Most Americans are back to eating peanut butter, tomatoes are ordered up in salads and sandwiches without a suspecting thought, and spinach, it graces menus unabashed and bluntly. Besides wasn’t that E. coli mishap like forever ago?
Actually it wasn’t – only 2 ½ years ago if your counting, and that’s not to mention the salmonella outbreak in 2007 – and though spinach farmers have been able to move forward, as has the tomato industry and eventually the peanut butter manufacturers, what hasn’t been grappled with until recently is an updated public examination of our food stock and policies.
President Obama ordered a review of the Food and Drug Administration earlier this month following the Peanut Corp. of America knowingly shipping out tainted products from a plant in Georgia that sickened 500 people.
As it turned out the processors knew the plant was indeed contaminated with salmonella since 2007.
So how did this slip by inspectors? In NY Times this week, an op-ed contributor, E.J. Levy, discussed the unsavory (to the fullest exacerbation of the word) policies utilized by the FDA via their booklet “The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods That Present No Health Hazards for Humans”, in which a percentage of “natural food contaminants” are explicitly condoned.
Among the booklet’s list of allowable defects are “insect filth,” “rodent filth” (both hair and excreta pellets), “mold,” “insects,” “mammalian excreta,” “rot,” “insects and larvae” (which is to say, maggots), “insects and mites,” “insects and insect eggs,” “drosophila fly,” “sand and grit,” “parasites,” “mildew” and “foreign matter” (which includes “objectionable” items like “sticks, stones, burlap bagging, cigarette butts, etc.”).
According to Levy’s survey of the booklet, tomato juice and paste were mostly prone to fly eggs and larvae, while the kraut on your dog could lead you to ingest up to 50 thrips per serving.
It makes you wonder if the protein intake on the nutrition label is calibrated appropriately.
Peanut butter — that culinary cause célèbre — may contain approximately 145 bug parts for an 18-ounce jar; or five or more rodent hairs for that same jar; or more than 125 milligrams of grit.
Levy also points out while the FDA considers these items solely “aesthetic” and “offensive to the senses”, with no outward harm posed to the consumer, the book hangs its policies on a hook of economics, stating that it is “impractical to grow, harvest or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects.” To read the FDA booklet in its entirety click here.
译文:
番茄酱里的“小秘密”
大多数美国人又开始吃花生酱了。番茄则是作为沙拉和三明治的配菜食用，人们在点的时候也毫无戒心。至于菠菜，更是毫不客气地在菜谱上占有一席之地。即然这样，埃布氏菌风波算是平息吗？
实际上并非如此--你算算，这些事情都发生在两年半之内，这其中还不包括2007的沙门氏菌事件--虽然种植菠菜的菜商和番茄商、花生酱制造商一样已经开始摆脱困境，但是他们最近的难题的则是要应对公开的食品业大清查。
就在美国某花生商从格鲁吉亚飞机上运输受污染的产品从而导致500人中毒后，奥巴马总统就下令对食品药物安全局进行检查。
结果令人惊讶，这家公司的人员竟然知道这架飞机在2007的事件中确实受到沙门氏菌的污染。
然而检查人员怎么就让这一切发生在他们眼皮底下呢？本周的纽约时报称，专栏作家E.J.Levy就食品药物安全局在《食品卫生标准》小册子中提到的臭名昭著的政策发表议论：不对人体健康造成威胁的食品瑕疵，包括自然的和人为不可避免的瑕疵。也就是说，一定程度的“自然食品污染”是可以接受的。
这本小册子中“昆虫污物”、“啮齿类动物污物”（包括毛发及排泄物）、“霉菌”、“昆虫”、“哺乳动物排泄物”、“腐臭”、“昆虫及其幼虫”（即“蛆”）、“螨虫”、“昆虫及其虫卵”、“果蝇”、“沙砾”
、“寄生虫”和“外来物”（包括胶水、石子、麻布袋、烟头等不洁物品）均被列入食品瑕疵的允许范围之内。
根据Levy对这篇文章的调查，番茄汁和肉酱最容易招引苍蝇虫卵和其他幼虫，所以一个热狗上的泡菜就足以让你吃下多达50条幼虫。
难怪你要怀疑营养标签上的蛋白质含量是否检测准确。
烹饪好帮手花生酱每18盎司里就含大约145条虫卵，或至少5条动物毛发，又或是多达125毫克沙砾。
Levy同时也指出虽然食品药物局人为这些物质只是起到美观和引起食欲作用，对消费者没有伤害。这本小册子同时还借经济的光，称“种植生产完全无公害、没有缺陷的产品是不切实际的。”