People are such freaks. They're afraid of the stupidest shit. If it's not murderers or enclosed spaces or nuclear war or clowns, it's something else. A lot of time it's stuff that can't even hurt you, like tarantulas. Sometimes it's so completely insane, it makes my eyes bleed. (I really should get that checked out&ldots;)

The seminal event for this essay is a conversation I had with a coworker concerning food and its tendency to turn into a level 4 biohazard within 6 hours after the expiration date. Yes, it's true. A lot of people, my otherwise sensible coworkers among them, strongly believe that the difference between a healthy, nutritious meal and convulsive death is a couple of hours at room temperature. I can't imagine what causes someone to regard their food with such horror, but it strikes me as odd.

Many of my coworkers will throw out food the day before its expiration date. Why? The fear of the nebulous specter "food poisoning". My brother got a stomach bug one day, and a coworker blamed it on some yogurt he let sit unrefrigerated for a day. Another coworker threw out a prepared meal over a relative's fear of botulism because one of the cans they used was "old". Never mind the fact that there are only about 60 cases of botulism a year, and those are mostly from people who can their own food. Come on, people.

That's not to say that food-borne illness aren't a potential problem, because they are. I've been hit with what may have been food poisoning twice in my life (i.e., up all night puking my guts out), but I'll be damned if I can figure out the source. I can tell you that I didn't eat anything that looked  poisonous, that's for sure. A few thousand people a year in the U.S. even die from food poisoning (out of 2.4 million annual deaths from all causes).

The thing the spits in my soup, though, is that a food can be swimming with dangerous pathogens, and it will probably look, smell, and taste just friggin' fine. A food that crosses the mythical Expiration Date barrier isn't any more dangerous than it was yesterday. We called a yogurt company, and they said that a week after expiration, the yogurt begins to lose its flavor. No horrible, agonizing death where your intestines shoot out your nose? Apparently not.

It's amazing to me that in this world of pasteurization, thorough cooking, and food producers' fear of bad publicity and/or lawsuits that people still freak out if food looks a little old. I say, if it's not fuzzy and hasn't changed its physical state (liquid to solid, and vice versa), then it's probably OK. Like I said before, I got sick twice, and I didn't eat anything that seemed borderline. It's the harmless looking food you have to watch out for. Salmonella isn't going to advertise its presence. If it's in your food, it doesn't matter how old it is. You're going to get sick.

In general, it's pretty easy to avoid food poisoning. For example, don't marinate your meat in mercury. Don't sprinkle arsenic on your salad. Don't lick the juices off of raw chicken. Don't recycle water out of the toilet. How friggin' hard can it be?

The other day, someone was telling my they didn't want to drink a portion of bottled water because "it had been sitting around too long." Is there no end to the madness?