food recall – in thriver words

Container Vegetables

With continuing recalls of food due to cyclospora cayetanensis and salmonella, now’s a great time to consider container vegetables. You don’t have to be an avid gardener or have tons of space to grow vegetables. If you have a patio, porch, deck, yard, flowerbed, or sunny room in your home, you can grow a number of herbs and vegetables. Growing your own gives you the ability to make sure contaminants don’t reach your food.

arugula in water in a black speckled roaster

All you need are pots or planters, soil, and plants or seeds. Pots and planters are often available for free through community gifting groups or at low cost from thrift stores and flea markets. Soil can be purchased from dollar stores, hardware stores, big box retailers, and garden centers. Many of these will deliver to your porch allowing you to avoid carrying heavy bags up steps.

Plants or seeds may be available from gifting groups, neighbors, hardware stores, big box retailers, and garden centers. To choose the most appropriate plants for your space, time of year, and growing zone, visit a seed company website and search by container vegetables then look for recommendations for your growing zone.

If you think you’ll be limited to tomatoes, peppers, and herbs, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. You can grow those in containers, but you can also grow lettuce, kale, arugula, celery, scallions, squash, cucumbers, eggplant, green beans, baby okra, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and corn. And that’s not all, radishes, potatoes, and garlic are possible, even inside.

I gardened with my grandmother as a child and once when my children were little. In 2020 when I learned how fragile our supply chain was, I started gardening again. Currently in my garden are cucumbers, peppers, green beans, bok choi, and the end of romaine lettuce and arugula for the season. My blackberry bush is beginning to flower a second time, and I have a blueberry bush in a pot on my back porch.

That means I have a lot of a few things to consume. If you’re used to grocery store produce, you may not be familiar with seasonal substitutions. Yesterday, I used some of my abundance of cucumbers to make gluten-free muffins. They’re not that different from zucchini or kiwi muffins. I just substituted what’s in season from my garden and changed the flavor profile a little.

This is how I grew up eating so it’s not a stretch to try a new way to prepare something I might otherwise tire of. With seasonal substitutions you get the full flavor of fresh vegetables or fruit that haven’t been trucked around plus variety of taste and texture.

As some plants become prolific, you’ll understand why great-grandmothers made pickles, jam or jelly, tomato juice, cider, and canned vegetables and why many people dry or freeze food. Once you’ve invested the labor to plant, water, and weed, you don’t want anything to go to waste.

But you don’t have to go big to avoid recalled foods. A planter of lettuce may give you the salad base you’re missing. A pot of jalapeno peppers can bring the heat you miss to your nachos. Once you’ve made the initial investment, you will most likely save money as well.

I’m not happy with the lack of food safety we’re currently experiencing. But it is a reality. Growing container vegetables and fruit is a way to continue to enjoy fresh produce with an added layer of safety. Now’s a great time to try it out!

Wash

Wash your hands. Wash your veggies. Wash your fruit. If it’s raw and you’re not going to cook it – clean it. This morning, a new list of recalls crossed my screen. It’s a good reminder that contaminated raw fruits, vegetables, and eggs can make you sick.

Instead of a quick rinse in water, consider using some kind of veggie wash product to remove an additional layer of contamination. This may not remove every organism, but it will help minimize potential exposure to undesirable substances.

In certain circumstances I wear a mask to handle fruit. I’m most likely overdoing the safety factor, but with berries that mold quickly and citrus, I’m doubly careful.

I understand the risk of inhaling enough fungus or mold to be problematic is low, but I remember my mother having a lung lavage to rid herself of a fungus growing there. Her doctors speculated that she had inhaled the fungus from unwashed citrus fruit she peeled.

Mold, fungi, and bacteria can travel in and on food. Histamines can multiply as food ages. We rely on farmers or supermarkets to handle food properly. But we should always keep in mind that the food we purchase may not have been kept at the ideal temperature. It may also be older than we imagine. And if you grow your own vegetables, cleaning removes soil as well.

In addition to the food itself, keeping utensils, cutting boards, and countertops clean will help prevent contamination from one item to the next. I know it may seem like you’re generating more dishes to wash without much benefit, but one round of salmonella will convince you the extra effort is worth it.

