My little rant...

So... I am taking Food Safety and Microbiology as my other course right now and we were talking about some things that made me want to rant a little (and I did on the discussion board a little but need to get more out of my system I think.) We were talking about food safety of course, and it came up that people never used to do things like cook stuffing separately from the turkey to make sure it was cooked, they just stuffed the bird the night before, stuck it in the fridge, then cooked it in the morning. But it brought me back to an earlier discussion about why we can't do things the way they did "in the good old days" anymore... Historically that might have actually been safer than it is now (even despite better stoves and whatnot) because ingredients in that stuffing were probably safer. Historically ingredients were grown and sold locally, at least compared to the global mass markets today. Things were somewhat kept in the area, so cost and production were not as high because demand wasn't as high. But now that your product can be shipped anywhere, it is causing a greater demand for it, so it puts more pressure on the producer to --produce! Money becomes the bottom line and with it that productivity. So things like cheap chemical fertilizers and pesticides are used that would never have gotten near food going to your neighbors, and contamination and foodborne illnesses are much more common. Not only are they more likely because of this, but the outbreak of illness from contamination is much more widespread because that celery that you made got put in people's salads in one part of the world, sent to a company that made the stuffing in another and into soup cans somewhere else. Now not only is your ingredient itself causing illness, but everything it got put into and distributed as! That stuffing you put in the bird the night before just like your mother and grandmother is suddenly not as safe as when they did it... So what I said in my discussion board brought it back full circle... If you want to be able to do things the way it used to be done "in the good old days" then you need to start that good old process much earlier in the chain...

OK off my soapbox again and for the final time tonight. I just needed to say it somewhere, and also needed a blog post for this week, so what better way to kill two birds with one stone as it were? Good luck if you actually read it and I hope some of it made sense to someone! ;-)