It’s Enough to Make You Sick

For purely food-related reasons, I have recently come to regret the end of the Cold War.

Nothing personal against the fall of communism, but life was so much less complicated when all we had to worry about was the destruction of the Earth by a misplaced finger on a nuclear trigger. Sure, there was the occasional 15-part New Yorker series on the dangers of living under high-power lines, but who had time to read those things?

Cancer clusters?

Ebola virus?

Sorry, too busy worrying about a nuclear holocaust to think about them.

Now, thanks to the absence of an external bogey man--bogey person, I should say--upon which to fixate, we have to face all kinds of unpleasant new threats, all coming from within our borders, all invisible to the naked eye, all having to do with our food and water supply.

Scientifically speaking, icky things that can make you sick have replaced communism as the biggest threat to the American way of life.

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Last week we were treated to a number of news stories coinciding with the first anniversary of the Minneapolis cryptosporidium outbreak. The bacterium invaded that city’s water supply around this time last year, causing severe gastrointestinal illness and more than 100 deaths.

It must have been awful. Imagine former President George Bush at a Japanese banquet. Imagine half a city acting like that. Imagine having to clean it up.

Then, during an hour devoted to pesticides in the food supply, last week’s “48 Hours” featured a segment on four Midwestern families. The families shopped at their regular markets for produce, then handed over their apples and lettuce and broccoli to the producers, who sent the stuff off to chemists for analysis. Most of the samples tested positive for pesticides, leading one of the moms to weep on camera.

The bad news just gets worse: Washing fruits and vegetables doesn’t necessarily make them clean because pesticides are not water soluble. And waxing--a common practice among purveyors of produce--not only keeps fruit and vegetables fresh, but may keep them coated with pesticides too.

The show featured the obligatory back and forth between the experts: One said even a little pesticide residue is too much, the other said allowable levels are too small to worry about.

You would dearly love to believe the second guy, but as one of the stricken moms so rightly pointed out: They used to say smoking was OK too.

As I watched, all I could picture were great big gobs of greasy grimy pesticide residues on the juicy strawberries my child has been inhaling by the pint.

How do we know that children who ingest a cornucopia of pesticide today will not sprout horns tomorrow?

The only solution seems to be to buy organic produce.

Thankfully, Birkenstocks remain optional.

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Early this year, the Times’ Food section ran a frightening and clear-eyed story about the myriad dangers in our presumably safe food supply. Hot dogs, chicken, eggs, oysters, fish, milk, cantaloupe, soft cheeses--you name it. Potential bacterial bombs, just waiting to explode in your child’s delicate intestines.

What stood out for me--and haunts me to this day--was a passage about hamburger meat: “Other nations, with wildly different degrees of sanitation, are also playing a greater role in the American food supply. . . . Even today, for instance, a single hamburger patty may contain meat from hundreds of animals raised in different countries under varying degrees of regulation.”

And even as the government and some food producers are unable to uphold stringent hygiene standards, Food and Drug Administration officials announced last week that they had approved for sale a genetically engineered tomato.

The tomato, “designed” by Calgene Inc. of Davis, Calif., will be marketed under the MacGregor label and might be in stores as early as next week. Its altered genetic structure will enable the tomato to ripen on the vine and stay fresher longer.

The idea of a tomato whose genes have been tampered with (besides the temptation to make lousy sexist jokes) does indeed have a certain allure. I almost had decided to give one a try until I heard what FDA Commissioner David Kessler had to say about it:

“Foods produced by genetic engineering are as safe as food in our grocery stores today.”

And to think I was so worried about nuclear destruction.