My great aunts used to make sure all the dishes they handwashed were rinsed in scalding water. I use this technique in the RV where I’m trying to keep the volume of water usage low. I still scrub with soap, but I want the double protection of rinsing with boiling water.

It absolutely drives me crazy to watch TV cooks wipe their hands off on a cloth towel when handling meat and then go back to handling knives and other utensils without actually washing their hands. I understand a kitchen set with rolling cameras means handwashing creates a disruption that requires more editing but showing this also teaches new or potential cooks bad habits.

Modeling healthy habits and kitchen cleanliness for our children is beneficial. We don’t want them sending us to the hospital the first time they cook us a meal! And learning by repeated, consistent example can be effective even if we don’t reinforce the lessons verbally.

I guess that brings us to the question of the five second rule. It’s not as bad as it sounds depending – how clean are your floors, do you have pets in the house, does anyone track in agricultural waste, and what is it you dropped – these are all factors that affect the safety of the policy. If you are pet free and mop often, five seconds probably won’t hurt anything.

On the other hand, if you break an egg onto the floor and do not disinfect the spill, you may contaminate other things that touch the floor.

Each of us has our own sensibilities when it comes to cleanliness. If you’re going to eat it, clean is better as long as you’re cleaning with ingestible cleaners. And high temperature cooking will kill most bacteria.

If you don’t want to wash your hands as often, wear gloves – keeping in mind that gloves can also spread contaminants from one surface to another.

In short, keeping it clean in the kitchen means wash, wash, wash.

Eating Her Curds and Whey

spider Spiders may not be the current danger for Little Miss Muffet when she eats her curds and whey. Last week, several snack cracker recalls centered around possible salmonella contamination of the ingredient whey. If you’re familiar with the nursery rhyme, you probably instinctively associate whey with milk or milk products, but what exactly is it?

Whey is the liquid that remains after you strain curdled milk. In food manufacturing, it is a byproduct of making cheese. Cheddar and Swiss cheeses leave sweet whey and cottage cheese and yogurt leave acid or sour whey.

When cheese was made at home, the remaining whey could be substituted for milk in baking. Even now, I sometimes use the liquid from yogurt in baked goods. Whey was also consumed as a beverage with honey and alcohol.

In US commercial food manufacturing, whey was a waste product dumped into rivers until the US government prohibited such dumping. Faced with a disposal problem, manufacturers began to look for other ways to use it. They first developed a filler for ice cream.

Whey’s use as a filler in convenience foods grew from there. It is now found in products that may or may not have inhabited my snack bin – things like King’s Hawaiian Bread, Cheetos, Ritz Sandwich Crackers, Goldfish Crackers, Nature Valley Protein Bars, Luna Protein Bars, Oatmega Protein Bars, Swiss Rolls, and Similac Pro-Advance Infant Formula. Whey has also become a nutritional supplement popular with bodybuilders because of its leucine content.

The primary components of whey are water, lactose, protein, fat, and amino acids. The proteins include beta-lactoglobulin, alpha-lactalbumin, bovine serum albumin, lactoferrin, and immunoglobulins.

Three types of whey protein are produced in the food industry – Whey Protein Concentrate, Whey Protein Isolate, and Hydrolyzed Whey Protein. In theory, whey protein isolate can be safely consumed if you have lactose intolerance, but other forms of whey protein may cause symptoms.

Like most milk in the grocery store, the whey contained in convenience foods is typically pasteurized to make it less likely to harbor bacteria and safer to consume. Unfortunately, as we have recently seen, it can still become contaminated during manufacturing or packaging.

It’s no secret that I prefer fresh food prepared at home. I think it tastes better, and I feel better knowing what’s in the food. Of course that doesn’t mean that all my food will be free from a risk of salmonella, listeria, E. coli, or other contaminants.

And real life means that I sometimes reach for convenience foods. Of course, I read the labels. I have to make sure they’re free of gluten and shrimp. Right now, I’m making sure they’re free of whey.

https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls/

http://wheyproteininstitute.org/facts/howwheyismade/wheyproteincomponents

http://www.liquidirish.com/2012/05/whey-alcohol.html

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/whey-protein-101#what-is-it

https://www.ampi.com/home/page/130

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”