DON'T DRINK THE WATER

This whole tirade came from watching one of my favourite chefs on the Food Network. More later.

It was the usual warning when you traveled to say – Mexico – where one drink of their tap water would give you the Aztec Two Step. Mexico got a bad deal probably. I remember Istanbul where tourists fled to bottled water served to them at the desk of their hotel. You were advised not to drink from that bottle if the seal had been broken because of course some clever water-entrepreneur had refilled it from the fetid Istanbul tap water.

I can see that precaution being legitimate in much of the developing world, where potable water is not always available. But here? In this country? And in the United States? Consumption of bottled water has become epidemic. I am always amused seeing a chic 20-something drinking her “pure” bottled water with one hand, while the other hand held a lit cigarette.

I have always loved the water that comes out of the tap in Toronto. Statistically it is a lot more pure than much of the water that is sold bottled.

The other side of the bottled water phenomenon, in fact there are actually two sides: one being that fresh water is being drained away for commercial shipment and the hundreds of thousands of empty non-biodegradable plastic water bottles are coming a close second to decomposable diapers in the landfill sites.

My beef is not with the waste of resources. It is with the fear and anxiety that has propelled millions into not trusting perfectly good tap water. It’s the same fear and anxiety that has been godfather to the development a fear-based food economy.
My favourite sad memory is words spoken by by someone from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture who complained wistfully to me: “You can’t fight CBS AND Meryl Streep.”

He was referring to a victory by the food fascists who are determined to tell us all what we must not eat. He was talking about Alar, a product that allowed apples to stay on the trees longer so they could ripen fully. It was discovered that Alar was a suspected carcinogen (almost anything can e carcinogenic if you take enough of it)
And between Sixty Minutes and the appeals of Meryl Streep (she didn’t want her children to grow up eating poison) the product, a boon to apple orchards, was taken off the market. It was a win for the forces of darkness that have, in my view, turned the food industry into a platform for their own agenda.

I am no scientist, but I see the entire organic, no-additives, no-chemicals crowd as not only misguided, but hysterical and worse, convincing millions of people that processed food and additives are killing the human race.

They are aided by well-meaning people like big-name chefs who make their culinary delights using only the best – e.g. organically grown food. (I’ll never win this one, except that agronomists at major universities have blind-tested people with regular food and organic food side by side. They have not been able to tell the difference. The other day, watching my favourite food show, "French Cooking At Home" with Laura Calder. She was breaking eggs with coloured shells. There is quite mysteriously, some notion that they are better than whiter-shelled eggs. She also made a delightful concoction that included carrots. She did not peel the carrots because she said, they were organic. Such rubbish, and from a real food person. You peel the carrots not because of some mysterious infection of chemicals and fertilizers and insecticides, but because the outer skin is tough and sometimes dirty. (I know, the dirt is clean because it is organic. Tell that to the people who got sick on organic spinach that was Ecoli infected. From “pure” fertilizer I guess. Pure in this case from the feces of organically fed, non-hormone-treated cattle.)

I remember an agronomist commenting about chemical fertilizer being used on vegetables. He said: “The cabbage doesn’t know the difference. It uses the fertilizer to give us a better vegetable.”

One of my other bugbears is the comment, when I confront one of these people with the point about: chemicals, suggesting that there is no harm - the response is “but we don’t know what the long-term effect will be.” That’s always a convenient dodge.

I’ve had it up to here with free range this and organist that and “real” food, not the genetically altered variety which will help feed a world that is slowly running out of the capacity to grow enough to feed everyone,.

My last shit is reserved for the opponent of “irradiated” food. The word is one of those loaded words that connotes death by radiation poisoning; Irradiation has been around for a long time. It inhibits the growth of food-rotting bacteria and makes the shelf life longer – so once again – we can feed more people.

I am indignant. In my last blog I suggested I would by kinder and more mellow. Come to my place for dinner and I’ll be mellow. You’ll be eating food that may not pass all your critical tests. I promise you – it won’t kill you. It might even taste good..