I want to respond to two very well articulated, and provocative, comments on recent posts. They have in common the subject of pathogens in our food, but come at the subject in completely different ways. They kind of got me going.

First, Laurie Girand, the head of Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP), makes one of the more interesting moral arguments I have seen in a long time in her comment on my posting, “A Well Meaning Organization That Can’t Leave Us Alone About Pasteurization.”

Here is her conclusion:” The issue is not about germs vs. overprocessing, as you stated. However, it IS about what you are willing to give up to protect children, the elderly, the immune impaired, pregnant women, and above all, the uninformed, about the risks they take when they drink and eat potentially microbially contaminated foods.”

I’m sorry, Laurie, I have to assume, or rather hope, you just got carried away, when you implied I should feel guilty if I’m not willing to give up my right to consume certain foods to protect all the unfortunates of our society, including “the uninformed.” (Oh, come on David, do you mean to tell me you wouldn’t give be willing to give up a stupid glass of unpasteurized juice to save a poor unfortunate uninformed person?)

I’m kind of struggling to figure out how to say this, because I want to get the words right, but I guess for a guy who spends a lot of time trying to remain reasonably informed, I never thought about the uninformed as a special interest group who require me to give up basic freedoms, like the freedom to buy and consume certain foods. Sure, I have to give up the right to go out and sell Ponzi schemes to the uninformed, but unpasteurized juice, or non-irradiated meat? And I don’t want to appear to be doting on “the uninformed”—there are ways to protect the pregnant, elderly, children, etc., etc. that don’t include impinging on a very important freedom. Every bottle of wine and other liquor carries this little warning: “According to the surgeon general, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects.” That pretty much covers it, and most women heed its warning. A few don’t, but do we prohibit all sales of wine to protect the unborn who are adversely affected by the few abusers? We actually did do that for a time, and the government finally gave up, in 1932.

As Laurie suggested, I spent some time reading through some of STOP’s literature, mainly letters to government officials on the subject of juice pasteurization and irradiated meat.

Here are some quotes from STOP letters to government agencies:

To the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1999 about irradiation of meat:

“Just as insufficient doses of the right medication will be useless in curing or preventing an illness, so will insufficient doses of irradiation in meat and poultry be ineffective in significantly reducing pathogens and protecting the public.”

To the FDA in 2000 on pasteurizing juices:

“…heat pasteurization has a century-long, proven track record of effectiveness in protecting the public health. The time has come to require all juice to be pasteurized until alternative technologies are proven to be as effective.”

I guess I come away from these letters still feeling that STOP is a bunch of zealots—well intentioned zealots, but as the expression has it, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

If you really want to protect the uninformed, why not go after Kentucky Fried Chicken and Coca Cola and Dunkin Donuts? They really do prey on the uninformed (and children, pregnant women, immune impaired, and the elderly), making pretty much any medical condition they have that much worse. I wrote about one such uninformed person in a recent BusinessWeek.com article, the price he paid for being uninformed, and his efforts to make amends.

I cringe when I watch my young niece (and anyone else, for that matter) guzzling down soft drinks. I resent the people who create glittery and enticing advertisements to make people think they’ll be more popular if they consume these drinks. But I always bite my tongue when my niece is consuming her drinks. I figure it’s up to her parents to limit those drinks. It’s certainly not up to the government. Or is it?

I also know that prohibiting any food is a huge step. The problem is that once you give up the right to a food product, getting the right back requires near all-out warfare. Just look at the battles consumers and farmers are fighting just for the right to consume milk. It took a constitutional amendment to get back the right to consume wine. I’d hate to have to fight such a battle to be able to consume non-irradiated meat, especially when it comes from a farmer I know and trust.

I guess I have a fatalistic attitude about food. When I go out for sushi, I usually joke about how I’m playing Russian roulette—I pretty much assume that one of these days I’m going to get a bad batch of fish, which is going to make me pretty sick. Even before I get badly ill, I’m probably slowly poisoning myself with mercury and other bad stuff. My solution has been to cut back on my sushi consumption, but I still reserve the right to eat it, and for others to eat as much of it as they want. And when I do eat it, I go to a restaurant I know and trust. I’m trying to do the same thing with other foods–buy from farmers and producers I know and trust.

You compare setting limits on what we eat to setting limits on how we drive (on the right side of the road, with seat belts), but the analogy doesn’t hold. There’s no benefit to driving on the wrong side of the road or without seat belts, aside from the satisfaction of having the freedom to do so. But there are likely nutritional benefits from consuming raw juice, raw fish, raw milk, and other unprocessed foods. To dismiss that possibility with the throwaway line that “substantial benefits to drinking unpasteurized juice…was not supported in any scientific data” is the same line used by those who deny any connection between vaccination and autism, and who condemn raw milk. There are certainly more benefits in such foods than drinking Coke and Pepsi, and probably less danger. You can say there are no pathogens in Coke and Pepsi, but obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments are their own sorts of plagues.

I’ll conclude by saying thanks but no thanks. Thanks for your offers of protection, but no thanks, I prefer to look out for myself. I do appreciate you stating your views so eloquently, though, because I don’t think this subject tends to gets thrashed out so candidly.

The second item I want to address (and this will be much briefer, I promise) is Diane Reifschneider’s comments about Organic Pastures Dairy Co. and the outbreak of E.coli 0157:H7 in California last September (following my posting, “Getting at the Truth About the Danger of E.coli in Raw Milk”). I should note that even though I previously referred to owner Mark McAfee as an ideologue, I have nothing but respect for his commitment to producing a healthy natural product and for his courage in standing up to the regulatory authorities who shut his dairy down last September.

Reifschneider repeats a lot that McAfee has previously stated about the fact that the E.coli that sickened three of the four California children was never found in Organic Pastures cows, or elsewhere at the dairy. My problem with what Reifschneider says is to conclude that there is no way Organic Pastures milk could have been the cause of the children’s illness, even though each of the children consumed its milk. That attitude denies the role of epidemiological evidence as a means to show possible causes, which is what initially prompted me to suggest ideology might be at work.

But the more important message of Reifschneider’s comment is to reinforce a message that has come out any number of times on this blog: that there is a huge amount we don’t know about E.coli 0157:H7. We’ve been treated to all manner of theories about the E.coli—the “evanescent E.coli” Reifschneider alludes to, the high-temperature driven E.coli from Mary McGonigle-Martin, the antibiotic-driven E.coli, the feed-lot-produced E.coli, and the E.coli that infects a few but leaves most consumers unaffected.

The key point here is that the dynamics of infection from E.coli 0157:H7 aren’t fully understood. Which is all the more reason not to invoke guilt to justify radical legislative and regulatory “solutions” like requiring pasteurization and irradiation of more of our foods.