Upon hearing the news that cilantro (and parsley) is being recalled in the US and Canada due to salmonella, half the population will cheer with glee. The other half will sob in dismay.
Cilantro is a contentious issue in the food realm. Maybe THE most contentious issue. I don't know a single person who's neutral or "meh" on the cilantro issue. People either love it or hate it. (Full disclosure: I love it.)
The cilantro issue is partly due to genetics. A portion of the public is genetically unable to taste the deliciousness of cilantro. They lack the ability to taste the zesty, citrus-y flavor, and are left with simply the flavor of soap. But it's impossible to say how prevalent the genetic issue is. A lot of people may taste cilantro the same as the rest of us; they just don't like it.
2010 has been a bad year for vegetables. We have had salmonella scares in baby spinach, tomatoes, peanut butter (peanuts are a vegetable, right?), fresh alfalfa sprouts, strawberries, and now cilantro. Unfortunately, this is one of the few cases where eating right can do you harm. Fresh vegetables are healthiest for you eaten raw, on sandwiches or in salads. But this leaves you open to illness.
Washing produce used to be enough. This is still true for certain vectors of infection, and certain vegetables. One example being apples contaminated with e. coli from having been sprayed with raw manure, from rolling through a contaminated factory, or from being handled by someone who didn't wash their hands before leaving the bathroom.
Apples don't take up fluids through their skin. And their skin is relatively non-porous, so bacteria are less likely to make their way in to the apple's flesh. Just rinsing an apple in fresh water is enough to clean it, for the most part. For those who have extra cause to worry about germs (like the immune-compromised), a quick soak in a bath of cold water with a splash of lemon juice or vinegar will sanitize an apple nicely.
But many cases of infected produce don't follow this old route. Instead, the plant takes up the bacteria, which then colonizes the actual inside of the fruit or vegetable. In the spinach recall, for example, the plants had been watered from a contaminated source. The plants sucked up the water, and the bacteria along with it. Washing the outside of the spinach wouldn't have helped, because the bacteria were actually inside the cell walls.
In this situation, the only way to have avoided illness would have been to cook the spinach thoroughly. A terrible thought for those of us who enjoy a salad of fresh baby spinach!
Hopefully issues like this will one day be a thing of the past, if the Food Safety Bill manages to survive. America has one of the worst food safety records of any industrialized nation, but the Food Safety Bill would be the first overhaul of the system since the 1930s. For one thing, it would send an additional 2,000 new FDA inspectors out into the field, to help catch problems like this before they happen.
Cilantro is a contentious issue in the food realm. Maybe THE most contentious issue. I don't know a single person who's neutral or "meh" on the cilantro issue. People either love it or hate it. (Full disclosure: I love it.)
The cilantro issue is partly due to genetics. A portion of the public is genetically unable to taste the deliciousness of cilantro. They lack the ability to taste the zesty, citrus-y flavor, and are left with simply the flavor of soap. But it's impossible to say how prevalent the genetic issue is. A lot of people may taste cilantro the same as the rest of us; they just don't like it.
2010 has been a bad year for vegetables. We have had salmonella scares in baby spinach, tomatoes, peanut butter (peanuts are a vegetable, right?), fresh alfalfa sprouts, strawberries, and now cilantro. Unfortunately, this is one of the few cases where eating right can do you harm. Fresh vegetables are healthiest for you eaten raw, on sandwiches or in salads. But this leaves you open to illness.
Washing produce used to be enough. This is still true for certain vectors of infection, and certain vegetables. One example being apples contaminated with e. coli from having been sprayed with raw manure, from rolling through a contaminated factory, or from being handled by someone who didn't wash their hands before leaving the bathroom.
Apples don't take up fluids through their skin. And their skin is relatively non-porous, so bacteria are less likely to make their way in to the apple's flesh. Just rinsing an apple in fresh water is enough to clean it, for the most part. For those who have extra cause to worry about germs (like the immune-compromised), a quick soak in a bath of cold water with a splash of lemon juice or vinegar will sanitize an apple nicely.
But many cases of infected produce don't follow this old route. Instead, the plant takes up the bacteria, which then colonizes the actual inside of the fruit or vegetable. In the spinach recall, for example, the plants had been watered from a contaminated source. The plants sucked up the water, and the bacteria along with it. Washing the outside of the spinach wouldn't have helped, because the bacteria were actually inside the cell walls.
In this situation, the only way to have avoided illness would have been to cook the spinach thoroughly. A terrible thought for those of us who enjoy a salad of fresh baby spinach!
Hopefully issues like this will one day be a thing of the past, if the Food Safety Bill manages to survive. America has one of the worst food safety records of any industrialized nation, but the Food Safety Bill would be the first overhaul of the system since the 1930s. For one thing, it would send an additional 2,000 new FDA inspectors out into the field, to help catch problems like this before they happen.
Photo credit: Flickr/Michael_Lehet