Food is Culture lists seven foods that food safety experts won’t eat. And presumably, none of us would want to eat them either.
To me, corn-fed/feedlot beef is the worst thing out there because it’s everywhere and it tastes insipid, even the supposedly best stuff. Heck, probably the best tasting corn-fed beef is the (really unappetizing if you know what’s in it) fast-food burger meat, ’cause its flavor is just concentrated grease and salt, and who doesn’t like that?
But I also thought this was well-put:
David Carpenter, MD, wrote a study in the journal Science on contaminated fish. He says fish shouldn’t be jammed into pens and fed soy, poultry litter, and hydrolyzed chicken feathers. As a result, farmed salmon is lower in vitamin D and higher in contaminants, including carcinogens, PCBs, brominated flame retardants, and pesticides such as dioxin and DDT.
If you’re wondering, we serve only wild-caught fish, not farmed, and we don’t serve salmon anyway ’cause we think it’s not relevant to Southern California.
As for other items on the list: for potatoes we’ve been mixing it up between Cal Organics and Weiser Family Farms (heirlooms); and most of our apples this year came from either Smit Orchards or Ha’s Apple Orchard. We’ll have to make sure we don’t go back to commodity at some point.
Trying to eat (or serve) food from sources not on the factory food grid continues to be a constant challenge, as the agricultural-industrial complex is continually working hard to eliminate other options.
The canned tomatoes bums me out. I never got to canning tomatoes this summer. Maybe someone puts them in glass? Or we’ll have to do it old school and find something else to eat until summer.
I’m glad our kitchen got a bunch in jars this summer, we’ll have heirloom tomatoes on dishes whenever we want. Although a couple local farms are growing really nice greenhouse tomatoes, too.