"You wonder how the woman at the poultry stall doesn't end up getting salmonella poisoning or something. Eek!"
No kidding. What a can of worms. Especially coming here from the Ritz, where the HACCP reports had to be recorded every 20-60 minutes, and every cooler had to be between 36 and 40 degrees (or some other set and narrow range), and all product had to be rotated within a certain period, and all hot areas had to be above a certain temperature, and there could be no cross contamination of butter touching milk or an open jug of orange juice in the fridge, and were a retentive scholar and devotee of Leviticus to visit, save for the blessings (I think are involved), the sterile segregation and separation of food would be without reproach.
Fast forward to the lady digging through an erstwhile-pink apron with greasy hands to pull out change, and then using the same hand that just doled out your cooked food to scoop out a big handful of raw chicken.
Enter the world where there isn't enough refrigerator space to keep meat. Or veggies.
And why would you, when lady on the farm/butcher cart wheels through every day?
You !would_not_believe! how quickly stuff goes bad over here.
Stateside, a cabbage is fairly indestructible. Or an apple. Leave it in the fridge for a week and you can still cook it off.
Here, two days and it's a puddle of black goo.
The expiration date on hamburger....
Here, you have two days--TOPS--to cook the sucker off, and then you'd better finish it tomorrow or you'll be reheating some serious funk.
I once bought something at lunch, put it in the fridge, and it turned sometime overnight: the following late-morning, the bag was about to pop open with the bacterial output.
Sometimes I worry about things like salmonella or e coli or bacillus.
It's been a long, long time since I bought raw meat from a vendor, but that's a byproduct of having only a plastic auto kettle to cook in (and that elicit, I might add). But you can bet that the vendors running the carts I haunt aren't inspecting HACCP labels and refrigeration levels when they buy the chicken whatnots or pig livers. And cross contamination is a non consideration while they wipe fish off the cutting board that just had chicken with a rag they use to clean their hands and occasionally disrupt the various lines of ants marching toward the goodies.
And when it's standard procedure to rinse a pot in the huge vat of stock before and after cooking anything and everything, how do you say, "YOU JUST HAD RAW _X_ IN THERE! DON'T DUMP IT BACK INTO THE STOCK POT!" when that's exactly what they've been doing.... forever?
In the same vein, the person who seeks out insects from a string of deep-fry fair stalls does not complain about the presence of an ant or ten. If it's that bad, give the food a shake and wait a minute and the ants will crawl off.
What better opportunity to evoke Buffet: it's a whole new latitude, a whole new attitude.
Sometimes I want to scream, "have you any idea how quickly your product passes through my system?"
But that would not do here.
In the Buddhist culture, there is no room to put someone on the spot with, "You're making me sick!" Instead, you back off and disappear so nobody loses face.
And how could I point a finger at a specific individual? (Although I harbor fantasies of flying out of SE Asia on a courier spraying a drop of diarrhea for every iota of carbon in the exhaust and blanketing the place in my wake.)
It's the disquiet in eating something with ants on it, or tapping on something and giving the ants time to clear out: somewhere in my head, alarms ring. But to avoid food that's been in contact with insects would be to starve, or live on packaged crackers.
I hit some rum luck, but most everyone else seems to do okay.
What sticks after the rest has boiled off is that bad food comes from a) extremely bad care or b) sick animals. When you're at the fillet table, processing the day's catch of salmon, of course it's routine to carve off and eat a bit of sockeye. And of course you don't eat the hunk with all the sea lice. Likewise, when you're at the market, you don't worry about disease or contamination unless you see something that gives rise to that worry; the morning's butchering of otherwise healthy animals happily running around someone's yard hasn't had time or cause to become a health risk. So you pick up and smell the fish with the same hand that picks up and smells the pork belly and digs through the wallet for cash. And since the vendors are reliant on your return, day after day after day, it's in their own, personal best interest to make sure you have a quality product. Otherwise there's the market just down the road or the ruralite who comes through with a cart.
Which is a huge part of the reason there's no dairy to speak of: industrial farming is unheard of and would be thoroughly unwelcome.
I guess that's one of the great ironies of W vs E culture: here, the individual, no matter how sick or deranged, is streamlined into the collective culture while the chicken of questionable character is removed from the foodchain, where in the West, the individual is pulled aside and given counseling and care while the sick chicken is processed right along with the rest.
