Ellen Sandbeck's Blog, page 2

OUTAKE #11, Dangerously Exotic

Trade has been an integral component of human culture ever since the Stone Age, when people began trading their surplus goods, food, or raw materials for items that they could not produce themselves. It still makes perfect sense to import foods that are so exotic or specialized that they are not produced domestically, for example: French cheeses, Belgian lambic beer, papayas, or bananas; or if the imported foods are superior in quality to their domestic counterparts. Beware of products that are unbelievably cheap, they may not be what they seem. When there is intense pressure at the production end to cut costs, and regulation is lax at the receiving end, tragedies may occur.
In 2006, diethylene glycol, a sweet, poisonous substance that is used in antifreeze, was mixed into 260,000 bottles of cold syrup in Panama. The forty-six barrels of diethylene glycol had originated in China. Enterprising Chinese enterprising counterfeiters often substitute the poisonous diethylene glycol for the nontoxic and much more expensive pharmaceutical-grade glycerine that it closely resembles. The barrels had changed hands, companies, and countries many times during their voyage, the shipping records had been altered each time, and no one had bothered to test the contents of the barrels, which were labeled “glycerine.” The reported death toll from the poisoned cough syrup was 365. Toxic cough syrup has also caused mass poisonings in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria, and India.
One weekend in May 2007, Eduardo Arias, a mid-level government worker who reviewed environmental reports, went to a discount store in Panama City that was reputed to have such low prices that the street vendors bought their wares there. As Mr. Arias stepped into the store, a large display of toothpaste caught his eye and stopped him dead in his tracks. He said, “Without touching the tube, the letters were big enough for me to read: diethylene glycol. It was inconceivable to me that a known toxic substance that killed all these people could be openly on sale and that people would go on about their business calmly, selling and buying this stuff,” Mr. Arias bought a tube, then used up one of his vacation days the next day in order to walk the tube to the nearest Health Ministry office where he was directed to a second health center where he filled out a form and left his tube of toxic toothpaste. Three days later, Panama’s top health official announced that toothpaste containing diethylene glycol had been found by an unidentified shopper in Panama City. The label on the toothpaste did not list its country of origin, though markings suggested that it originated in Germany. Shipping records revealed that the toothpaste had actually been made in China, and that 5,000 to 6,000 tubes of the poisonous toothpaste had been slipped into Panama hidden in a shipment of animal products. Many more tubes had been shipped to other countries throughout the Americas.
On June 1, the United States announced that tubes of toxic toothpaste had been found within its borders. Eventually investigators discovered that some tubes of tainted toothpaste did not list diethylene glycol on their labels, and some counterfeited tubes of Colgate and Sensodyne were discovered that contained the poison. When Glaxo Smith Kline, the manufacturer of Sensodyne, traced the counterfeit toothpaste to a factory in Zhejiang Province, the Chinese government shut it down. The Chinese chemical company that produced the diethylene glycol that had poisoned the cough syrup in Panama was also shut down by the Chinese authorities.


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OUTTAKE #8, Cleaning for Show

A short while ago I taped an organic housekeeping segment for a television show in Winnipeg. The producer/star of the show had given me only a sketchy idea of what I was expected to do, and I have an extremely deficient memory, so it is quite easy to trip me up. I was quite disconcerted when just before taping began, I was informed that when the crew was setting up the klieg lights for the taping, and turned them on for the first time, they had discovered a previously invisible light brown stain on the beige couch. (The show was being taped in the host's home.) No one knew what the stain was or how long it had been there, and I was supposed to remove the stain during the show. I had hoped to be able to demonstrate the amazing efficacy of a domestic steam-cleaner, but unfortunately, one was not to be had that day in Winnipeg. Not surprisingly, I failed to remove the stain.
Here are my feelings about cleaning:
1) If you can't see a stain unless you throw a thousand-watt spotlight on it, turn off the spotlight. (This philosophy also applies to skin blemishes and wrinkles. Almost everyone over the age of ten would be happier if all the lightbulbs above mirrors were lower wattage.)
2) If it's not bothering you, leave it alone.
3) If it's not dirty, don't clean it.
4) If there's still shiny wax on it, don't rewax it. Too much wax is not a good thing.
5) Don't ever take a swipe at a cleaning chore that you don't want to completely finish. I learned this from a young woman who told me that she had recently bought a home steam-cleaner. She was showing it off to her husband, and took a random swipe at their living room wall. The steam cleaner worked so well that it made a stripe that was significantly lighter than the surrounding wall. The owner of the new appliance said, "%?*%@!!! Now I have to clean the whole wall!”

