After watching an evidently grocery store spoiled child of mine throw a perfectly good apple away because of a small brown spot this week, I think her rant is dead on.
We live in a super-sanitized world. Some might as well live in the proverbial bubble. Everything we eat, touch, use, or come in contact with is sanitized, pasteurized, homogenized. We douse every surface in our homes, every nook and cranny of our kids with germicidal disinfecting products. The very air in our homes, cars, offices is filtered, disinfected, atomized, humidified or de-humidified, and scented with ‘mountain fresh’ or ‘tropical breeze’ perfumes. The food we eat is no different, having been cleaned, treated, disinfected, bleached, powdered, waxed, polished, and bombarded with who knows what chemicals; sterilized, neutralized, and packed into convenient ready-to-serve eight-ounce re-seal-able bags. Don’t want to dirty your hands to wash your lettuce, crack an egg, or measure a cup of sugar? You can buy ready-to-eat salads (dressing packet included), eggs already beaten to be poured out of the container, sugar pre-measured into one-cup increments and neatly packaged in plastic boxes, for those who feel getting out the measuring cup is one chore too many. Cleanliness (and convenience) may be next to godliness, but we’ve taken it to a ridiculous extreme.
I’m not promoting a return to medieval hygienics, bathing a mere once a month, or eating rotten, grub-infested food. But we sorely need to lighten up a little. A few bacteria will not kill you. You are, in fact, covered with them, inside and out, like it or not. As the old saying goes, you’ll eat a peck of dirt before you die. (Whether that means you’ll kick once you’ve eaten one full peck, or you’ll inevitably eat a peck of dirt before passing, I’ve never puzzled out. Yep, these are sometimes the things I think about when out there hoeing, hoeing, hoeing for hours on end.) Either way, dirt won’t kill you. Germs are unavoidable. Bacteria are everywhere, some good, some bad. Bugs? There are more of them than there are of us. Sorry, you’re simply outnumbered. We have, as a race, persisted (and in fact multiplied like rabbits) for quite some time without our recent hysterical cleanliness.
And in case you hadn’t guessed where I’m going with this, that all applies to the food you eat as well. I sell at two farmers markets per week for the better half of the year, and it never ceases to amaze me watching people pick over what’s offered, watching people pass up or toss back perfectly good food. I’m guilty of picking over piles of produce in a supermarket or farmers market as anyone else is. But I hate to waste food. My husband tells me it borders on obsession. He calls me the head of the Ketchup Conservation Association every time I turn the almost-empty ketchup bottle upside down in the refrigerator to get the last dregs down to the bottom, then dilute the remaining tablespoon with water just to make sure it ALL comes out of the bottle. I may be a little touched, but I’ll never go hungry. Is half the tomato spoiled? The other half is still perfectly good, just cut it in two.
I don’t expect everyone to go to such extremes. But let’s face it. We are obsessed with appearances when it comes to choosing our food. Appearances lie. What a vegetable or fruit looks like does not necessarily indicate it’s flavor. Blemishes or imperfections do not mean it’s bad, rotten, inedible. Do you judge your children, your spouses, on mere appearance, ignoring their character? I should hope not. Just because a tomato is not worthy of gracing the cover of Gourmet Magazine does not mean it isn’t incredibly flavorful. A slightly bruised peach might be the ripest, juiciest to-die-for little orb of heaven you ever sank your teeth into. A little dirt on the surface can be brushed off, people.
I grow real food. Not picture-perfect, sanitized, pasteurized, tasteless chunks of cardboard. That real food grows outside, in the dirt. It grows amid bugs. It grows in the rain, dust, mud, and sunshine. I don’t spray it with chemical poisons to kill off every bug, mite, or worm. I clean it after harvesting, though some may not believe me, for the sake of conforming to widely held standards. I do not have industrial pressure washers and cleaning equipment to remove every last particle of dirt from each and every leaf of lettuce. I don’t have 48 hours in each day to scrub each speck of grit from every last scrap of baby spinach. I don’t believe in throwing away a perfectly good tomato simply because it has a crack or a spot on it. Can you swim in the ocean without getting wet? - potatoes and carrots grow in the ground, in the dirt, and so they will have dirt on them, the same as you will have water on you after going for a swim. Cantaloupes accumulate a little grit and dust in the nubbly surface of the rind. An egg, at the risk of being indelicate, comes out the back end of a chicken, and that end isn’t always spotlessly clean. A hen isn’t quite as obsessed with cleanliness as we all are. And despite all that, you can buy supermarket industrially cleaned and packaged greens, tomatoes, fruit, peppers, and still buy tainted food. After so many food scares, why do we all still persist in thinking pretty means good?
But it goes beyond dirt. We want perfectly evenly sized produce; each and every cucumber or pepper must be the exact same size and shape as the next one. We want seedless fruit (I’d never even heard of a seedless blackberry until a few weeks ago; I’m still not sure they really exist). Heaven help us all if anyone should have to work around the seeds in a watermelon, cut the tip off an ear of corn if a worm’s been nibbling at it, or eat a cracked cherry tomato. Seedless fruit? Fruit, and most vegetables, come from seeds, and the fruit that contains the seeds are nature’s way of producing more fruit for you. A seedless anything is a result of genetic tinkering. One can even grow corn that’s been genetically altered to resist earworms. You can eat frankenfood if you want to, but I won’t eat it and I won’t grow it.
Do we even taste our food anymore, or do we just show up at the table three times a day and shovel down what looks pretty?? I hear parents tell children to look with their eyes, not their hands. Taste with your tongue, not your eyes.
Or maybe the recent heat has just made me cranky.