“Increasingly, the biggest companies,” writes New York Times reporter Michael Moss, “that supply Americans with processed food cannot guarantee the safety of their ingredients.” To Moss, safe means sterile. I believe the opposite but the whole article leaves something to be desired. It focuses on Banquet frozen pot pies, made by ConAgra. A ConAgra spokesperson is asked a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife question:
Pressed to say whether the meals are safe to eat if consumers disregard the instructions or make an error, Stephanie Childs, a company spokeswoman, said, “Our goal is to provide the consumer with as safe a product as possible, and we are doing everything within our ability to provide a safe product to them.”
Pressed to answer an unanswerable but fear-inducing question . . .
If you buy vegetables from the produce section, you know that you can eat them raw but need to wash them first. If you buy a frozen pot pie that contains only vegetables, you might assume that you can eat it un- or partially cooked since it contains only vegetables. In fact, you must cook it thoroughly to be sure you kill salmonella etc. It’s understandable that the consume would assume that a product containing only frozen vegetables wouldn’t need to be thoroughly cooked. If you made the same thing at home and didn’t thoroughly cook it, you’d be ok.
Even you Seth can’t recommend eating salmonella or e coli.
Ted – I suspect the answer is “all things in moderation”
– ben