So I’m in Washington, DC at the moment, and, because the line at the Spy Museum was too long the other day, I wound up at the National Archives instead. Which turned out to be lucky, because they had this incredibly cool exhibit called “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government’s Effect on the American Diet.”
The exhibit was full of interesting factoids about our collective food history (like, did you know that “blood turnip” was a 19th century name for beets? Or that exploding ketchup bottles were once a kitchen hazard?), but what struck me the most was the information about the history of food safety. As anyone who’s read The Jungle knows, our food supply wasn’t necessarily safe or wholesome 100 years ago, but the exhibit drove home just how dangerous the products on the unregulated market could be – candy adulterated with arsenic or boric acid, milk containing blood or dead frogs.
I’m no FDA apologist (there are clearly still huge concerns with the way we regulate our food supply), but there’s no doubt that the food supply is much, much safer than it’s ever been. Yet I can’t help but notice how the level of fear around food these days seems higher than ever. As I’ve been researching the rise of the DIY food movement (backyard chickens, baking your own bread, etc), I’ve talked to dozens of people who say their primary motivation for growing their own veggies or raising urban chickens is that they need to know where their food comes from to feel safe feeding it to their families. Food industry experts describe this new-found need to know where our food comes from as “food vetting,” and consider the phenomenon one of the big trends of the past decade. I certainly recognize some of this behavior in myself – though I’m not one to throw around words like “toxic” to describe, say, non-organic grapes, I do find myself doing things like avoiding eating spinach (e. coli!) before big events, just in case.
Given that eating has always been an inherently dangerous activity, but that eating today is safer than ever, why do you think there’s so much concern about food safety? How much do you, personally, feel motivated by worries about food safety?