Vol V Issue VI: For the Fear of Food by Megan McCormack

It bothers me that I am becoming paranoid about food. I had just recently discovered a love for spinach not too long before the whole scandal (around 2006) about contaminated spinach hit the fan. I stopped eating spinach, and I expected to get sick at any moment because of my previous spinach consumption habits. Even though much time has past since that recall, and despite how much I prefer spinach to iceberg lettuce in my salads, there is still this fear in the back of my head that I am going to become sick from e-coli if I eat spinach. Irrational? Maybe.

However, my fear does not stop there. My mom introduced me to the Peter Pan Reduced Fat crunchy peanut butter around the same time as I started liking spinach. I loved it because it was a lot healthier than regular peanut butter, and when I was dieting, this peanut butter helped me to curb my sugary food cravings. Lo and behold, a recall went out for this exact brand of peanut butter around 2007! I could not believe it. Peter Pan peanut butter and some other brands were pulled off the shelves because of several cases of salmonella poisonings linked to this tasty spread. Not all the peanut butter, if I remember correctly, was said to be infected; I decided to look up what was safe. I found out that I actually had one of the recalled jars of Peter Pan Reduced Fat crunchy peanut butter sitting in my cabinet. To my horror, I had already eaten about half of the contents of the jar before I had even known about the salmonella incident. Keeping in mind that I had a more than lack-luster immune system, I was pretty sure I was going to die at any moment. I also felt betrayed. First, spinach. And now Peter Pan. I did not die from my consumption of peanut butter. I do not think I even got sick from it, although I did feel instantly queasy when I realized I had eaten some recalled peanut butter. It only increased my fear of foods. Although, to be fair, I do not have cibophobia (fear of food) because I am not scared of all food. I do not have nightmares about carrots.

Tomatoes, however, are another story. Tomatoes were recalled in the summer of 2008, also because of salmonella. I am also a fan of tomatoes, always have been, but I avoided them like the plague that summer. I am beginning to think that somebody out there does not want me to eat healthily. Or that there is some sort of villain who goes around screwing with food that I like. There is also the recent infamous melamine milk scandal in China. So many babies became seriously ill because of the melamine found in baby formula. Some of these children died as a result. Last month, some of the people responsible for the contamination were sentenced for execution. Death for causing food contamination? No one is being shot for my spinach, but that is not what I would want anyway. I would like not to be afraid to eat something. I do not want to have the worry in the back of my head that I could get sick from eating a tomato. It angers me that people and children have become ill or have even died from improper food care. Don’t people have the right to eat and drink products they purchase without being scared about consuming them? I feel as though somebody needs to write a sequel for Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to raise awareness about this issue. Although there had been many recalls on food that I liked, I was trying to get over my paranoia about them. I started buying my favorite peanut butter again many, many months after FDA said that it was safe again. I slowly reintroduced spinach into my salads, and I put tomatoes on my sandwiches. I decided to trust and to have faith, as hard as it was to do so. My fear was still there, but it was much smaller than it had been. Yet, I was let down again! Peanut products everywhere are being recalled because of salmonella for the past month or two.

I felt sick to my stomach when I read an article on NPR about an inspection at a Texas peanut plant. According to the NPR article, “Salmonella-Linked Peanut Firm Files for Bankruptcy,” bird feathers, rat poop, and even dead rodents were discovered in this plant’s crawl space. I suppose I could have dealt with the idea that a peanut factory had a rat and bird problem, but what was worse was that the ventilation system in this factory was faulty. It was leaking this junk out of the crawl space and into the areas in the plant that produced the peanuts. The only reason I want my peanut butter to be crunchy is because of the peanuts, not because of rat crap, thank you very much. In this Texas plant alone, the article goes on to say, it sells its products to about 100 manufacturers. The FDA website has listed everything from ice cream to pet food that has been recalled because of this epic problem.

Not too long ago, I was excited to see that Kashi was sending out free cookies as a promotion. I was excited about this because I love Kashi and cookies: a winning combination. I filled out the form online, got my cookie about two weeks later, and ate it with joy. What email did I get a few days ago from Kashi? An email recalling those exact cookies they had been giving away because of the recent peanut-salmonella incident! I feel sometimes as though there is some weird sort of hit that has been placed on me because of all the coincidental food events that have happened to me. If all this was not enough to scare me off, earlier in the year, my boyfriend had to go to the hospital because of some food he ate at a local fast food restaurant. I had almost ordered the same thing that made him horribly sick; in fact, I had also had some of that ill-fated food, but I did not get nearly as sick. If there is not some sort of hit man after me, trying to kill me by e-coli infested spinach and salmonella Kashi cookies, I must have an incredible amount of bad luck with food. Or, perhaps it is not me at all. It could be that food plants and factories need to reevaluate and investigate how they produce their food. Maybe health inspectors are not doing enough to protect us, the consumers. It is just a thought. Then again, this is coming from a woman afraid of tomatoes.

Works Consulted:
http://www.npr.org/templates/stor y/stor y.php?storyId=100691167
http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/peanutbutterrecall/index.cfm