Remember when you could just sit down to a meal and eat it and not have to worry about it? I know there was a time like that, I just can't recall it anymore. The term "comfort food" seems to be slipping fast from our vocabularies, morphing into "foods to be feared" - and this can't be a good thing.
In the past 5 days I've seen three articles that up the ante on eating. Maybe we should be trying to figure out a way to just not eat...take a pill for our meals...except that more and more research says we need to eat foods in their natural state to get the benefit of vitamins. Or maybe not. Read on.
Today in the New York Times there's a brief article on ground beef being recalled due to possible e. coli contamination. I have a mixed reaction to this report. On the one hand, I am tempted to go check the ground beef in my freezer to see if it has the number on it mentioned in the report. On the other hand, I think we've all gotten used to the feeling that eating ground beef in any form is a new way of playing Russian Roulette. We either have to cook the heck out of ground beef until it has no taste, or we get to think about e. coli, and mad cow disease, while munching on our burgers.
On June 27th there was a report on MSNBC.com and other places, about the concern over something called "acrylamides" (found in fried foods and starchy foods) which may cause cancer. This category covers everything from french fries (a staple in the American diet) to cereals to breads baked at high temperatures. There was actually a UN-sponsored meeting on this, which basically boiled down to the experts saying they didn't know how serious it was, but that it was in fact serious, and we should most likely be concerned, but they weren't sure exactly what foods we should be concerned about...and I'm left thinking "What?? So what do I do with this information?" I get fairly fed up with these kinds of reports. If they don't have any real info, then why report on it at all? I mean really, it can't help our digestion any to think that the potato chips we're eating in front of the TV may be causing cancer with every bite. That kind of stress can't be good for us. Why do they put out partial info like this? A warning isn't a real warning with so little information.
And then there was the MSNBC.com June 28th article on orange juice. For years there have been articles telling us how we need to eat foods in their natural state. So of course, when juice companies began packaging fresh orange juice in cartons, a lot of us starting buying it that way...because it had to be healthier, right? Wrong. Now they tell us that the frozen orange juice is waayyy healthier in terms of the amount of vitamin C you get from frozen juice. So I get to look back over my orange juice consumption for the past several years and think how dumb was I to fall for the "buy fresh not frozen" concept. All that orange juice I drank thinking I was getting the best vitamin-bang for the buck, and lo, I now discover I got much less than I thought.
All this to say that I am valiantly trying to refuse to see food as an object of fear. If we read and obeyed every food dictum that comes out these days, I'm not sure we could eat anything much at all. So I'll do my best to incorporate whatever seems prudent, but if a few extra french fries shorten my life span by a few days, I'll live with that danger in "comfort food" bliss.
Posted by pam at July 01, 2002 09:21 AM | Comments (0)