A few days ago, the USDA announced a recall of 143 million pounds of beef. Though the spokesman for the USDA assured everyone that it was a Type One recall, meaning that it's not deadly, but better not eaten, I felt betrayed. Why?
Because, given this evidence - how can we trust other facilities and make sure that what we are eating is safe? We can't. None of us has access to laboratories equipped with hi-tech devices to test every meat package that we buy. And even if we did, it would be impossible to test everything; what about what we eat in restaurants?
Thus, the main question is: should we stop eating meat? Say that we stopped eating meat and went on with our lives without that juicy burger or steak from time to time. Does that mean that we would be safe from illnesses in other foods? Of course not.
A recent book written by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, "Skinny Bitch," raises questions about the milk that we drink. They reason that if the cow in the slaughterhouse is sick, chances are that the one in the dairy plant could be sick. They also mention another industrial process the milk undergoes, pasteurization, which is funny when you think about it. We pasteurize milk to rid it of bacteria, but fear the chemicals added to it. Are we not going in circles?
It was by mere chance that I was reading Freedman and Barnouin's book just a few days before the news came out about the slaughterhouse in California. For a whole day after reading it, I couldn't bring myself to eat meat. However, after further thinking, I decided that I did want that burger after all.
And I think that it was while I was munching on that burger that I heard the news. My eyes widened like a cow's. Maybe these were all signs telling me to stop eating meat!
And I did stop eating meat. Then I read about the pesticides used in growing vegetables and fruits. Give me a break! We have always thought that fruits and vegetables are the safest of all edible things on earth. Wrong! If the soil that the vegetables are grown in contains chemicals that are bad for human beings, then those chemicals are going to pass into our blood; God knows what they can do to our bodies. We all remember the E. coli outbreak with spinach. So what do we do? I guess we stop eating vegetables, too.
Even if a fruit, vegetable or meat has been grown in a 100 percent chemical, hormone and disease-free environment, it has still been through packaging and handling. It's obvious that foods in the supermarkets have been treated with chemicals to keep them fresh for longer or to make them shinier. The ones in packaging or cans contain tons of additives. Fruits or veggies that are open on the shelves might have been dropped a few times on the floor by customers or employees before being put there. Washing the produce doesn't necessarily get rid of all the germs.
It seems that in this day and age, if we want to worry about our food being totally chemical, hormone, antibiotic and disease-free, then we must stop eating all together. Furthermore, the stress that we go through with every single bite, thinking about how safe our food is, will turn us into freaks. We already have too much to think about with all of our calorie and fat gram-counting without thinking about the soil and the growth environment.
If the government recalls unsafe products only after they've been sold and probably eaten, who are we to trust? I guess the only way we can continue living is to use our common sense to decide what's healthy and what's not. We can try our best to find products that are good for our bodies and rely mainly on our bodies' defense systems to perform the huge task of combating the enemies. And we can pray that those recalls don't end up on our plates for dinner.
Maybe the next human evolution will make our bodies stronger against chemicals and diseases. But for now, let's think about what we are doing to our generation and the ones to come.
Shirin Jaafari-Dehaghi is a graduate student majoring in French.
