Feed Us Back: Comments of the Week
– A full 50 percent of you say mustard and hot dogs belong together (and mustard narrowly avoids a runoff). The ketchup haters were out in full force on this one:
SAG: People that put ketchup on their dog give me the chills…
But Vio just can’t believe it: My stomach hurts from this poll… It’s ketchup all the way! Mustard is for sausage!!! Ketchup is for hot dogs!
And rooms has an even better suggestion:
For me, by far the best way to have a hot dog is Dominican street style at 3 in the morning, when the disco closes. The whole thing is done on the grill; hot dog gets sliced open down the middle and grilled, pan de agua gets grilled into crunchy flaky deliciousness, and then they saute up a whole bunch of cabbage with every sauce you can imagine, and slap it all together with mayo , mustard, ketchup and picante. It’s amazing!!!
-Gansie started quite the debate with her critique of Bed, Beth & Binge:
emrez4985: I’ve gotta say I’m so thrilled to see so many people outraged by this mailer. i did a tirade in the elevator on the way up to our apartment after i received it and my neighbor kind of gave me a weird look… but i’m so glad that i wasn’t just making things up. what was BBB thinking?!?!?
dani: I’m so glad you posted this! my jaw literally dropped when i pulled this out of the newspaper this morning.
Although some of you smelled an overreaction. Christina Stroz: I fail to see how this promotes eating disorders. How about we take responsibility for our actions instead of blaming advertising? It’s just a scale.
– Finally, for those of you with a desperate post-election need of something to get riled up about something, the The Haphazard Gourmet Girls give us an update on the raw milk controversy:
The Haphazard Gourmet Girls are all for personal choice and as little government intervention as possible. But the raw milk issue in California was more about personal financial gain for the two dairies that somehow roped our Senator, Dean Florez, into backing SB 201, rather than providing The Public with a healthy source of food-based medicine (raw milk sells for $25/gallon to markets, as opposed to $4/gallon for pasteurized milk). Unfortunately, there is no hard medical evidence that raw milk provides any of the health benefits that the very emotional and very glossy pro-raw campaigns suggest (literally, not a single study done in a completely scientific way). However, there have been many, many studies done on the deadly pathogens like listeria, campylobacter and e coli that are regularly and naturally present in milk as part of cows’ daily digestive processes. Pasteurization kills these pathogens, and many others. It’s no accident that illness and mortality rates from milk have plummeted in the century since pasteurization became a standard. California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a self-proclaimed raw milk advocate due to his body-building “natural foods” past, ultimately vetoed the bill because he believed it dangerously altered state dairy standards, and because there was no real reason that raw milk should be allowed into the marketplace if it contained deadly pathogens. Can “raw milk” be bottled and sold without deadly pathogens being present? Absolutely. But it’s a labor intensive process, requiring scrupulous cleanliness in barns and fields, and constant testing for the presence of pathogens. Thus it’s extremely costly for raw milk dairyists, and vastly reduces their profit margin. SB 201 sought specifically to allow a higher level of pathogens to be present in milk being sold, thereby reducing the financial burden of testing, etc. Another complication in the mix is that cows naturally shed campylobacter in the spring and fall; it naturally exists in almost all cows’ digestive tracks, but just happens to cause renal failure, dementia, paralysis or death in humans. Raw milk dairyists who are scrupulous about cleanliness, health–and ethics–would not be selling raw milk during the natural campy shedding season. Coincidentally–or not, as it happens constantly–less than 24 hours after we showed up to protest passage of the bill at the Martin Sheen event, a whole batch of raw milk cream was quarantined and recalled for contamination. It was produced by Organic Pastures, the raw milk dairy that had sponsored the bill. Organic Pastures, as it happens, is involved in a number of ongoing law suits for poisoning its consumers. The Haphazard Girls are locavores, organic, microfarmers and activist foodies, and it pained us to be on the side of “Big Ag.” But in some cases, Big Ag has it right. There’s no good reason NOT to pasteurize, except for monetary gain.
Photo: The Busy Brain