Embrace the dust bunny and live a longer, healthier, happier life.


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OUTTAKE #4 Connoisseurs

Frédéric Brochet, a researcher in the enology department at the University of Bordeaux, invited fifty-four wine-lovers to participate in a series of two wine tasting experiments. The subjects were asked to describe a red wine and a white wine that were served in clear wine glasses. A few days later, the tasters were invited back, and each subject was again served a glass of white wine and a glass of red wine. The samples in both glasses were actually the same white wine; the “red wine” had been turned red with an odorless and flavorless food dye. The real red wine of the first tasting had been described by all the subjects with classical red wine terms such as “dark,” “intense,” “complex,” or “blackcurrent;” the real white wine of the first tasting had been described using classical white wine terms such as “floral,” “fresh,” “pale,” or “crisp.” During the second tasting, the subjects all used white wine terms to describe the white wine, while the white-wine-pretending-to-be-red was generally described using classic red wine terms. Brochet told an interviewer: “About two or three per cent of people detect the white wine flavour, but invariably they have little experience of wine culture. Connoisseurs tend to fail to do so. The more training they have, the more mistakes they make because they are influenced by the color of the wine."


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Green Barbarians, Outtakes and Snarks

Into every manuscript the editing knife must fall. Here are some tasty morsels that landed on the editing room floor, but I couldn't bear to throw out:

OUTTAKE #! A History of Unsavory Foods

There also has never been such a thing as a purely free, unregulated market that did not pose a real danger to its customers, and there is no reason to assume that there ever will be. In staid, respectable Victorian England, poisonous chemicals were commonly added to commercially prepared foodstuffs. For example, Victorian consumers could purchase beer that had been enhanced with strychnine; pickles, canned fruit and preserves and wine that were preserved with copper sulphate; mustard and snuff that were flavored with lead chromate; and candies and chocolates that contained lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury, or Venetian lead. These chemical additives were not listed on the product labels, perhaps they were considered “proprietary information.” Victorian food products were also none-too-clean; the list of organic contaminants discovered in ice cream included bacteria; cotton fibers; straw; human hair; cat and dog hair; lice; bed bugs; insect legs, and fleas. When compared to Victorian food-manufacturing practices, the modern Chinese practice of augmenting the apparent protein content of foodstuffs by adding melamine appears almost restrained.


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OUTTAKE #15, Tiny Co-workers

If you are extremely worried about the bacteria on your office telephone or computer, stop and think hard about where those bacteria came from. If you are the only one who uses this equipment, and you wash your hands at reasonable intervals, the bacteria are your very own and are quite unlikely to do you harm.
If you are worried about acquiring hitchhiking microbes, you might want to invest in a copper bracelet that you can roll between your hands in order to calm yourself(copper kills bacteria). But if your office equipment is visibly soiled, you can use a clean microfiber cloth just barely dampened with water to wipe down most hard plastic surfaces.


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OUTTAKE #12, A Charming Little Story

A friend shared this charming little story with me after she read the “Toilet Rats” section of Organic Housekeeping:
One cold winter day, a woman who lived in Superior, Wisconsin surprised a rat in her toilet bowl. The startled rat climbed out of the toilet, whereupon the homeowners chased the dripping rat around and around the house. The creature finally dashed out the door and climbed the nearest tall object, which was a metal clothes pole. The wet rat froze to the metal pole.

Sewer rats follow plumes of food waste back to their origins. If you would

rather not find a rodent swimming in your toilet bowl, don’t dispose of food in

the garbage disposal, and never flush food down the toilet. All the wastewater

exits a home in the same sewer pipe.


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OUTTAKE #9, Make a Little Something Out of Nothing

The Buffalo/Niagara Convention & Visitors Bureau informs us that Buffalo Chicken Wings were invented on Saturday, March 4, 1964, by Teressa Bellisimo, at The Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention: a horde of hungry teenagers had accompanied her son to the family establishment, and there were a lot of chicken wings hanging around waiting to be discarded. Before this momentous date at The Anchor Bar, chicken wings had been considered a waste product.
Ms. Bellisimo deep-fried the chicken wings, smothered them in a spicy sauce, and served them with celery and blue cheese. And a culinary star was born.
The Anchor Bar has become world famous and still sells more than a thousand pounds of chicken wings each day.

The National Buffalo Wing Festival was started in 2002 in order to celebrate the contributions of the Buffalo Chicken Wing to culinary history. More than 329,000 people flocked to Buffalo during the first seven festivals, where they consumed more than 110 tons of chicken wings (approximately 2 million wings) more than $105,000 was raised for charity.


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