CSotD: The Five-Day Rule
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Arctic Circle points out a certain degree of imprecision in the risk assessment capabilities of our food and drug safety regulators.
Though, actually, they're quite accurate in assessing who swings a big bat and who doesn't, which is what truly matters.
Regulation of food safety (and making sure it is what it claims to be) became part of government's responsibility in the early part of the 20th century, and, while we're all taught it was due to Upton Sinclair's novel, "The Jungle," the stage had been set roughly a decade earlier, when the meat packers of Chicago proved more efficient than the armed forces of Spain at mowing down American soldiers.
There are historians who assert that the bully beef — tinned beef also called "embalmed beef" — was not to blame, but it hardly matters even if they are right. At the time, that seemed to be the source of food poisoning and, as this short piece from the Christian Science Monitor reports, bully beef was hardly the only thing making consumers edgy.
(And who better to comment on consumer fraud than former store clerk PT Barnum? "Nearly everything was different from what it was represented. Our ground coffee was as good as burned peas, beans and corn could make, and our ginger was tolerable, considering the price of cornmeal.")
Sinclair's novel hit at the right moment, however, not only to touch upon the concern raised by the "bully beef" scandals of the late war but because the war's most famous veteran was now sitting in the "bully pulpit." Public outrage rose, TR responded and the result was government oversight of the food and drug industries.
And it being after Roosevelt had won election in his own right, the fat cats can't blame Leon for this one. The American people had seen TR in action, they liked what they saw, they voted for him.
But don't weep for the plutocrats. As Alex Hallatt points out in today's cartoon, they still have plenty of control over what is considered safe and what is not.
Raw milk is an excellent example, since, like raw apple cider, it can, for practical reasons, only be sold by local operations.
Raw cider in New York State fell victim to an e-coli incident in 1996, followed by a less serious outbreak a few years later. This article describes the banning of raw cider in New York and contrasts it with the procedure in Michigan, where raw cider is legal but producers are required to be more careful.
Where I would differ with her reporting is that my understanding (as someone who had covered apple production in New York, though I was off the beat by the time of the ban) is that, while she finds enthusiastic support for the legislation, I was hearing that small producers felt abandoned, that, had Mott and Del Monte been able to sell raw cider, they'd have stepped up to support a more reasoned approach.
Raw cider, and even pasteurized cider, is a different beverage than the near-clear yellow "applie juice" sold on grocery shelves, but the advantage of raw is that it ferments slightly, not enough to pick up a real kick (unless you actually work to control it), but enough to have a slight bite and a bit of effervesence.
Not any more, not in New York.
Raw milk, I would suspect, is in the same situation: The large dairies not only can't sell the product but would likely just as soon people didn't discover a favorable difference between the unprocessed and processed product. They're not going to lobby on behalf of raw milk.
To be honest, I don't know that "raw" versus "pasteurized" is the difference in milk, at least in the flavor and pleasure of drinking it.
We didn't have raw milk when I was a kid, but we had milk from small-batch, individual dairies, and you could tell, for instance, when the cows were out of the barn and into fresh pasturage in the spring. Today, the milk is picked up in tankers and taken to a central processor to be mixed with enough other dairies' production such that any traces of individual characteristics are lost.
Meanwhile, the relative healthfulness of fast food isn't on the table. McDonald's and gang have pretty good lobbyists, though it should be remembered that an e-coli incident pretty much sank Jack-In-The-Box.
I think it's like the five-second rule, which states that, if you drop a piece of food but pick it up again within five seconds, it's okay to eat it.
Our food supply has a five-day rule. If it doesn't kill you within five days, it's okay to eat it.
Even the source of raw milk is regulated:
Here's Derf's current The City strip, as seen on his website:
And here's the syndicated version:
Point made. I think.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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