picking some shit up for lunch

[sisyphusshrugged]

with Uncle Procrustes

As you may recall, I've occasionally ranted about Republican willingness to allow Americans to eat feces tainted meat in order to save their corporate johns a few bucks. The problem, besides the yuck factor, is that this tolerance also means we're eating live listeria bacteria; which can (and occasionally do) kill us. It's not like banning fecal listeria from food won't work; the EU allows 0 live listeria per test sample, and it works fine for them. The Republicans simply refuse to do it; so we allow up to 4 live bacteria per sample. It's a filthy business. But now it's changed a bit...

The FDA, we hear, has finally decided to deal with Listeria. Will they roll back the meat handling rules to pre-Reagan days? Replace all the fired meat inspectors? Uniformly enforce food safety rules? In fine, re-ban raw feces in cold cuts? Not exactly. Our Republican bretheren in the FDA have just authorized the spraying of live viruses onto cured meat products, in order to kill some of the live bacteria that same FDA tolerates on said meat products. Now leaving aside any other consideration, what kind of idiot would trust a political party, which tolerates live fecal bacteria in the U.S. meat supply, with ensuring the purity of this viral treatment?

You might like to keep in mind that only a small percentage of food is ever tested, and that the plants are warned ahead of time.

Comments

[ebonbird.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Hrm.

Culturally, cleaning meat with vinegar or limes is something I'm supposed to do with whatever sort of meat I'm preparing. I need to go back to that religiously. I was told that lime has antiviral, antivermiform (sp?) properties and that I should do that whenever I'm eating meat.

Geez.

Talk about 'eat shit and die'.

[weremensch.livejournal.com]

Listeria is easy enough to deal with; cook the meat. In the case of cold cuts, jerky snacks, or other cured meat you can nuke it or fry it for a few seconds (until it starts to steam). As far as viruses go...I suppose you could just keep it steaming for half a minute or so; it's not like they're prions. That's just my WAG, though.

[weremensch.livejournal.com]

Nuke them for a few seconds, until they start to steam.

[jmhm.livejournal.com]

as ever, I'm going with "ewwwwww" here.

In the meantime, we should hook up about midweek HM coverage at some point.