Food safety and standards - 17 March 1989

I don’t know if I told you a month or two ago about a visit from my eldest grandson who came down from the snows of Vermont to spend a weekend in the comparative balm of New York City.

Once he’d unpacked, his outfits for a busy weekend were stowed in a duffle bag the size of a small puppy, he heard the tap-tap of grandpa at his trade and loped into my study. He’s a rangy six foot three placid type, temperamentally equipped to be the soother and peacemaker among his four brothers and sisters, but when he saw the object of the tap-tapping his eyeballs glowed like comets and he said, “A manual typewriter! Wow!”

It’s been a pleasant little tale to tell to anybody of my generation, but I now look back on it sourly for the other day I went off into the jungle of mid-town New York on what I thought would be a very brief expedition. I was looking for a cotton or linen ribbon for my machine.

After two hours I surrendered to the only thing available, a film of nylon advertised on the package as being of superior quality, which means that once installed it leaves a clean, faint imprint like an old cotton ribbon that had been vigorously used for about six months.

In other words, Adam was not being cute; he was right. As one dealer said, “Since we’ve phased out manual typewriters there’s been no call for your ribbons.” Another man looked at me as if I were asking for a quill pen and said, “They don’t make those things any more.”

I came home in a pesky temper to think that an item as trivial as a typewriter could set up such a panic search all over town. I turned on the 24-hour news channel for solace in order to put my little grouch in perspective to see what mighty issue was wrecking the republic.

What I saw was a picture, in sinister colour, of two small oval balls with what looked like a tiny eye in the middle of each. They were embryos. That was it. I was on to some medical bulletin, no doubt. However, once I turned up the sound I was told they were not embryos, they were two grapes and the tiny eye in the centre of each was the point where they had been injected – heavens! – with cyanide.

Well if one nylon typewriter ribbon could for the moment upset one old journalist, how about two grapes – only two, they were not shown as examples, they were the only two grapes discovered in the whole United States to have been injected with cyanide, two grapes that immediately caused every supermarket and mini-market in the country to be ordered to remove from its shelves every pear, peach, plum and grape that had come in from Chile.

This is the time of the year when Chile provides the bulk of its fruit imports into this country. The Food and Drug Administration performing a routine sampling of imported food in a store in Philadelphia had spotted these two grapes and the 50-state alarm went out.

The prompt results – 200,000 fruit growers, packers and shippers in Chile were idle. The FDA – the Food and Drug Administration – detained at the piers and warehouses of every port of entry into this country the half a million cases of fruit a day that arrive at this season from Chile.

The people on the receiving end here, the importers, shippers, distributors, cooperatives, chain-store owners and so forth were holding emergency meetings with officials of the FDA to see how, if, those three and half million cases a week can be saved or – so help us – recompensed.

In the helter-skelter meantime, FDA inspectors were at it night and day searching through hundreds of thousands of Chilean fruit to see if there are any more contaminated items. You understand there’s no suggestion that Chilean fruit breeds or is susceptible to cyanide or any other toxin. Some mischief-maker, some criminal, at some point injected the stuff in those two grapes, an act of terrorism of immense unprecedented success.

He, she, they, had only to perform that single act to set off the natural suspicion that perhaps that was not all. The dollars lost to the Chileans, to the American importers, to the markets everywhere here is at this point incalculable – certainly hundreds of millions, at the least.

Within two days of that casual discovery in Philadelphia the Chilean foreign secretary was winging his way to Washington to meet the secretary of state and Mr Jim Baker had on his hands a kind of problem – for once what can genuinely be called a crisis – which I doubt any other secretary of state has ever had to deal with.

However it is, I suppose, typical of the sort of problem that will become at least familiar in the new age of terrorism. While we were glumly pondering this front-page news, not very far back in the papers and way up front on the tube was another scare which has nothing to do with anonymous criminals in a remote country.

This week another government agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, proclaimed that daminozide, commonly known as alar, can be a cancer-causing agent. It is used to control the ripening of apples shipped long distance, also to heighten their colour. Apples sprayed with the chemical, says the EPA, are unacceptable for human consumption.

So, thanks to the instant messenger of network television, apples started pouring off the shelves of stores and markets and shops throughout the 50 states. Within 24 hours of the EPA’s warning, a friend of mine in California called to ask what sort of signs are going up on your fruit stores.

I went round our corner to the Korean fruit stand. The immigrant Koreans have a monopoly in New York now of fruit stands and stores which they set up at four in the morning with tidy mountains and graceful pyramids of fruit. They close down at ten at night, dismantle the whole show, draw and lock the gates and go home.

They are, you understand, fairly recent immigrants and like all such people from the late 19th Century on they believe in what they’ve been told, that in America if you work very hard every day of young and middle life you will prosper and realise the American dream.

It usually takes one generation to get them used to the more normal routine of working, say seven hours a day for the legal minimum wage, health and pension plan.

Well, sure enough, a mound of apples bore a new legend painted on cardboard – “Not treated with alar”. I called back my California friend and told him. “Same here,” he said.

The phrase “the mind boggles” would have to be reinvented to imagine the speed and the extent across this entire continent of fruiterers rushing to their stores on the same morning sifting through their apples, removing boxes of them from their shelves or, in much relief, posting the signs that all was well.

However the government, the EPA, were quick to advise the states of their warning as it applied to schools and it was a brave school anywhere that went on serving apples for school lunches until the parents descended upon them and accused them as brazen poisoners.

The proclaimed menace of grapes and apples was enough to set medical correspondents, environmentalists and plain investigative reporters to recall or revive recent warnings about other threats to health in food, so that by the middle of this week – with no effort on my part by way of digging into files or other deep research – the telly and the papers were bristling with reminders of other hazards recently publicised.

And I need hardly tell you that in this country, which surely has no equal anywhere as a collective health and fitness nut, once a government agency vents a suspicion, once a learned article appears in the New England Journal of Medicine ever so faintly suggesting a possible risk to experimental mice of practically any food you care to mention then the three, four, national television networks scoop it up and it sounds off on the nightly news like a fire bell.

So a series in the Wall Street Journal has been recalled “Watch out, corn eaters” – corn being maize, the staple crop of the Americas. “Watch out for aflatoxin”, another cancer-causing agent. Better lay off the corn – an injunction which would in the summer here would be like telling Englishmen or Irishmen to lay off potatoes.

In New York the National Broadcasting Company ran a series with the frightening title, “Killer fish”, simply listing the pollutants getting into the rivers and lakes that breed fish and shellfish. Well, that’s an old story and for ten years or more now each state has forbidden or restricted the commercial catch of certain specified fish.

Incidentally, a ban on antibiotics in animal feed is still being considered by the Food and Drug Administration, not because the cow or chicken would poison you, but because some antibiotics can make human diseases resistant to them and, oh yes, salmonella has now found to be running like wildfire through American chickens, some chickens.

That’s the snag. Which chickens? The Chilean or whoever poisoners didn’t need to spend more than about 20 seconds of their time to guarantee that a whole nation would pause and say “Better safe than sorry” and freeze at the ports half a million cases of fruit a day.

Along with these warnings of acute hazards to health, the papers and the telly have not slacked their daily campaigns about chronic threats. Every night, in a score of television commercials, we are urged to buy pastes and dressings and drinks low in cholesterol. A campaign about triglycerides will soon be under way.

Excuse me, it’s time for my breakfast – my low-cal, cholesterol-free eggs and country sausage and little dollar-sized pancakes with butter and maple syrup.

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