Food Safety Update!

I've been recently appointed the King of Food Safety in my household. This is because I am the only person in the house that knows The Golden Rule of Food Perishability. I have it memorized.

Here's Abby Perreault's‌ synopsis:

Last Monday we decided to have tacos. But Monday is a very busy night for us. Soccer, tennis, zumba, etc. So two of us had to eat at 5:30 PM and two of us had to eat at 8 PM. This was a food safety dilemma fit for King Solomon. I had to figure out what to do with the meat between the split feedings. Someone not versed in the Golden Rule of Food Safety would have left that stuff out, allowing it to become a Petri dish of multiplying bacteria. But I know better. And I was in charge. I refrigerated the meat and then reheated it for the second mealtime.

Safety first.

I have also been designated as The Biggest Hypocrite in our house, and I have something to report an that front as well. Even though I am the King of Food Safety, I do not subscribe to Divine Hygiene. I recognize that I can make mistakes (and I reflect upon them).

Today, when I got home from school, I conducted a thorough investigation of our dog's "hot spot." Do not be confused. She is not a sexy dog. This is canine terminology for a raw sore that won't heal because of incessant licking. She has one of these "hot spots" on her groin, she licked it raw during the doldrums of the recent rainy days.

My investigation was both visual and tactile, and I am pleased to report that the spot is no longer oozing pus-- or maybe just a slight bit of pus, but it's certainly not festering-- and the sore mainly felt dry to the touch. So it's healing.

I was so pleased with her progress, that I grabbed a celebratory bag of potato chips, sat down in the good chair, put on a podcast, and started chomping away. After I few minutes, I realized I hadn't washed my hands after sticking my fingers in her raw sore. So I got up and washed my hands (though I realized it was too late, far too late).

I do this belated post haste‌ handwashing all the time (and I'm sure my readers do it as well). I replace the ballcock assembly in the toilet, go downstairs, toss the old ballcock in the garbage, see a cookie on the counter, eat the cookie, and then realize I haven't washed my hands. Then I rush to the sink and wash my hands, like the washing can retroactively remove the bacteria from the food, though I've already swallowed it.

This is medieval logic, similar to the belief that if you rub a special ointment on a dagger that has caused a wound, you will heal the wound. I will keep you posted on the consistency of my diarrhea.

Dave Breaks the Rule

As many of you know, I am generally an advocate of the Golden Rule of Food Hygiene:

Never leave perishable food out for more than 2 hours 

but today after school, I broke the rule . . . once again, Ian forgot to eat the hardboiled egg that my wife made (and peeled) for him this morning and I hadn't eaten lunch, so when I saw it on the counter I grabbed it and inhaled it (so quickly that I got the hiccups) and while I did some research and you should NOT eat peeled boiled eggs that are left out in the danger zone (between 40°F and 140°F) but so far so good, I'm writing this sentence, I'm not in intestinal distress, and I will probably follow the rules in the future.

American Tailgating vs. The Americans

There's nothing like a good-old-fashioned-football tailgate-- but that doesn't mean I like everything about a good-old-fashioned-football tailgate; Rutgers played Penn State today and we have a number of kids from Highland Park that attend both schools (including my son Alex, far right in the photo) so it was fun to see the high school gang back together and the parents brought loads of good food and drink, but it was bitter cold and it was windy-- notice the flags-- and wind ruins everything . . . tennis, biking, golf, tailgating (everything except kite-flying) so while I enjoyed the cold-- especially from a food hygiene point-of-view, I had no problem eating leftovers from this tailgate hours later, because everything was kept at refrigeration temperatures-- I was happy to catch a ride home and watch the game inside my warm, windless house . . . and then when the game broke bad, I was happy to watch an episode of The Americans with my wife . . . and choosing a show about Russian spies over football probably means I'm some kind of pinko communist.

 

Not Following Directions (Because They Are Insane)

Does anyone actually:

1) rinse and drain quinoa thoroughly in cold water before cooking?

2) determine doneness by the visible germ ring on the outside edge of the grain?

because these are the specific instructions on the back of TRADER JOE'S Organic Tricolor Quinoa, and while I like to follow food hygiene instructions and recommendations--

1) quinoa grains are much too tiny to rinse in a colander-- they would go through the holes!

