Is It Safe?

Yes, it’s safe.  It’s very safe.  It’s so safe you wouldn’t believe it.
No. It’s not safe, it’s…very dangerous, be careful.
– Thomas ‘Babe’ Levy, under duress

Recently James, began a comment with the following statement:
As usual, I will continue my crusade against unnecessary food paranoia here on the FLB.

I appreciate James and his comments on such subjects as GMOs, HFCS, and his further thoughts on soy processing.  I understand how someone can come to the FLB read a few posts and think that I was concerned with food safety.

The truth, as it usually is, is just a bit more nuanced.

My concerns are not driven by safety per se.  If I were concerned with food safety, I wouldn’t eat rare meat, runny eggs or raw shellfish.  I also wouldn’t be a proponent of young raw milk cheeses.  In fact, some of the things that bother me have to do with increasing food safety, such as irradiation and ultra-pasteurization.

I eat for pleasure.  I eat for flavor.
I don’t want safe food.  I want delicious food.

What bothers me is when companies start to mess around with the integrity of our food, especially when these machinations are invisible to the average consumer.

People have a series of unrealistic expectations about their food.  For example, they imagine the burger in front of them came from a cow that lived on a family farm, with a nice red barn.  And they may even imagine that cow got to walk around, chew some grass, and lay in the sun before it met its untimely end.

Some cows are raised like that, but they barely make a blip on the radar of the national domestic production figures.

I am willing to pay more for beef from a cow that is raised in what I consider to be an ethical manner.  In my world cows should eat grass and not corn. Cows as herbivores should not be fed any form of animal protein or other animal byproduct.  Sick cows should be taken out of the herd, and not consumed by human beings.

Now there are some people who will make the claim that meat from these kinds of cows is safer.  In some ways they may be right, but it is a tenuous claim at best.

E. coli O157:H7 can appear on meat from small local farms that practice sustainable agriculture, just as it can with meat from larger factory farms.  Excuse my bluntness, but the danger comes from poop getting on the meat.  It is just that when it happens in larger operations that headlines are made with giant mega deluxe recalls.

As far as I am concerned, the cleanliness of meat is a separate issue entirely from how it is raised.  I am looking for food that fits my expectations of what food should be.  And it extends beyond meat.

If you asked the average consumer about how they thought canola oil was extracted from canola seeds, I’m guessing it would be difficult to find someone who said “solvent.”  Most likely they wouldn’t know, but if pushed would probably default to some form of mechanical (versus chemical) process.

Even if you check out the CanolaInfo website, the callout in the sidebar reads:
Canola oil is made from canola. Canola oil is pressed from tiny canola seeds produced by beautiful yellow flowering plants of the Brassica family.

Saying it is “pressed” is very misleading.  In fact you have to scroll down well below where most readers would likely stop before there is any mention of a solvent extraction.  Which, they do say, is used in the bulk of canola oil production.

I assert that the reason it is so far down, is that if consumers were aware of how their food was being produced, they wouldn’t find it as appealing.

For the sake of increased profits food companies turn to things like antibiotic laced livestock feed, solvent extraction, and high fructose corn syrup.  They save money and help the bottom line.  And the list of corporate shenanigans just seems to keep growing.

I’m not saying it isn’t safe.  Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.  I am hardly qualified to provide an expert opinion on the matter.

I’m just saying that I’m not buying it.