What Doesn’t Kill You Will Make You Stronger

“What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger”. What does this age-old adage mean for the food you eat?

What do you eat each day? Where does your food come from? What is done to that food as it is grown, harvested, preserved, packaged, shipped and stored to ensure it will be safe for you to eat?

As soon as food is harvested, it begins to decay. Generally it is best eaten right away. But we need food everyday to grow strong. Through the centuries, humans have devised a number of ways to preserve their food – so they will not starve in the days before and after harvest, and so what they do eat won’t make them sick.

If you have ever experienced a food-induced illness it‘s something you will never forget. The things your body does in response to bad food can be quite nasty.

In “Emerging Infectious Diseases”, Vol. 5, No. 5, September and October 1999 the National Institute of Health estimates that foodborne illnesses cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year.

These statistics sound frightening until you put the numbers in context. Perhaps they aren’t so bad after all, unless you are one of the unfortunate. If you round down the US population to 300 million, and each person eats just three meals a day you have 328 billion meals in the US per year. Assuming a conservative number of 3 different foods at each meal, you are looking at nearly one trillion food servings in the country each year. If there are 5000 deaths per year that would be a 1 in 100 billionth chance of dying from a food serving. These odds of course are just estimates and built around arbitrary numbers but make the point that our food is quite safe and rarely causes death. But if you are one that gets sick or dies the odds don’t matter much. And these numbers don’t include things like allergies or linkages between our food and things like cancer.

We need to eat. So what do we do to ensure our food is plentiful and safe to eat? And makes us strong and healthy? The United States is a melting pot of many different cultures. Each culture has developed “unique” foods to meet this challenge. Other cultures, times and ecosystems may struggle to eat or even see it as food. The Norwegian lutefisk and German sauerkraut are just two examples.

Today our food supply has changed dramatically from the days of lutefisk. Modern preservation and transport mean food can be harvested anywhere in the world and end up on your plate. These changes have altered the food we eat. To produce an adequate food supply, farming has incorporated fertilizers, pesticides, and growth regulators. Tomatoes are picked while green so they can be packed and shipped. New varieties of plants were bred to “look nice”: red, round and the same as every other tomato, only ripening as they reach our grocery shelves.

So if your food doesn’t kill you, does it make you stronger? Many of the changes haven't been related to either food safety or its healthful qualities. This Mission of the Month takes a tasty look at what we eat and explores food safety and quality from three perspectives: food preservation, altering food, and cultural foods. Along the way themes of marketing of food and our choices of what we eat as well as our food regulations will be examined. Dig in!