Tal Abbary, a freelance writer writes in the quickly diminishing N.Y. Times that she recently moved back to South Florida after seven years in Spain, where supermarket shelves are curiously empty of antibacterial products and superbug threats have not yet become the stuff of media commentary.
Spaniards (or rather, their maids) can scour a home clean like no one else, but bleach is the product of choice, and in recent years, the public has focused its measured fears on high unemployment rates, home evictions or government corruption. Kitchen counters are generally considered innocuous.
A common cultural motto is the psychologically cool “no pasa nada” (roughly — no big deal), meant to take the wind out of the sails of just about any of life’s problems. This is a hard-won ethos in a country that has endured, over mere decades, a bloody civil war followed by dictatorship, transition to democracy, meteoric economic growth, rising immigration and the current financial slump.
This is food safety idiocy.
While culturally correct in the right social circles that also are anti-vaxx, anti-GMO, and can afford to life in New York City, the data suggest otherwise.
My mother was four-years-old when she suffered a bout of undulate fever.
Gramps got rid of the cows the next day.
Even now, with whole genome sequencing and other molecular tools, we humans fail at the most basic microbiological tests: the hygiene hypothesis leaves a lot of bodies.
.jpg)
on June 22nd..jpeg)
asparagus baron of Ontario.jpg)
April 15, the citation was for having no soap in the dispenser at the washing station.
Ben and I went along with Uncle Denton to the Canadian Horticulture Council meeting in Montreal in Feb. 2003. I had chaired a national committee on on-farm food safety program implementation – and the advice was completely ignored – Chapman and I had done years of groundwork with Denton and the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers, and we agreed to share a room at the annual meeting to cut down on expenses.
He showed up a few hours later, seemingly intact.
From the University of Guelph and the beginning of the On Farm Food Safety program, Doug has moved to Kansas State University where he is associate professor of food safety. He is still very much in the industry – just relocated to a different university — and still writing newsletters, hence the reputation of “the guru” of On Farm Food Safety.
And I knew Chapman, way back when.
Beyond introducing me to Red Cap Ale — a beer I drank in university because no one else would touch it and my supply was safe — Homer had a warmth, especially with strangers.