Opinion

Waiter, There's a Fly in My Soup

By SCOTT T. HARDS

It happened to me at home. As I raised the scrumptious-looking slice of pizza to my lips, my eyes became riveted on the small, cheese-encrusted piece of ground beef near the tip. Wait, that's not ground beef! I howled, "Yuck! There's a baked fly on my pizza!"

"Don't worry," joked my father, "A little extra protein for you!" It's too bad that Japan hasn't been able to regard the recent string of food contamination news with the same calm humor.

Of course, the problem that started everything was no laughing matter at all, but a genuine public health crisis. Snow Brand milk products' contaminated milk sickened thousands of people and many required hospitalization. The company's lies as to what had happened further fueled public anger. No doubt this laid the groundwork for what was to follow.

A fly in a can of tomato juice. A lizard in a can of corn. A caterpillar in a jar of kimchi. A bee (still alive!) in a bag of bread. A dead cockroach, too. We also saw reports of non-organic items invading food. Rubber shards in cheese. A bolt in a can of meat sauce.

The list goes on and on. These incidents were reported by the media as if each was a national health crisis calling into question the safety of the nation's food supply.

Learning from Snow Brand's utterly disastrous handling of their problems, manufacturers quickly announced recalls of the affected food products, costing them millions of yen.

Food contamination is nothing new, of course. It's just that up to now, if a consumer reported a problem, the company would apologize and replace the product, and that would be the end of the story. But it was the Snow Brand crisis that gave the media a new toy to play with, and they suddenly began reporting things that they never have bothered to mention before.

What concerned me the most was that none of the reports pointed out a very crucial fact: Bacterial poisoning of milk is not only invisible, it's virtually guaranteed to make you sick. That's a huge problem. A bug in your food, however, while quite disgusting, is easy to spot and, to be perfectly honest, can be safely eaten, as my father joked years ago (just ask any frog or bear about the nutritional benefits of eating insects!).

This is not to say that I don't care if bugs are getting into our canned foods. Of course I do. But what concerns me is when manufacturers start unnecessarily recalling products at huge cost when it happens to preserve image.

Not only will this lead to higher prices on food (such costs are always passed on to consumers), but some firms may also choose to employ pesticides in their processing plants to lower the risk. While we may end up bug-free, we'll be eating more chemicals, and that's probably worse than the alternative.

Insect invasions are a routine part of life. No picnic would be complete without its ants and flies, right? Let's hope that this imagined crisis has already run its course. Bon appetit!

Shukan ST: October 6, 2000

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