how safe is your food?

While everyone is running around worrying about what's in packaged spinich and jars of peanut butter, do we ever stopped to ponder undpackaged produce that is handled repeatedly? Take apples! How many hands have touched an apple before you bite into it? Do we wash them before we eat them? Do we thing passing water over a recently purchased apple is not going to disinfect it? No! Same with peaches, grapes and strawberries. When I get tomatoes in a salad at a rest. I wonder if that tomato had been washed *good*. On and on...... whatever we eat is a crap shoot. Some crap, some not.

How much of your day do you spend worring?

We do have this thing called an immune system. Even if there are germs in what we eat, and their are germs in what we eat, we can handle it. 5,000/year is 1 in 60,000 chance of dying from food. That's about the lowest risk factor out there. As to why the vegetables are coming up with more outbreaks ... it's because the pig farms and chicken ranches that are located up stream of the vegetable growers are passing the pathogens downstream to them. Also, with more and more people wanting organics, there is an increase in risk due to lack of pesticides and chemicals used on them. There's always bad with the good.

I agree with Blackie. Unless you're a farmer and grow all your own food, you have to trust that what you buy at the grocery store is safe. You can't go through your life worrying about whether or not the food you buy is safe. You just have to trust that it is. The best thing you can do is wash everything before you eat it and hope it doesn't contain any bacteria. I know I'm not going to spend one second of my life worrying about this stuff.

FDA and USDA budgets get reduced due to "other priorities" less inspectors out there, the gov't relies on industry to police itself, and when there's a profit motive, they cut corners.

Anyone ever see the documentary "Harvest of Shame"? think this is new? It's been going on for years, just that there's better diagnoses of illnesses than there used to be. Consumer beware. We rely on our food supplies to be safe. Go watch farm workers, especially the migrant workers in the fields, ask them how they get paid. It's usually by the pound, or other weight measure, so their incentive is to pick as quickly as and as much in the time they have. Ask them where they go to relieve themselves. They may not answer in fear of letting the truth out:right there in the fields. So why would we not get contaminations. Not just from pig and cow farms nearby but right there where the field workers are. Don't expect the gov't or the big agra businesses to admit to this.

Don't count on the huge agricultural companies like conagra and archer midland to do the right thing, they scream for all sorts of subsidies then cut corners at the expense of the public.

MANGLER wrote:

We do have this thing called an immune system. Even if there are germs in what we eat, and their are germs in what we eat, we can handle it. 5,000/year is 1 in 60,000 chance of dying from food. That's about the lowest risk factor out there. As to why the vegetables are coming up with more outbreaks ... it's because the pig farms and chicken ranches that are located up stream of the vegetable growers are passing the pathogens downstream to them. Also, with more and more people wanting organics, there is an increase in risk due to lack of pesticides and chemicals used on them. There's always bad with the good.

Certainly animal farms nearby pass their wastes downstream, but the human immune system is taxed due to more chemicals introduced in foods than ever before. Our livers just can p[rocess some of these and the human body becomes less resistant over time from complex chemicals in our foods. There's lots of organics out there, in response to the contaminations and chemicals in processed foods and produce, but organics are expensive, and not guaranteed to be safe either.

Growing your own would help, but not everyone has land to do that, so we have to have "faith" in profit motivated companies to do the right thing. This is why the FDA and USDA were established, because farmers and distributors and manufacturers don't alway have the public's best interest heart. Ask a tobacco ceo if he/she smokes their product, they don't they know better. Ask the ceo of conagra if he had his peanut butter in the house. he knows better.

Well, I will say this: after the spinich debacle we didn't see any spinich in the produce sections of our groc. stores for weeks, however, now, the spinish I've been buying at Publix is absolutely beautiful, crisp and fresh looking. It is their own brand, obviously bought from a huge dist. But the point I'm trying to convey is, before the spinich I bought both org. and Publix's own brand and Dole...etc. there was always too much moisture inside the bag and there was sliminess and some really bad leaves of spinich. It is not to say that now the bacteria/listeria/salmonella count is not as it were, but at least someone is taking more pains to at least 'clean up their act.' And I always buy baby spinich. It has less time to expose to the bad things. I would add that don't think Dow Chemical and Monsanto, all the rest of the Chem. companies have stopped making pesticides, and don't think they don't export to Turkey and Chili, Peru and Brazil that which is outlawed here. So what are we doing with Chilean grapes/Brazilian Mangoes/Mexican brussel sprouts/cucumbers/green onions in our produce markets in this country? Ahem NAFTA...HELLO!

Our food is unsafe - still. Yet you gave away your constitutional rights to protect you from terrorism - including things like terrorists infecting the food supply. We still can't keep contamination out - its bad for profits, Thank a conservative...

We are all, for most part, eating the same foods grown/raised here, are we not? Perhaps 'food taster' will be a high-paying job for this century as it was during the Roman Empire. As for the terrorists, if it's any consolation, the average middle-easterner eats Turkish apricots and sniffs/snorts/ingests opium that has been treated with pesticides banned here, exported *over there* which inturn is *all* exported to this country. I wish I could know if those pesticides which we specifically banned and send overseas are in the foods we import. I dont' see a whole of people on this subj. either. Guess they don't care what is put in our mouths. Restaurants! Do you think restaurants care what they put in your mouth? If we only knew.

This is George Bush's fault!

It's Dick Cheney's fault; he's the one who tells G.W. what to say.

grow your own veggies like i do and stop worrying.

be a hunter

never had food poisoning during my 23 years living in France. However in the U.S. I get food poisoining at least once every 2 years.

Rob wrote:

Hey you can always eat at McDonalds for that clean feeling of knowing your food will be safe.

but then you might cut your own throat trying to eat it
remember the

Woman who Found a Razor Blade In McMuffin

I just ordered the Magna Medical Services test kit from my Cheney Brothers rep. I would rather have it than presume I am OK.

I worry all the time