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A Little Dirt Wont Kill You (Foodism Magazine-2003) Face it, food is intrinsically dirty. Plants come from dirt and meat is riddled with biological agents, bacteria, even toxins. We can never be perfectly resistant to our environment. Cancer cells, like terrorist cells, tend to metastasize in an unstable and stressful organism. Whether the stress comes from a divisive social philosophy, or a lack of physical integrity, the result is the same: a state of conflict in both nature and culture. Taking too drastic an action in order to remedy a cancer can cause more harm than good. Even with the best of motives, one's remedies must also be sound and sensitive to the nature of the larger environment. In confronting an assault to one's personal or social health, the greatest danger may come from the drastic "solutions" offered by one's own object-oriented ideology. Inspectors can be a good thing when they monitor the quality of meat. Taking inspectors off the floor and putting in their place the "speedier" process of irradiation in order to "purify" the product can result in significnt dangers. Nuking food, like bombing nations, inevitably causes horrifying "collateral damage". Believe it or not, there are actually some decent tribes of bacteria out there. The process of radiating meat is likely to create a new class of biological agents. These are agents which have never existed before and whose long-term impact cannot be accurately predicted. Like tiny biological "sleeper-cells" these new agents may have terrifying and far-reaching effects on our global organism. Drastic solutions can destroy benign cultures and beneficial elements in both states and steaks and lead to an imperialistic and unsustainable "monoculture" in both food and politics. Our solutions must not be simple unpalatable reductions. It is not enough to be against war, one must be against the philosophies that make war possible. We must remember that we can never soften the stance of the single-minded ideologue until we are willing to impeach the philosophical premises that underscore their ruthless convictions. My mother had it right. She always said: "A little dirt wont kill you". |