Food Safety and Savings Tips
Now that there's barely an FDA left, who keeps our food safe?
I gotta tell you, I was already concerned about our food systems in the United States. You know it’s bad when you have produce recalls for e.coli roughly every month. And that’s what we’ve had until recently, when they all just stopped.
They stopped because the people inspecting our food for bacteria like e.coli and a dozen other pathogens have all been fired. They fired all the people who keep baby formula safe, and they even fired the folks who inspect our pet food.
These inspectors test random samples, and if they find anything, they have to shut the plants down, recall the product, and notify the public so they don’t die. Then they identify and eliminate the source of the contamination, and then everything is up and running again.
But not anymore. Now, today, in the United States, you have no way of knowing if your foods is contaminated.
But you have more power than you think.
Take food safety into your own hands
First off, let me make the obvious argument. E.coli comes from poop. It doesn’t come from anywhere else. Vegetables don’t poop, as a rule. So you are far less likely to get sick from eating produce than you are from eating animals.
However, like me, you might’ve noticed lots of produce getting recalled for e.coli. There have been outbreaks in romaine lettuce and spinach and several other veggies. There are really only a few ways poop gets on veggies.
One way is that people put it there deliberately to fertilize them. Untreated cow and pig manure is spread on fields before the crops are planted. In some areas, especially the huge romaine farms in Arizona they irrigate the crops from a stream of water that runs through a man-made ditch in between the veggie crops and the factory-farm where cattle stand packed together like cordwood. They shit, it’s washed into the irrigation ditch, powering up that water with crop-growing might and e.coli. Then the irrigation machines draw the water from that very ditch and spray it all over the lettuce.
You know what romaine lettuce looks like? It grows upright, with layers and layer of leaves, all of them open at the top. The manure water rains down from above, and gets trapped in between the layers of romaine.
Why this is legal, I don’t know. But manure fertilization of our crops is something so ordinary even small backyard gardens wind up full of shit.
And no, organic crops are no safer. If anything, they’re probably more likely to have been grown with “organic” manure rather than chemical fertilizer.
Make compost of your plant-based leftovers and scraps. Fertilize your garden with it.
Other ways foods get contaminates is by workers who handle them with unwashed hands, and cross contamination from being processed in the same plants as meat.
So what can we do?
First, stop eating animals. That goes without saying. I have a sidebar. I’ll try to keep it short, but I am a word-woman, so that’s a challenge.
I was horrified to hear the story of a red-state woman with a dead fetus in her uterus, and the doctors refusing to take it out for weeks—I guess to ensure that not only is it merely dead, it’s really most sincerely dead. So the fetus is decomposing, or in other words ROTTING inside her. This can kill women and has killed many as decomposing flesh releases all kinds of toxins that get into the bloodstream and become what we call sepsis or blood poisoning and then you die. It infuriates me that women are dying of sepsis at such high rates that the governor of Texas ordered hospitals to stop counting maternal mortality.
Okay back on topic. If a fetus decomposing in your abdomen can kill you, how is it safe to have a cow or a pig or a chicken or a fish (pew!) decomposing in your intestines? The answer it’s not safe, and in fact, is one of the reasons people get colorectal cancer and Chrohn’s disease and IBS and things like that.
Second, stop eating ultra-processed and processed foods other than the bare minimum. The more a food item is handled, the more chances for contamination. You want it as close to the ground it came from as possible.
Third, wash your hands before, during, and after you touch the food. Wash the vegetables, rinse the grains. When you wash hands, be sure to apply Covid rules, 30 seconds, thorough coverage, clean towel. When you wash the produce, use a veggie brush you don’t use for anything else and sterilize it between uses.
Some contaminants are not rinse-off-able. They have to be physically removed, so scrub every veggie all over.
This is ESPECIALLY important when you’re eating them raw. When you cook them, the cooking process kills a lot of the germs.
After using it to scrub produce, you can clean the veggie brush on the sanitize setting in the dishwasher or soak for five minutes in well-diluted bleach water, or some other method. I’ve heard citrus rinses are helpful. There are a lot of veggie washes you can buy, but do you really want to? Somebody has handled that and processed it and packaged it and is selling it for profit, not for the greater good.
