Monday, February 11, 2008

Bacterial Racism

Children should play in the mud, infants & toddlers should be permitted to act as sharks and examine everything new with their mouths first, bachelors & miscellaneous college students should continue to eat pizza that has been left on the counter all night, the five second rule should be permitted-strike that-encouraged when pertaining to your own food. People should continue to share food and silverware with their pets, fathers should eat the slobber covered snacks that their kids didn't finish, and most of all, antibacterial soap should be banned with the exception of hospitals and healthcare facilities.
We need to get dirty again, we need to embrace the plethora of germs, bugs, bacterium & viral pathogens that await us at every turn. We need to face these adversaries head on with a "bring it on beyotch!" attitude rather than running with our tails between our legs to the family doctor for more antibiotics or the local pharmacy for a "peace-of-mind" flu shot.
"It's goin around"- the common blah-blah-blah heard this time of year in regards to countless sniffles, sneezes and bleeding ulcers of the skin. So far this year I've heard of probably five times as many people as usual being down for the count from the flu, I've even heard of a few schools closing due to high volume of "infected" students & faculty.
Super-Flu gonna git you! Hells no I ain't scared! (this sounds better when I sing it like an idiot)
I worked in numerous kitchens washing dishes for a few years, that's hundreds of thousands of plates, glasses and eating utensils covered with partially eaten food and breeding bacteria and viruses. I never called off because I was actually sick (oh, like you've never lied for a day off!) I virtually never got sick until I had kids and they brought home cooties from school, which coincidentally was after I stopped handling old food for a living.
We try and sterilize everything around us, antibacterial soap for our hands (what about the rest of our bodies), sanitizing wipes, sanitizing air fresh sprays, plastics with built-in microbial resistance, and I'm sure there are plenty of other items for the paranoid consumer that I'm missing. We have become so clean that our bodies are beginning to attack foods instead of germs -peanuts, wheat, fish, soy, milk, eggs, tree nuts- these are just the beginning, there are now new foods being imported from regions previosly unknown to our American immune systems, who knows what kinds of "introductory offers" these new foods might offer our overly clean systems.
So I encourage you all to live dangerously once in a while, don't wash your hands before eating, don't take hand sanitizer on that next fishing trip, drop a cookie on the floor and THEN eat it, and of course as always-eat that corn! -g