The Chapel of Our Lady of the Snows (Capilla de Nuestra Señora de las Nieves) is the southern-most worship site, let alone southern-most Catholic Church, in the world and is one of 8 churches in Antarctica. It’s carved into a permanent glacier in Argentina’s Belgrano II Base, serving the year-round population of 12 researchers.
Re-reblog with some extra notes because a lot of people are just like ‘we’re all fucked/we’re gonna die’.
Listen, not all food is equally as contaminable. Some small notes are stay away from delicate greens because they grow on thre ground where the poop is but cannot stand up to rigorous washing OR cooking, which is why stuff like romaine lettuce and baby spinach is a problem.
All other veggies can and should be thoroughly washed, and if you eat a lot of raw veg and want to be safe- cook it. People have shit on cooking food lately with all the raw vegan hype but guess why we humans started to do it? Two main reasons, one is increased nutrient absorption, the other is you don’t get the shits and die as often from cooked food.
Also, meat is not your friend right now. If you are used to eating meat, I would avoid it and switch to eggs, which are sealed and even if the outsides came from a chicken’s ass, the inside is safe. Fish also tends to be cleaner and is always less at risk of pathogens than farm meat but again, be careful.
This is survivable, if it wasn’t there’d be no point to warning you. Y'all will not survive what’s coming if you see every bit of news as proof of your doom.
Forewarned is forearmed. Be safe, be sharp, be helpful.
im stupid™ but,,why are we avoiding meat? you can cook out the Nasty Stuff™, right?
Meat is incredibly susceptible to contamination and can easily transmit food-borne illness even when well-cooked. Sometimes meat simply isn’t fully cooked when people think it is. Cross-contamination with other foods is also a common problem.
Meat is covered by the USDA, which is still inspecting last I heard. This only applies to the FDA.
I want to clear up some inaccuracies and misconceptions in this thread:
1) As @wetwareproblem described above, this doesn’t apply to beef, lamb, pork, or poultry, because the FDA doesn’t inspect those meats. That’s done by the USDA through the Food Safety and Inspection Service and they have not suspended operations.
Again, when it comes to meat, the FDA only inspects seafood.
2) Additionally, meat isn’t that dangerous because it isn’t incredibly susceptible to contamination as was described above. It’s actually ground meats that are the problem. In meat, surface contamination usually isn’t much of an issue because it’s been shown that surface bacteria penetrate into the tissue of the meat. That means you’re usually fine taking care to wash and prepare your cuts of meat as normal. Combined with cooking the meat to the right temperature, you should be totally safe.
Ground meat is more of a risk, however. Contamination on the surface of the meat will have been spread to the entire product, since it’s been chopped up and thoroughly mixed together. That means that you need to buy your ground meats fresh and use them quickly and try to avoid buying from dodgy suppliers. The meat counter at your local supermarket is probably safer than buying off the shelf hotdogs or sausages, because the meat is going to be ground and packaged by that local butcher. The safest would probably be to buy your own cuts of meat and do the grinding yourself.
In the long term, ground meats are a point of concern for overall food quality. Back before the establishment of the FDA and the adoption of real food safety regulations in the US, contamination of ground meat was a serious issue and people would put all kinds of terrible things into ground beef, pork, and sausage. Sawdust or worse.
2) It’s not accurate to call out eggs as safe in this context, as they’re one of the more challenging animal products to protect from contamination. That’s because chickens produced in the US mostly come from factory farms and that production method is prone to salmonella contamination. IIRC, the life cycle is that the salmonella is picked up from chickens walking through droppings and they then spread that to other chickens when they fight and claw one another with said feet. And once infected, the salmonella will also contaminate any eggs they lay.
While the overall quality of chicken has improved over the last couple of decades, salmonella is still a problem. That’s why it’s recommended that you cook your eggs well.
Meat being well-cooked is a matter of temperature and it’s very easy to control. Buy a meat thermometer and use it. There are readily available guidelines on what temperature you need to take the meat to in order to eliminate bacteria. Yes, being completely safe according to temperature guides will reduce the quality of the end product, but it’s still an important thing to know.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, for right now, we’re fine. Things aren’t going to change quickly.
The FDA is suspending some of their domestic food inspection programs in order to concentrate on foreign food imports, produced outside of our supply chains, and high-risk facilities in the US.
It will take time for companies to start putting us in danger by trying to exploit this lapse in monitoring.
The recent problems we’ve had with E. Coli outbreaks haven’t been tied to any lapse in monitoring or regulations.
The reason for those recent E. Coli outbreaks hasn’t yet been determined and although people have blamed the Trump administration for overturning farm water testing requirements, those requirements weren’t yet implemented and the Trump administration didn’t overturn them. It just pushed their implementation from January of 2016 to January of 2020. So no, it wasn’t the result of overturned testing requirements because that didn’t happen.
If you’d like to read more about the history of food safety in the United States, start with The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. It had a profound effect on US culture in the early 20th century and helped usher in the changes that resulted in the creation of the FDA. Sinclair set out to document the treatment of immigrant populations working in the Chicago meat industry in order to promote socialism by demonstrating the poor working conditions. Instead, people reacted quite viscerally to the way he described the unsanitary food practices of the industry which led directly to the Meat Inspection Act and the creation of the FDA. The kicker? He wrote it as a piece of fiction, based on real life. And it still had the power to influence people like it did.
