Have you ever really looked at a burger? It’s not pretty. One time, I took a bite out of hamburger at McDonalds. It was a Big ‘N’ Tasty, promising both size and deliciousness. Chewing the first bite of my greasy and drool-inducing hamburger, I inspected the “all beef patty” nestled in with the lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle slices, and special sauce. The meat was a pinkish brown, oily conglomerate of ground beef particles, sparsely scattered with mysterious white bits. I looked at the burger, still chewing the bite in my mouth, staring at the white speck surrounded by glistening meat. What was it?
You know how sometimes when you take a bite of a burger there’s that one hard morsel that you can hear crunching? What is it, a piece of bone? Questions raced through my mind as I imagined the possibilities.
Then, I began thinking outside the cow.
We don’t usually look closely at the food we put in our mouth. If it doesn’t look or smell suspicious, down the hatch it goes. We trust whoever cooked the food, whatever company hired that person, and whoever grew and sold the ingredients, often without actually seeing any of the food’s origins.
Most of all, we trust the Food and Drug Administration to do its job, taking their stamps as guarantees of quality and cleanliness. Our last issue’s cover story on the G-shot caused some to wonder aloud why a person would put something in their body that hasn’t been FDA approved. Today, people read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle about the horrid conditions in sausage factories and assume that 1906 is ancient history, and that the FDA’s creation somehow ensures that food suppliers are subject to more thorough inspections.
According to Marian Burros in a recent New York Times article called “Wegmans Sets Standards for Shrimp,” “The Food and Drug Administration inspects less than one percent of all imported seafood.” This came as a total shock to me, but maybe it shouldn’t have been so surprising. After all, it took until August for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to recall a whopping 5.7 million pounds of both fresh and frozen ground beef made in late April and June. The meat was tainted with E. coli. It’s not only meat and seafood—remember the Peter Pan peanut butter recall last year? Even more recently, toys have become health hazards to children, with lead paint and other dangerous chemicals. One toy company, Spin Master, makes a bead-like toy called Aqua Dots. When eaten, a chemical on the bead’s coating metabolizes into gamma hydroxybutyrate or GHB, the “date rape” drug. These seemingly harmless (and apparently delicious-looking) craft toys caused two children in the U.S. to slip into temporary comas, and hospitalized three children in Australia. Our regulatory organizations must have some wide cracks in their floorboards.
From the toy industry to the food industry, companies are cutting costs in the race to make a profit and consumers are getting the shaft. But not all companies have their wallets as their number one priority. Burros’ October 31 article discussed how Wegmans is awesome (this is news?) and only buys shrimp from farms that prove their environmental friendliness. These shrimp farms have to show that they treat and dispose of their wastewater properly, and do not use antibiotics, pesticides, or fungicides. That sounds a lot better than the FDA’s one percent guarantee.
So, now that you know, will you still order shrimp in your Caesar salad? Would the beef or chicken be any better? There’s so much about your food that is next to impossible to find out. That’s why so many people are turning toward vegetarianism and its many branches, embracing new diets like raw food, and buying local and organic groceries.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not about to build my own farm. I’ll still eat hamburgers, and I’ll order the shrimp occasionally. I just hope I never find a crunchy bit in my burger or a poop trail in my shrimp ever again.
Daniele Hauptman
Associate Editor
