The Congressional Hearings (the American name for a political public theater battle for power) that are being fought for extending FDA bureaucracy's control over the food production industry are going well for the industry. The FDA has declared that it is powerless to enforce all the regulations but if I understand right the situation, it is not asking for more inspectors but for cooking all the eggs before they are sold to the public. Cooking kills Salmonella. The FDA has shown pics from DeCoster (the designated villain - see pic below) while the industry is promoting its own pics (see illustration above).
Technically, there are several ways of cooking the eggs, such as radiation and pasteurization. If I am not wrong, milk is universally pasteurized (cooked at 70 degree C during a long time) and it is forbidden to sell crude milk products (French cheese is excepted).
Gradually, we are moving into a sterilized world. I dont know if growing up in a sterile world is good or bad for humanity. We certainly evolved to deal with a different world. Rats, then, were food. In Nigeria they were called "grass cutters" and they were tasty, in Peru I used to eat "cuy" in the best restaurants of Lima. They say their meat has low colesterol content and local doctors recommend it.
18 comments:
Rabbi Kahane would have disapproved of your rat fiestas.
Those were not the things he censured.
Lifespans have been increasing. Tuberculosis , once common, is now rare. Pasteurization of milk must have save thousands or millions of lives by now. It's true that our immune systems don't get the workout they used to, which has increased autoimmune diseases such as allergies which are caused when the immune system has nothing better to do.
Egg pasteurization is a simple technology - the eggs can be pasteurized in the shell. All you need to do is hold them in a hot water bath of the correct temperature for a certain interval of time. The temperature is low enough not to coagulate the proteins and "cook" the egg. Dishes that have fallen from use because of fear - softboiled eggs, homemade mayonnaise, are again possible. It is also possible (and DeCoster will from now on) to vaccinate the hens against salmonella. So why haven't these technologies been implemented? Simply because of cost. An egg sells for as little as 7 cents, which must include packaging and transportation from the farm, so there is just very little margin for extra cost. The inflation adjusted price of eggs has been falling for 50 years due to economies of scale. Consumers have proven (with their purchases) that they prefer cheap. A few years ago I saw pasteurized shell eggs on sale in the supermarket (at admittedly a high premium - the small scale of demand increased costs) and then they disappeared -people preferred "unsafe" eggs at 85 cents/dozen vs. "safe" ones at $1.85.
K
This is really the Walmart story.
And we blame everyone else but ourselves.
Anon.
Well, tomorrow consumers will have no choice. Small farm eggs will be unavailable. My grandchildren will not believe that in my times, chicken searched for their own food in the manure hill and we children had to find where they made their nests to "steal" their eggs.
The problem is education.
The raw egg white should be mixed with the pisco first, which will result in ~30% alcohol, which will disinfect the egg. If adding egg white after mixing simple syrup and lime juice, the time to kill bugs would increase! Anyway, despite Peruvian bartenders not following my (impractical engineering) scheme, and Peru being unable to afford an FDA, an d the eggs generally not being refrigerated, Peruvian pisco sour seems quite safe.
Other uses of raw eggs, I have no sympathy for, let them have salmonella!
Dear Viking,
You need
3 glasses of pisco
1 ½ Glass of sugar
2 Glasses of lemon juice
White of an egg
Shaken ice
Add drops of Amargo Angostura
If you have no Amargo Angostura, anyother bitter herb alcoholic concoction will do. In fact, Ferro Quina is better.
PS: And what to do with the egg yolk?
You can use it as lubricant and extender when playing with your girlfriend.
I think that it's funny that no issue is too small or petty to be the subject of an international dispute - both Peru and Chile claim to be the inventors of, and the rightful owners of the exclusive trademark to, Pisco.
Slivovitz or palinka are much more suitable drinks for an Ashkenazi Jew and I think would work quite well in a "slivovitz sour". Powdered egg whites, which are pasteurized, are safer and less messy than fresh eggs for this recipe - they can be kept on the shelf and reconstituted by the spoonful as needed. I'll all in favor of egg consumption but I'm not sure your suggest use for the yolk is the best product for this purpose.
K
"Gradually, we are moving into a sterilized world. I dont know if growing up in a sterile world is good or bad for humanity."
It is very bad. There is an epidemic of autoimmune diseases caused by modern ways of living.
I am soon out of the Pisco I brought from Peru, I think I will switch to Caiparinha, I don't think my girlfriend would enjoy your suggestion one bit!
Thanks for the recipe!
Cachaca is the spirit, caipirinha is a drink made from that spirit. Other than being S. American there is little in common - pisco is a grape brandy, cachaca is made from sugar cane.
K
What I meant was: Since my supplies of Peruvian pisco is exhausted, and locally there is only one Pisco available, which happens to be Chilean, I may as well switch from pisco sour to Caiparinha, for which there is an ample local availability of Cachaca 51.
Hola J;
I saw you made a comment in your latest post that the ramifications of dissing Israel should be having to boil ones water.
In regards to that, boiling water seems to be "the law of the land" in Peru, whereas in Santiago, my understanding is that it is not common.
I allays asked if bacteria were detected in the water, and nobody ever new. The suggestion that somebody is drinking unboiled water seems to be an easy out for doctors whose patients complain about general malaises. I did get one comment that it was a precaution to the pestilences that raged in the eighties.
About Venezuela, I asked the same question, and one local suggested that the municipal water is safe, but due to outages, people store water in large plastic barrels, and when such stored water causes illness, the municipal water supply get the blame.
Do you in general think there is a correlation (inverse?) between water safety and odor?
Do you have any other general comments about the relative safety of municipal water in south America?
When you arrive to a new place, you get infected by the local microfauna. It takes a few days to get used to them, but only if you are weak you notice fever ot diarrhea. A healthy young man may drink anything and neve get sick. But why risk drinking water? The beer is excellent. In Chile you can drink wine. Aguardiente is cheap.
I can't answer re: S. America, but regarding China I was warned never to drink the tap water EVEN AFTER it had been boiled. Boiling renders water bacterially safe but does nothing for industrial contamination w. heavy metals, etc. Of course in many places in S.America there is not enough heavy industry to worry about.
Speaking of smell, most Chinese cities have a lingering whiff of sewage odor about them, which you catch now and then (often in fact) when the winds are just right. I gather it is because the sewage system is not properly constructed in some way.
K
> There is an epidemic of autoimmune diseases caused by modern [sterile] ways of living.
This is much more hypothesis than fact, though there is some evidence that could be construed to support it.
Whatever there is pales in comparison with the # of people who DON'T die anymore from Polio, dysentery, etc.
K
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