February '08 | New York rocked by food safety scare!
MAD-HATTERS OF NEW YORK
In the middle of the presidential election-fever, New York has been rocked by a food safety scare: high levels of mercury have been found in sushi sold in Manhattan stores and restaurants. Apparently, sushi is such a staple in the New York diet that the entire city has panicked.
White House hopefuls and their partisans have had a chance to demonstrate their ability to deal with a major food scare ... after the elections of course.
Their positions are highly diverse:
- “I'm too old to be scared ... we've been through hard times before ... I have the experience, my friends, to handle this sushi ordeal.”
- “Don't believe these fairy tales” because “mercury isn't a problem if ingested in small doses” and , if you love tuna just “cut it into little pieces”.
- No pledge on dealing with the crisis, but, “will be ready for action ... Experience counts, and I've been eating sushi almost since that transforming day when I heard Martin Luther King speak in person.”
- “We can't rest until we have safe sushi of all types, all across this great land.”
- “It's all that immigrant fish, we're not controlling our borders.”
- It's the invasion of “foreign waters” in search of ever more tuna for insatiable New York diners.
- “Give me that old-time cuisine”.
- “I have been saying since 2002 that we were headed down a disastrous road with our sushi policy”
- “Nowhere does the Bible mention sushi in the Garden of Eden”. What was “good enough for Adam and Eve” should be good enough for everyone else.
- (from a vegan representative) “Americans should throw away the slice of fish ... and eat just the rice ball with a dash of wasabi”
- “We need to speak up for the little guy. The guy who gets mercury poisoning and then sits for hours in a hospital emergency room because he can't afford health insurance.”
And, let's give the ex-mayor of New York the last word:
“This is a very, very serious problem ... But, trust me, Sept.11 was a lot worse”
You can read the whole article on the New York Times website, www.nytimes.com.
OUR COMMENT
Up until now, America has managed to avoid dealing with actual GM problems: the tryptophan disaster was dismissed as a quality-control slip-up, StarLink maize fears were quelled by small-scale test which failed to prove links to any ill-effects, the illegal GM rice was just a case of awkward customers (us), the pharmaceutical-spiked maize was pronounced successfully removed from the food chain.
Interesting lessons are to be had from the White House aspirants in how the US administration is going to react to the first real GM-based food scare which can't be swept under the carpet.
There will certainly be routine denials by the old-timers in the world of politics that the problem actually exists at all, probably with a bit of hedging like don't eat too much of it anyway.
Newer politicians will likely make promises of immediate, relentless and completely unspecified action.
No doubt there will be plenty playing the blame-game: it's the fault of immigrants and, therefore, the border guards; it's the fault of greedy diners and the colonialism they are inspiring; it's the fault of the cook for using new-fashion recipes; it's the fault of the people for not listening to warnings, and for not reading the Bible.
The solutions offered seem to be:
- Stop eating the offending food (easier said than done if it is a staple crop which feeds the food-processing industries, all livestock, and humans)
- Sort out the health service, all the better to pick up the pieces
- Ask Martin Luther King
There is the occasional touch of realism in these statements: the recognition that a food contamination problem noticed in New York must actually be spread throughout the entire continent; the fact that it will always be the poor who suffer most in such a crisis; the fact that the crisis was totally predictable.
Indeed, a poison in the food supply is a very, very serious problem. But, worse than Sept.11?
If only a fraction of a percent of the 303,362,000-plus souls in America fall victim to that, inevitable, GM crop which turns out to be harbouring a really nasty surprise, they will be very, very lucky. And so will we.
Suggest you indulge in a little old-style cuisine, that is, the type without chemicals and made from fresh local produce. It was good enough for Adam and Eve, and your grandmother.
SOURCE
- New York Times, 25.01.08