Plus, people who use these sprays don’t tend to scrub. Spritz, spritz! All set!
No thanks. I’ll wash mine with my hands, with water, with a clean brush, and know it’s clean.
Aprés Grocery Trip Routine
We have to take the berries out of the containers as soon as we get them home and wash our hands. Ditto the apples if they came in a bag, and any of those little baby oranges that peel easily. And the celery, and the carrots, for sure. And all the greens.
Empty each container, one at a time, sorting out any soft or bruised pieces, or pieces that are already moldy or mushy.
Berries: Rinse the sorted berries in a clean colander with cold water. Rinse the container in which you bought them. Put a clean paper towel in the bottom of the container. Pat berries dry, then dump them back in. Refrigerate.
With apples, take them out of the bag they came in, sort and toss any soft or bruised ones. Put them back in the fridge sans bag, or into a fruit bowl in a cool, dim area.
Celery and Carrots: Take them out of those awful bags in which they’re packaged. Remove any soft and bad looking carrots or celery stalks. If the celery is a whole stalk, I generally cut off the bottom and the leafy ends, so I can clean the individual stalks better. I generally put them into one of my flour sack produce bags and refrigerate once cleaned and sorted.
Greens must be separated, sorted, thoroughly rinsed. I pat them dry with paper towels, then lay them in a wide, long dish with a cover and use them as needed.
A word on beans and bulk
I’ve never yet seen a recall on beans, but I am noticing that canned beans are getting pricier and pricier. And too, it’s harder than ever to find reduced sodium varieties. Yet, I can by a bag of uncooked, shelled beans for almost nothing.
I’s 1.28 for a can of black beans at Walmart.
It’s .98/per pound for dry black beans at Sam’s Club.
One pound of dry black beans would make about 3 cans, so cooking the beans from dry instead of buying the cans brings the per-can price down to about 42¢.
I’m switching. We buy a LOT of beans, and it’s just dumb to pay triple what’s necessary, particularly right now.
Granny, if I remember correctly, always brought the dry beans to a boil in a pot of water with spoonful of baking soda in it. She’d get them boiling really nice, then drain them immediately and rinse thoroughly. The water she drained off was always green, and she used to say the baking soda “drew the green out.”
Then she’d cover them up with fresh water and boil until they were done. I’ve read conflicting reports of whether to soak the beans first or not, and I don’t recall what Granny did, so I’ll try both ways and report back.
And there’s no reason not to dress them a bit, is there? If you’re boiling up beans, you might as well flavor them. I plan to add onions and garlic and various herbs to the pot as my shell beans boil.
This is my goal for April, to get myself mostly converted to shell beans, and then get some huge containers and buy them in bulk.
I already buy oatmeal from the bulk bin. We must go through 10 cups of rolled oats per week. That keeps well, too, as do grains like rice and pearl barley.
I was shopping the other day and needed a bag of GF flour. It was a one-pound bag. And I said, aloud, “It’s no wonder prices are so high and people are so hurting. Look at this teeny tiny little bag of flour. What the hell is anyone going to do with a pound of flour? Granny always bought flour in 50 or 100 lb sacks.”
We can save a ton of money by getting ourselves some large containers we can seal and then buying the foods that keep well long-term, like oatmeal, sugar, flour, beans, lentils, rice, barley, in bulk.
More ideas…
I have a ton of ideas, more ideas than time to execute them honestly, but I’m getting a Garden Tower planter. My goal is to grow all our green leafies year-round, cutting the grocery bill by 10-12 bucks a week.
I’d love to grow and can enough tomatoes to sustain us, too. We probably use 5 or 6 12-oz cans per week, which translates to about 2 quart jars per week if I were to can them myself. So 104 quarts of tomatoes. I have actually done that and then some in my younger days. There’s not much easier to can than tomatoes.
If I can’t grow them myself, I can buy them by the bushel from local farm stands when the time comes. That might be more practical, actually, since I have so much else going on.
We’ll see. Just this handful of things I’ve thought of already, things that are relatively easy (the canning will be a commitment,) if I can do them successfully, should cut $20-$30 from my weekly grocery costs.
Now if only had a fruit orchard!
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