By Alan
Caruba
The one thing you can count on during
the Christmas season is an avalanche of media-driven scare campaigns by
environmental and self-appointed consumer protection groups that are intended to
ruin it with claims that everything you eat or do has the potential of killing
you and your loved ones.
Here’s an example; in December 2011
GreenLivingIdeas.com posted an article by Sanya Kanelstran to let everyone know
that, during the Christmas season, “A heart attack can strike at any time in a
person with coronary artery disease, but heart attacks are more likely during
the festive season and especially between the Christmas and New Year period
because of the change in diet and lifestyle around the holidays.” So, happy
holidays and try not to die.
The folks at Naturalnews.com posted
an item on December 17, 2010 that warned that “Those Christmas-colored snack
chips and store-bought cookies, but watch out. Eating them may cause side
effects such as hyperactivity, especially in children. That’s because nearly all
Christmas-colored foods achieve their colors through the use of artificial
coloring chemicals, including Red #40.”
ItsMyHealth.com issued a warning in
November by Julie Robotham. “Traditionalists love their roast turkey with all
the trimmings on Christmas day, but with food poisoning from poultry more
prevalent than ever, it pays to take care with the preparation of raw meat.”
Properly cooking turkey or any other meat is sufficient to kill most, if not
all, bacteria.
The Internet is filled with these
posts and, during the holiday season, you can count on the media to repeat them
because scaring people is the stock-in-trade of most reporting. A welcome change
from this is Fox News channel’s John Stossel who has devoted his career to
debunking food and other claims that do not stand up to the scrutiny of
fact-checking.
On a November 29, 2012 program, aired
on Fox Business and Fox News, Stossel revisited the lies about finely textured,
95% lean beef. As I wrote in a commentary debunking the lies about “pink slime”,
a term applied to this, “This lean beef is routinely added to lower quality
hamburger to increase its protein content and its production has long been
approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It actually improves the
nutritional quality of a lot of cheaper hamburger.”
Stossel reported that “What some
media outlets call ‘pink slime’ is perfectly safe because it’s just meat. It’s
made from the meat that clings to the bones—the parts that the meat cutters
missed. An added safety factor to kill any bacteria is its treatment with a tiny
ammonium hydroxide gas.” There have been no reports of illness from the
consumption of finely textured lean beef. Moreover, the process is also used to
protect processed cheese, chocolate, and soda. And it exists naturally in beef!
In May, the Washington Times
published a commentary by J. Justin Wilson, a senior research analyst at the Center for
Consumer Freedom, a group devoted to debunking food and other product
scares. In “Funny Food Hypocrisy” Wilson examined the ‘pink slime” campaign
waged against finely textured lean meet. Along with a “bug juice” scare
campaign, he identified them as “clever hooks adopted by activist food snobs who
raised ill-conceived firestorms about lean beef trimmings and cochineal red food
dye.”
Wilson wrote, “Contrary to the
overhyped reports, lean beef trimmings make meals healthier, safer,
cost-efficient and less animal-intensive. Cochineal food dyes, while derived
from bugs, are actually all-natural replacements for artificial
colors.”
At this time of the year and all year
long consumers have to be skeptical of “fashionable prejudices against
‘processed food’”, said Wilson. “These people hoped to turn the ‘yuck factor’
into an irrational boycott.” As for finely textured lean meat, Wilson noted
that, “As any butcher will tell you, people have used and eating trimmings in
sausages and hamburger for centuries.”
If finely textured lean meat was
removed from use and “one estimate says we’ll need to slaughter an additional
1.5 million cows a year.” That’s a lot of cows!
Every year at this time I receive
dozens of catalogs from food vending companies offering all manner of delicious
items from steaks to nuts. These companies, food producers, as well as your
local supermarket are not in the business of killing consumers, nor is there any
evidence of widespread food poisoning. The government has an army of inspectors
at work to ensure that any reports are swiftly acted upon and, yes, they do
track down and close facilities where any conditions warrant
it.
Those Christmas cookies are not death
traps for the kids and the Christmas turkey is not a mine field of bacteria.
That hamburger you eat is as safe as modern technology and processing can make
it and that’s very safe. Proper handling and cooking is the key to enjoying
Christmas dinner.
My late Mother taught the art of
gourmet cooking for over three decades, in addition to writing two cookbooks.
She taught me and thousands of her students of the importance of keeping all
kitchen surfaces on which food is prepared clean at all times. It’s very good
advice and, along with the vast amount of food, meat, chicken, turkeys, and
baked goods, you can expect to enjoy a very merry
Christmas.
Don’t let the Christmas food killjoys
kill your holiday with false food claims.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
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