Zap!  Your food is safe

You hear a lot about food safety during the warmer months.  Although not widely used, irradiation is the most effective way to protect almost all foods. Even the FDA and the Department of Agriculture approve, but most consumers are still uneasy. If you ask the average consumer his opinion, he will most likely answer that "It kills a lot of good things along with the bad things." I agree with that, and you must decide for yourself if it is worth the trade-off for the benefits of irradiation. These benefits include less illness (if that indeed is proved to be true); less spoilage, which means longer shelf life; and, consequently, cheaper food.

Of course, there are some problems with irradiation. If irradiated food is subsequently mishandled, and that is usually the source of the problem, and becomes contaminated with a disease-causing organism, the food will lack the competing beneficial organisms that could otherwise inhibit its growth. This is comparable to the situation in your intestine. There are trillions of bacteria in your gut, but they are friendly agents when in that environment. If you were to irradiate your gut, you would kill these organisms and there would be a foreign invasion that would probably kill you. Another problem with irradiation is that unscrupulous operators may take spoiled food, bought very cheaply, irradiate it, and resell it as fresh.

It's not an easy decision, and you should have a choice.

Until food irradiation becomes more common, hydrogen peroxide is an excellent rinse for fruits and vegetables. Use the drug-store/supermarket variety, which contains 3 percent. Soak the fruits and vegetables for 20 minutes (scrub vegetables, such as potatoes, with a brush and then do the soak), rinse, and cook. Cooked or raw, the food will not taste like peroxide. 

If you store all fresh meats in the freezer for 24 hours, any parasites will be killed. Although presence of parasites is very rare in U.S. meat, it can happen.

Needled by the government, again!

A friend of mine owns a small restaurant in Florida. He told me recently that the state is seriously considering mandatory hepatitis A vaccinations for all restaurant workers.

This is another one of those situations where the drug industry and the government, this time state government, are attempting to violate your body with an injection that is unproven and unnecessary. At $85 a shot, their motivation is obvious.

Hepatitis A is a benign liver inflammation caught from fecal/oral transmission, meaning from people with unclean habits. Restaurants are blamed for most cases but that is hard to prove since the incubation period is about 30 days. Most people can't remember what or where they ate last week, much less a month ago.

Although the word "hepatitis" strikes fear into the heart of any informed person, hepatitis A is completely benign. There is no carrier state; there is no chronic infection potential; it is a mild disease; you will be completely well in a week to 10 days and then have lifetime immunity. There is no treatment because there is nothing to treat. By the time the diagnosis is made, assuming you were even sick enough to go to a doctor, you are well.

What next? An injection for halitosis? A shot for B.O.? Why don't they make a vaccine that will make us immune from bureaucratic meddlers?