Raw flour, though... that stuff can kill you. Well, apparently.
Like all of these food safety claims, it's somewhat overstated. Food is so safe in our country right now that this sort of warning is overkill. You could also make sure that you consume raw cookie dough only alongside adequate amounts of rum-flavored eggnog, I suppose.
From visiting friends in Guatemala, I learned that not refrigerating food doesn't necessarily lead to food poisoning. A pot of beans stayed in an unrefrigerated pie safe (bean safe?) for several days until all consumed. It didn't get any hotter than around 75- the safety of the food might not be the same at sea level with highs in the 90s.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I took no chances with water. I added a capful of Polar Pure to my drinking water, and never had a problem. From what my friends told me, the quality of the municipal water system in their small town was touch and go. Sometimes they added chlorine, sometimes they didn't. In going on hikes, with no access to hot coffee, the iodized Polar Pure was a godsend. The flavor wasn't the greatest, but acceptable.
Another way to bypass impure water is to confine liquids to coffee and soups. Given the quality of Guatemalan coffee, that is hardly a sacrifice.
An American in-law visited my friends in Guatemala, and had continual stomach problems, even with avoiding drinking water. Just the food was an issue. I never had a problem. Maybe my intestinal flora had adapted over the decades.
In eating at restaurants, a good rule of thumb is that food should be hot, no lukewarm. One time I ate lukewarm, and paid for it.
Regarding quality- I do not purchase any food from China. Too chancy. Kikkoman soy sauce is made in Wisconsin, so no problem.
Fooey. I used to make oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips and raisins from scratch. My 98-cookie recipe routinely came out to 30-40 cookies because, after each ingredient added, diligent me had to sample the developing dough to ensure I'd gotten it right. I'm still alive. And I never got sick from the process.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, Gringo is right about water, and not just in Guatemala. When I was stationed in Manila, the potable water wasn't. The city's potable water pipes were in the same trenches as the city's waste water pipes--inches apart. Both sets of pipes were 100 years old, poorly maintained, and they leaked into each other. I had to get my water either from beer or from potable water supplied in large jugs by the Embassy's commissary.
Eric Hines
An adequate addition of rum can also sterilize drinking water, so it's win/win.
ReplyDeleteBut why spoil perfectly good rum with additives like water?
ReplyDeleteAs W.C. Fields said, never touch the stuff. Fish do unspeakable things in it.
ReplyDeleteGrim"
ReplyDeleteAn adequate addition of rum can also sterilize drinking water, so it's win/win.
In the past, it was not uncommon to drink alcoholic beverages in lieu of unsafe water. Hard Cider's Mysterious Demise.
Numerous anecdotes testify to the popularity of hard cider as Americans' preferred drink on the farm and in the town from the colonial period to its demise. Because public sources of water in unsanitary old England were not fit to drink from, the colonists at first distrusted the water in the new world, and their opponents even used the fact that they drank water as a
sign of their obvious desperation.
Apple trees for cider production were among the first fruits planted in the British colonies. John Hull Brown reports that from the early 18th century to 1825 even children drank hard cider with breakfast and dinner. By the 1670s, orchards in New England were producing up to 500 hogsheads of cider annually in some communities. In 1721, several villages in New England reported a cider production of over 3000 barrels a year per village. John Adams drank a tankard of hard cider every morning. Horace Greeley, looking back at the early years of the 19th century, recalled that a barrel of hard cider lasted his family barely a week; anybody dropping in had his mug filled again and again, "until everybody was about as full as he could hold....whole families died drunkards and vagabond paupers from the impetus first given by cider-swilling in their rural homes." (Demon 21)
That sounded great until the last line.
ReplyDeleteYes, that last line was a bit of a downer.
ReplyDeleteOTOH, how would you drink a tankard of hard cider every morning and NOT get drunk? Rorabach's The Alcoholic Republic informs us about our hard-drinking ancestors. Apparently until 1850 or so we drank quite a bit.