What’s Really in our Food?
One article doing the rounds on the internet yesterday listed the “The 10 dirtiest foods you’re eating”. I’m such a sucker for these kinds of “top 10” lists, and I really like food, so… had to have a look really.
Bearing in mind that this is an American article, so at least one of the foods they’ve listed is probably not high on NZ’s grocery list, the rest of the list were (scarily!) pretty common foods, and while I think everyone will be aware of the problems with most of them – there were a couple of surprises.
In case you wanted to know… these are the dirtiest foods you’re eating…
Photos via "The 10 Dirtiest Foods You're Eating" Men's Health 6 June 2011
Ewwww! No not really, they don’t look that bad do they (apart from the raw chicken).
The whole list was:
- Chicken
- Mince
- Ground turkey
- Oysters
- Eggs
- Rock melon
- Peaches
- Lettuce
- Salami & cold processed meats
- Spring onions
The surprises for me were the rock melon, peaches, lettuce and spring onions. You don’t normally associate fresh fruit & veg with food poisoning etc, do you? Or maybe you do. I should probably have been paying more attention, because it turns out that the recent deadly outbreak of e-coli in Germany has been traced to an organic farm’s bean sprouts!
I couldn’t find any similar list for NZ foods, so don’t know whether our oysters, eggs etc are a problem, but the whole article is worth a look if you’re interested in minimising the risk of being one of the up to 200 000 cases of food borne illness occuring in NZ each year (3x the rate of Australia & 2x the rate of the UK 
)
Have you ever heard of Baked Potato Soup?
And speaking of food, I saw someone on a reality tv show the other night making “baked potato soup”, which I’d never heard of. Then yesterday I randomly saw this photo on the web – and it looked so good that we’re definitely trying it this weekend (I might just leave off the spring onion though & replace with chives or something seeing they were just on the list of the 10 dirtiest foods:)).
It’s going to be hard for this soup to beat actual baked potatoes on a chilly Sunday night – but we’ll give a go and see.
Photo via The Curly Carrot
If anyone else is tempted to try, you can find the recipe here at The Curly Carrot.
Like Gingerbread Men? Like Ninja’s? LOVE these!
On a final food related matter I also found these on the web yesterday (I really need to get off my computer and do some work!!) and just thought they were so cool… NINJABREAD CUTTERS to make NINJABREAD MEN!!
Photos via Fred and Friends
Awesome! Just when you thought the world had run out of big ideas!
Being a gift shop owner, I immediately thought of their gift giving potential – and rated it as High. They would make a great gift idea for guys or kids that like cooking (or might even be enough of an encouragement to get a non-domesticated male or child cooking).
We don’t sell any of these at The Paper Package, but wouldn’t a gift made up of things like these ninja cutters, a cook’s blow torch (what guy wouldn’t like to play around with a little blow torch!) and a book like Esquire’s “Eat like a Man” (to be released here in July I think) be a great food-related gift idea for guys?
Photo via Amazon
