Complaints about campus eateries distract from a more disturbing truth
By Jake Perrone, contributing writer
Posted on April 3, 2008
A rising complaint among my JMU compatriots is aimed directly at the heart of our beloved D-Hall. As a freshman, the initial allure of D-Hall and its above-average buffet offerings was an interesting novelty, but the reality of the place seemed to set in among all of my friends, with dirty cups, plates and the occasional malignancy in the form of flies, cockroaches and the like. Sure, I suppose I can echo those sentiments to a degree as well. To date, I’ve personally seen two mice and a handful of cockroaches skittering about below as I attempted to stomach D-Hall’s world-renowned grilled cheese.
Many of my friends have sworn to stop eating at D-Hall, claiming they’ve seen the occasional mouse or cockroach; if they are in plain sight in the dining facility, my friends believe they must also be swimming around in the kitchen vats and adding pestilence to the meals themselves. Call me jaded, but I fortunately have stopped deluding myself with such notions of grandeur and come to terms with the fact that all food has a level of filth to it that the naked eye or unfettered tongue couldn’t even begin to notice. Allow me to elaborate.
Common logic dictates that the most reasonable place to start in this mission of tracing filth-levels in food is the beginning. The lifespan of food obviously begins at its place of production, be it a farm, mill, barn or what have you. You would like to think that if government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration allowed the outbound product of these facilities onto grocery store shelves – then every food with that sought-after approval stamp would have a standard of purity from the outset.
However, a little research into the matter reveals some key information that makes both the mind and the belly shutter. Cleverly hidden on the FDA’s Web site, our nation’s Health and Human Services Department provides a telling list known as the “The Food Defect Action Level Handbook.” It’s a comprehensive list of the allowable amount of items such as insect residue, mouse droppings and other undesirables that the government will allow to remain in the everyday foodstuffs we consume. These standards aren’t nearly as rigid as you would assume or hope for, and the results can be a little hard to stomach, so to speak.
Take apple butter, for example. Delicious. Savory. Great with a little light toast in the morning or alongside some tender pork chops in the evening, correct? But what If I told you for every hundred grams of apple butter produced, it’s perfectly allowable for (on average) five entire insects to be ground into the sweet concoction? According to the FDA, this is an acceptable standard for food production companies to meet.
Even our precious chocolate bars cannot be saved from this fate, as the FDA will only intervene if a 100-gram bar contains more than 60 insect parts and/or traces of more than a single rodent hair. Your average Hershey’s bar weighs about 43 grams, so by this logic, how many insects do you think you’ve devoured in your entire life? Heck, how many maggots-worth of chocolate do you devour on Halloween in and of itself? I guess now we know what gives the Crunch bar that oh-so-satisfying snap with every bite.
Furthermore, some people seem to be under the divine illusion that, beyond all of this government-approved contamination, the products they purchase in grocery stores have been delivered to them with some sense of unscathed cleanliness. Again, this is just an elaborately crafted myth to dull the reality of the situation.
I personally worked in a grocery store for two and a half years, and even though it was just mere months ago since I last worked my final shift, I recall that period of my life like a shell-shocked war veteran who saw his entire platoon meet an untimely fate. I’ve inquisitively stared as deli employees spilled pounds of raw chicken onto the less-than-regularly cleaned floor, only to scoop its giblets up and plop them into the fryer without saying “boo.”
I’ve gawked in horror as I saw the bakery’s cake specialist take a loving, intricate pick of nose, smack-dab in the middle of adding finishing touches to Spongebob’s iconic square pants on some unfortunate kid’s birthday treat. I shudder to think of the types of horror stories about what goes down in the kitchens of your typical restaurant – especially if you’re a notoriously cheap tipper.
I don’t reveal these brutal honesties in an ill-fated attempt to sicken you off of food all together, but just to get you finicky eaters to stop grandstanding this mass hysteria about seeing the occasional offbeat occurrence at D-Hall and, for that matter, restaurants beyond. Now that all of this food for thought is out in the open, everyone should re-evaluate their opinion on the seminal punching bag that D-Hall has apparently become. Remember: out of sight doesn’t necessarily mean out of belly.
Check out other stomach-aching factoids about what could be in your supper tonight at cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/dalbook.html#CHPTD.
Jake Perrone is a freshman computer information systems major.
