meaty meat meat
Can I just mention how excited I am that this recent salmonella outbreak (which is terrible and horrible) is veggie related? You know in ten years when I mention eating a tomato, no one is ever going to say, “OH I’d never eat those! All those people got salmonella from them!” Yet any time I mention how much I love Jack in the Box, I get a hearty laugh and people say they’d NEVER eat there (even though fewer people got sick in that incident, and JitB now has the most extensive food safety testing of pretty much any restaurant) because of their food poisoning incident. I mean it’s horrible that we have to be skeptical or frightened of any food, but the fact that, for some reason we have been frightened into believing things that grow from a literal pile of excrement are less likely to make us sick than things protected from it by hide is bizarre to me. Obviously proper handling is necessary for both, and there are temperature issues for meat, but how saintly are vegetables that it never occurred to people that they too could poison people?
Now I want a Jack taco. Sadly the nearest one is over 600 miles away.
6 Comments so far
1. Miss E wrote on July 10th, 2008 at 5:54 am
See, for me the various food scares just reinforce my commitment to buying from the farmers’ market, as then I figure I can go straight to the source and yell at the farmer if I get sick. It also makes me feel smug and self-satisfied, which I don’t really have much occasion to do.
2. jennybento wrote on July 10th, 2008 at 5:57 am
Yet few of them sell meat! They still mostly sell veggies or eggs.
3. Heidi wrote on July 10th, 2008 at 6:34 am
We have a pretty good meat selection at our little farmers market. There’s even a whole booth just for every kind of jerky you could ever want. If you know the right beef guy, you can also get (illegal) raw milk. You say “1C” and pay, and then they send you to a house around the corner where someone hands you a gallon out the back door.
Anyway. It all makes me think of when we went to Hong Kong when I was 10. We couldn’t eat farmers market fruit/vegs where we were staying because people used human feces for fertilizer. And our tender American guts couldn’t handle whatever was in all that.
4. jenny wrote on July 10th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Yeah I mean all food is dangerous if handled poorly. All factory processes let bad stuff potentially sneak in. Why veggies are seen as more virtuous I have no idea. What about the sprouts scares! I had to not eat sprouts on my sandwiches for a couple of years in college because of that!
5. alison wrote on July 11th, 2008 at 6:12 am
mmm, jack in the box tacos. two for 99 cents! i have a veg friend who has convinced herself that they are meatless. why are they not on the east coast?
oh, and i agree with your sentiments re the saintly vegetable, growing out of excrement. i love my veggies, but i get annoyed by people who think to be veg is to be good and SAFE.
tonight, in lieu (loo? sp??) of JitB tacos, i may try the bison tartare at a belgian restaurant.
6. jennybento wrote on July 11th, 2008 at 7:47 am
I have no idea why they are not here, since we have Qdoba, which is owned by them. I think a lot of Eastern (and Midwestern) JiBs closed after the scandal. There used to be JiB in the Chicago suburbs, but they closed around the scandal time. Sad. This week I am all about chains, apparently.