5 Myths on the Dangers of Dining

Planning the Thanksgiving meal is daunting in the best of times. Will the turkey cook as quickly as your calculations say? Is your cousin a vegetarian this year, or is that phase over? And among many reasons to feel vaguely anxious, one looms largest, casting a shadow over the holiday shopping list: Is anything safe to eat anymore? It can be so hard to keep up in this world of endless food scares. One minute we're alarmed by salmonella in jalapenos. Now it's melamine in milk from China. What next?

Endless fear of food isn't healthy. During the same period in the 1980s and '90s when the American health establishment was pushing a fear of fat (specifically anything delicious such as butter), the nation got fatter. When all food seems scary, a kind of apathy sets in. We fail to distinguish real frights from bogus ones. And we forget about a little thing called pleasure.

Our food hysteria has spawned numerous myths, most of which take us farther and farther away from the simple pleasures of a good meal.

1. The American food supply has never been so dangerous.

This is the least safe time in history for eating, right? Wrong. If you find it terrifying feeding your family now, try imagining yourself in Washington or New York from the 1850s to the 1900s. You try to buy vinegar; you are sold sulfuric acid. Your peas come greened with copper, giving you a dose of heavy metal poisoning with every bite. Spices are bulked with breadcrumbs or sawdust. Children's candies are colored with poisonous lead. Canned goods are laced with copper, tin and toxic preservatives. You buy "fresh country milk" to feed your baby, only to be sold disgusting swill milk from cows kept in stables attached to distilleries and fed on the alcoholic "mash" left over from making liquor. To disguise its thin bluish appearance, swindlers have thickened it with plaster of Paris and colored it yellow with molasses. There's a good chance your baby will die from drinking it, as a reported 8,000 infants in New York City did in 1857.

Or what about meat? If you think industrial meat production is scary today (and you're not wrong) you could at least be grateful that you're not living in the part of Chicago known as Packingtown in the early 1900s. Sausages contaminated with rat dung, spoiled hams disguised with chemicals and "potted chicken" that was really rotten pork were just a few of the scandals exposed by Upton Sinclair in his 1906 novel, "The Jungle."

Okay, so our food supply today isn't perfect (there are still Twinkies). But it has been much worse.

2. Packaged food is safer.

When we feel scared, we want to put our faith in something. Lots of people put their faith in food that comes in packets. Some part of us knows that a SnackWells cookie isn't as healthy as a fresh carrot, but at least it can't be tampered with. Right?

Maybe it's nostalgia for reading the back of the cereal box as a child, but we feel oddly reassured by labels. Look! It's fortified with thiamine; it must be doing me some good!

In fact, packaged food is potentially less safe than unpackaged food. It passes through many hands before it reaches the consumer, increasing the odds that it has been tampered with at some point along the way. Labels are only reassuring when they tell the truth. Plenty of packaged food is mislabeled -- as is the case with the formula scandal in China, which affected well-known brands. Besides, the healthiest and safest food -- produce bought loose from a farm stall or food that you have grown, raised or cooked yourself -- needs no label or package at all.

3. People who buy organic food don't have to worry.