This is not a good time for those of us who like to eat.
Every day brings a new bit of bad news.
People who live in cities don't have to spend much time actually thinking about how those marbled cuts of meat made it into their plastic-wrapped home in the supermarket bin. But it's getting harder and harder to eat in blissful ignorance.
If it's a nice juicy burger you want, consider the largest meat recall in the history of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The total -- 143 million pounds of beef -- represents a California meatpacker's entire production for two years.
That's a lot of meatballs.
Videotape that showed cows too sick to stand being shocked with electric prods or rolled with forklifts would ruin any appetite.
A worry is that any animal that is sick enough to collapse is at greater risk for "mad cow disease." I'd be furious.
Most of the meat was just fine and eaten long ago, we are assured by USDA officials. Doesn't that make you feel so much better?
If not red meat, then what? Chicken is the traditional white-meat alternative. The smart cows in that television ad certainly seem to think so.
At family reunions in St. Mary's County in Maryland, I saw chickens go from yard to table in just a few steps, and it didn't bother me.
I must have been distracted by how delicious those fried drumsticks tasted or the fact that an assembly line of flying chicken parts was nowhere in sight.
Then, a recent Observer series exposed conditions in some poultry plants where workers suffer illness and injury. Many are afraid to complain because of their illegal status or lack of better job opportunities, so employers can feel freer to break hiring and safety laws.
The convenience of those nicely breaded nuggets is trivial next to ruined lives and broken laws.
There's always seafood. I grew up Catholic in the port city of Baltimore eating fish every Friday, so that's no hardship.
But my sister-in-law, with her doctorate in public health and her job with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, is horrified by my fish fanaticism. It's not enough that she tells me how close I live to a hazardous waste site.
Every time I'm about to bite into a delicate serving of Dover sole -- or anything with a fin -- she recounts horror stories of mercury and contamination with PCBs (that's polychlorinated biphenyls for the uninitiated).
A study suggested that older adults who ate fish containing PCBs and other contaminants had lower scores on some measures of memory and learning.
What was that?
I don't glow in the dark -- yet. But I still hear her voice of doom in my head when I order the scampi.
All of a sudden, there's danger on every shelf, a hidden warning in every item on any menu. Nothing tastes good when you think about it long enough.
I know there are smug vegetarians out there, content that they know the secret. For those taking pleasure as options dwindle for the rest of us, I have four words -- salmonella in the spinach.
IN MY OPINION Mary C. Curtis