2) quinoa grains are way too small to examine in such a precise manner;

so WTF?

What Is the Cost of a Quarantine Bagel? Maybe Dave's Life . . .

On Tuesday at his daily press briefing, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that the economy and public health are not an either/or scenario. He's right, of course. An increase in public health is going to help the economy. But he also said something that's patently false. 

“But if you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy then it’s no contest, no American is going to say accelerate the economy at the cost of human life because no American is going to say how much a life is worth.”

This is logical silliness. We HAVE to put a value on human life. It can't be worth nothing-- then you're Stalin. It can't be sanctified and worth an infinite amount, because then you can't allocate resources. 

Plenty of Americans say how much a life is worth. Americans that work in federal agencies that decide whether a regulation is too costly to enact. Car manufacturers say how much a life is worth when they decide which safety features to add to their vehicles and which to leave out (and how much to charge for them).  Actuarial workers say how much a human life is worth on a daily basis.

Professor W. Kip Viscusi says how much a human life is worth. He gets specific about it.

Often, these federal agencies rely on Viscusi's number. Back in 1982, one statistical human life was worth 300,00 dollars, but Viscusi revised this figure. He used data on dangerous jobs-- he looked at how much more a worker needed to be paid to accept a job that had a higher risk of death. He came up with three million dollars per statistical life-- ten times the old amount. Because of inflation, that number is now estimated by the federal government to be around 10 million dollars. 

Planet Money Episode 991: Lives vs. the Economy give an excellent rundown of this math (along with an interview with Viscusi himself!)

And that's why I was able to go and get bagels yesterday morning. We haven't completely shut the economy down. We are still allowing people to shop at Wal-Mart and get take-out food and go to the grocery store as many times a week as they'd like. We're still delivering and receiving mail. We're still ordering from Amazon. 

Do these things spread the virus? 

Absolutely, but at a lower rate than normal. But not at a rate of zero. If one human life were priceless, we'd have to shut it all down. We'd get one chance every two weeks to go to the grocery store. We'd be eating beans and rice. By leaving some businesses open, we're making a cost/benefit decision and putting a price on the lives that will be lost because social distancing is fairly voluntary. And imperfect, as you will learn at the end of this post, when I describe my journey to buy bagels.

We'll keep making these decisions, balancing public health and the economy, and recognizing that plenty of people WILL be deciding what a statistical human life is worth. That's why the speed limit isn't 15 miles an hour. If it were, we would save many many thousands of lives, but we've decided that those lives are worth time and convenience. How many statistical lives are 50,000 jobs worth? I don't know, offhand, but someone is going to have to make that decision. The same way we know opening bars will lead to some drunk driving deaths and some cirrhosis of the liver. And some spread of Covid-19. At some point, that number will be low enough that we will reopen. But it's never going to get to zero.

Some people are better at minimizing the risk than others. That's baked into the system. I don't seem to be very good at minimizing the risk. 

Yesterday, I went to the La Bagel in Edison. I put on my mask, picked up our order, and carried it back to the car. The place was busy: four customers and four people working. One of them was a uniformed health care worker. Everyone wore masks, but still. The virus is around.

I got my bagel toasted and with cream cheese. I had never gotten my bagel toasted before, but my wife gave me this option. La Bagel is only a four-minute ride from my house (three minutes, really, because there's no traffic) but I decided I needed to eat my toasted everything bagel with cream cheese NOW. In the car on the ride home. I was hungry.

I didn't realize that the cream cheese would be slightly melted from the toasting. I got cream cheese all over my hands. I licked the bulk of it off-- which is probably not proper pandemic hygiene. Then I put the bagel down on the console so I could find some napkins. After getting the napkins out of the bag, I noticed that I put the bagel down on a pair of used gloves. Also probably not proper pandemic hygiene. But I ate it anyway, of course.

In the next few minutes, I got cream cheese on all kinds of surfaces, including my mask. I licked my fingers clean and ate a bagel that had touched my mask and some gloves. 

I'm not a doctor. 

I don't have this protocol down pat. I'm like most people. And we still have a whole mess of people behaving like this, so the virus will spread, slowly. Hopefully, slowly enough. But this is a tough adjustment for me. 

