Food recalls running rampant – can we know what we’re eating?
So far this year, a number of separate food recalls have been issued due to salmonella contamination from a handful of manufacturers – including thousands of products from hundreds of different labels, products that include Peanuts, Pistachios, Egg rolls, Pepper, a slew of other spices… even organic eggs have felt the crunch. And the food has made its way not only into the products we purchase from the grocer, but into restaurants and even school cafeterias as well.
But most of the time, we don’t even know what’s in our food, let alone where it came from… so when there’s a peanut recall, even if we toss any peanut butter we have in our cupboards, we might not think to look at the labels on our salad dressing, frozen pad thai, or even our pet food.
I suppose this is, in large part, a consequence of our convenience-based society, the ridiculously large scale that food is produced on today… but at this point, it is a wholly unnecessary one. Today, the technology at our disposal that could allow us to know where our food comes from – be it the myriad ingredients from sources currently unbeknownst to us, or purchased from the weekend farmer’s market. The main roadblock preventing this today is not that it is impossible to create a way to track our food back to the farm, or even that it would be too costly to implement a real-time tracking system accessible to consumers.
What I fear will prevent this from becoming reality is the very real fact that the manufacturers’ ability to keep us ignorant of where our food is sourced from helps them to maintain their profit line. Were we to know how our food is sourced, the degree of homogenization, and the risk at which that places us and the integrity of our food supply, demands would be made for changes that would be a real cost to the large-scale food producers of the nation. And so long as it is simply optional for food manufacturers to provide this information to the consumer, it won’t be done on a large enough scale to truly be useful… for it appears that trade secrets are more likely to be a concern than consumer safety. Still, there’s no reason we shouldn’t get started.
But I’ll get into that another day, I suppose.
More about the recalls:
- Pistachios and Peanuts: Far too many labels to list
- Spices from Union International Food Co./Uncle Chen & Lian How Labels
- Organic Eggs: Kirkland and Safeway O Organic Labels
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