No kidding. What a can of worms. Especially coming here from the Ritz, where the HACCP reports had to be recorded every 20-60 minutes, and every cooler had to be between 36 and 40 degrees (or some other set and narrow range), and all product had to be rotated within a certain period, and all hot areas had to be above a certain temperature, and there could be no cross contamination of butter touching milk or an open jug of orange juice in the fridge, and were a retentive scholar and devotee of Leviticus to visit, save for the blessings (I think are involved), the sterile segregation and separation of food would be without reproach.
Fast forward to the lady digging through an erstwhile-pink apron with greasy hands to pull out change, and then using the same hand that just doled out your cooked food to scoop out a big handful of raw chicken.
Enter the world where there isn't enough refrigerator space to keep meat. Or veggies.
And why would you, when lady on the farm/butcher cart wheels through every day?
You !would_not_believe! how quickly stuff goes bad over here.
Stateside, a cabbage is fairly indestructible. Or an apple. Leave it in the fridge for a week and you can still cook it off.
Here, two days and it's a puddle of black goo.
The expiration date on hamburger....
Here, you have two days--TOPS--to cook the sucker off, and then you'd better finish it tomorrow or you'll be reheating some serious funk.
I once bought something at lunch, put it in the fridge, and it turned sometime overnight: the following late-morning, the bag was about to pop open with the bacterial output.
Sometimes I worry about things like salmonella or e coli or bacillus.
It's been a long, long time since I bought raw meat from a vendor, but that's a byproduct of having only a plastic auto kettle to cook in (and that elicit, I might add). But you can bet that the vendors running the carts I haunt aren't inspecting HACCP labels and refrigeration levels when they buy the chicken whatnots or pig livers. And cross contamination is a non consideration while they wipe fish off the cutting board that just had chicken with a rag they use to clean their hands and occasionally disrupt the various lines of ants marching toward the goodies.
And when it's standard procedure to rinse a pot in the huge vat of stock before and after cooking anything and everything, how do you say, "YOU JUST HAD RAW _X_ IN THERE! DON'T DUMP IT BACK INTO THE STOCK POT!" when that's exactly what they've been doing.... forever?
In the same vein, the person who seeks out insects from a string of deep-fry fair stalls does not complain about the presence of an ant or ten. If it's that bad, give the food a shake and wait a minute and the ants will crawl off.
What better opportunity to evoke Buffet: it's a whole new latitude, a whole new attitude.
Sometimes I want to scream, "have you any idea how quickly your product passes through my system?"
But that would not do here.
In the Buddhist culture, there is no room to put someone on the spot with, "You're making me sick!" Instead, you back off and disappear so nobody loses face.
And how could I point a finger at a specific individual? (Although I harbor fantasies of flying out of SE Asia on a courier spraying a drop of diarrhea for every iota of carbon in the exhaust and blanketing the place in my wake.)
It's the disquiet in eating something with ants on it, or tapping on something and giving the ants time to clear out: somewhere in my head, alarms ring. But to avoid food that's been in contact with insects would be to starve, or live on packaged crackers.
I hit some rum luck, but most everyone else seems to do okay.
What sticks after the rest has boiled off is that bad food comes from a) extremely bad care or b) sick animals. When you're at the fillet table, processing the day's catch of salmon, of course it's routine to carve off and eat a bit of sockeye. And of course you don't eat the hunk with all the sea lice. Likewise, when you're at the market, you don't worry about disease or contamination unless you see something that gives rise to that worry; the morning's butchering of otherwise healthy animals happily running around someone's yard hasn't had time or cause to become a health risk. So you pick up and smell the fish with the same hand that picks up and smells the pork belly and digs through the wallet for cash. And since the vendors are reliant on your return, day after day after day, it's in their own, personal best interest to make sure you have a quality product. Otherwise there's the market just down the road or the ruralite who comes through with a cart.
Which is a huge part of the reason there's no dairy to speak of: industrial farming is unheard of and would be thoroughly unwelcome.
I guess that's one of the great ironies of W vs E culture: here, the individual, no matter how sick or deranged, is streamlined into the collective culture while the chicken of questionable character is removed from the foodchain, where in the West, the individual is pulled aside and given counseling and care while the sick chicken is processed right along with the rest.
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