Joanne,

I agree with most of this, although I think food quality varies greatly by supermarket chain and location. There is also a problem with respect to the quality of food available to — or affordable by — people in lower socio-economic classes, which is, imo, at least partly responsible for the increasing onset of obesity: too much cheap pasta, for example, as well as a lot of boxed crap that is packed with calories and devoid of nutrition. That said, I think in some areas food safety has greatly improved. I think a good example would be the lessening (to a very low rate) of trichinosis cases.

Most us probably learned that pork has to be cooked thoroughly, My mother generally broiled it until its ends turned up and tried to form little pork smilies, by which time it was useful only for driving nails. There were good reasons for this, based on the risk of becoming infected with this parasite (generally trichinella spiralis. At the beginning of the 20th century conservative estimates showed a 2.5% infection rate in U.S. pigs. Even more alarming were postmortem surveys, conducted in the 1930's. A National Institute of Health report published in 1943 found 16.2% of the U.S. population to be infected (1 out of every 6 people). This type of information led to considerable publicity on the dangers of eating pork. The historical problem of trichinae infection in pigs is responsible for strict federal control of methods used to prepare ready-to-eat pork products in the U.S., and expensive carcass inspection requirements in Europe. These regulations are still in effect in the Code of Federal Regulations, for processed products, and in the Directives of the European Union, and the rate of trichinosis in some countries is now about zero. It isn’t zero here — but it’s pretty low, and much of that comes not from the ingestion of pork, but of bear, moose, and other game meats that also harbor the parasite.

And then there’s botulism, which used to be fairly common in commercial canning, but is now pretty rare, most cases in the US coming from improper home canning of food. In some cases, you’re much better off getting the product from the market.

Lee



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/24/2005 11:45AM by Lee.