before we left this morning!”
It was the best egg-salad sandwich
I’d ever eaten. And even though it had been sitting in the bottom of a purse
for seven hours, it didn’t bother my stomach a bit.
Perhaps it’s because ignorance was
bliss back then.
Nowadays, however, the subject of
food poisoning has become so widespread, I find myself growing more and more paranoid
about everything I eat. And in the process, I'm probably driving everyone crazy.
For example, I read that a group of
people at some church picnic in another state all got deathly ill from eating
bruised tomatoes.
I’d never really considered
tomatoes to be any sort of health threat before, but after I read that, I found
myself carefully studying them for bruises, even though I wasn’t even sure what
a bruised tomato looked like. I felt a
little indentation on one in the supermarket the other day, so I took it over
to the produce clerk.
“Is this just a harmless dent or do
you think it might be a potentially life-threatening bruise?” I asked him.
The look he gave me told me the
only thing he thought was dented was my head.
And then there’s fish. Fresh fish should have no odor whatsoever,
according to an expert on TV. “If fish
has a fishy smell or even worse, it smells like ammonia, it’s old!” the guy
said. “Don’t eat it!”
As a result, I have sniffed so many
fish, I feel like an otter.
But the food that has me the most
frightened is chicken. I blame Chef
Emeril Lagasse, who was cooking chicken on a TV show one night.
“When you handle chicken,” he said,
“be sure to wash your hands right away. Also, wash the counter, the dish you
put the raw chicken on, and anything that came within 10 feet of it! And then wash everything all over again! You
can’t be too careful with chicken! It can be full of deadly salmonella
bacteria.”
Chicken always has been one of my
favorite foods, but every time I’m about to cook it now, I feel as if I should
be wearing a hazmat suit. And after I touch it, I am tempted hose myself down
with Lysol. I’m always afraid I might miss cleaning a spot on the counter, and
the chicken bacteria in that one spot will run rampant, rapidly breed and
overtake the kitchen, kind of like a bacteria coup.
So just to be on the safe side, from
now on, everything I put into my oven is going to be cooked at a bacteria-annihilating 550 degrees.
Maybe I should go
check the batteries in my smoke detectors.
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