I'm used to teaching in a classroom all day. Kids cough on pieces of paper and then hand them to me. The desks are sticky and gross. There's never enough tissues. I touch my face, pick my nose (you can't teach with a booger) and cough all kinds of droplets into the air. I'm used to seeing one or two sick kids in every class I teach. They slobber on the desks and blow their noses. And I don't even want to get into the bathroom passes . . . yikes. This is business as usual when you do five 45 minute classes a day. There's no way we're going to be able to control the situation inside the schools, but we're eventually going to open the doors anyway. 

Here are a couple of other good podcasts on this topic:

Making Sense with Sam Harris: 198

Freakonomics 413: Who Gets the Ventilator?

Comment of the Quarantine!

Yesterday, I lamented the fact that some of us are not cut out for all this extreme hygiene during the quarantine. Masks, gloves, hand-washing, no face-touching, six-foot distancing. It's an OCD ballet, and I can't find the rhythm.

It's because I've become inured to people and germs. I teach in an enormous, crowded high school.

Kids come to school sick, they cough, they drool, they fall asleep with their snot-covered faces plastered to the desks, they blow their nose while you're giving directions, and they occasionally leave menstrual blood on chairs (seriously, this has happened more than once . . . you call the janitor instead of doing the clean-up yourself).

I eat in a tiny office shared by twenty other teachers. There's always random food on the table, often long past the expiration date. I bring a cooler because I'm scared of what's inside the refrigerator.

Thousands of people are touching the doorknobs, staircase railings, and bathroom surfaces each and every day. If you need to get from A Hall to F Hall during the five-minute passing time, you inevitably get stuck near the library in a mass of bodies that resembles an Anthrax mosh pit. It's no place for claustrophobes, germaphobes, or tiny sophomores.

Ironically, this year our school decided to crack down on two things. Teacher absences (especially sick days on Mondays and Fridays) and bathroom passes. Obviously, the teacher-absence thing went out the window when the pandemic started. Teachers were encouraged to stay home if they were sick-- which is how it should be. We get our sick days for a reason, so as not to spread virulence in a building with 3000 closely-packed inhabitants.

The bathroom passes are another issue. Students are required to take a laminated pass if they leave to go to the bathroom. These passes obviously harbor bacteria, fecal matter, and worse. They are disgusting. But star commenter Zman offered an elegant solution:


You should keep the bathroom passes in a glass cylinder of Barbicide like the combs at the barbershop.


While I'm sure when we finally go back to school, we will abolish shared, laminated passes for some other more hygienic system, I am definitely going to take my old passes and put them in a glass cylinder of Barbicide on my desk.

I can never pass up some good prop comedy.

Thanks Zman!

I Need to Stop Losing My Temper (But My Kids Also Need to Stop Doing Stupid Shit)

Catherine was at a cooking class last night, so I was in charge of dinner-- but she kindly ran to Costco and bought us two rotisserie chickens, so I didn't have a whole lot to prepare; I made some green beans and heated up some store-bought mashed potatoes (yuck) and put one of the rotisserie chickens on a baking sheet in the oven, and a few minutes later, once it was hot, I took it out of the oven and told the kids to come-and-get-it . . . meanwhile, as the kids started spooning out green beans and potatoes, I carried the other rotisserie chicken down to the extra fridge in the basement, not thinking that anything could go wrong during my momentary absence, but when I got back upstairs, my fourteen year old son Alex was carving the rotisserie chicken with a big knife-- and this was not the problem . . . his other hand was the problem-- as he was holding the chicken in place with, of all things, our big red fabric oven mitt, and once he carved some meat, he grabbed it with the thumb and paw of the mitt, and this mitt was absolutely filthy-- it's an oven mitt, for Christ's sake-- so it was filthy before he started fondling the chicken with it and now it was moist and filthy and soaked with rotisserie chicken fat and this simultaneously grossed me out and pissed me off, causing me to launch into a profanity laced tirade about common sense and culinary hygiene, after which I showed him how to use a fork . . . and then I apologized and told him I shouldn't have lost my temper over something so ridiculous, and he apologized for being really stupid and we all agreed that the oven mitt is NOT for handling food.