Casting Off the Crutches…and Adjusting to the New Third-World America

Well, hallelujah. It looks like your honored scribbler may live, after all. Another miracle!

The belly virus is about gone. Tho’ it still feels like someone socked me in the gut, at least I can now stand upright. And here’s the weird part:

After three days and four nights flat on my back in bed, the hip and back pain are almost gone! For a period this morning, the pain level was actually down to zero, the first time in two years.

It’s returned to some degree, of course, but it’s still much, much better. It’s as though the bod’ needed to give the physical therapy exercises and the swimming and the sitting at a desk a rest! Or maybe like taking the weight of the upper body off the lower lumbar vertebrae somehow let something shift away from whatever nerve it was pressing on.

Whatever caused it, any relief sure is welcome!

And speaking of causes…

Initially I thought I’d brought on the bellyache with a perfectly awful asparagus soup I concocted. Instantly after eating it, the bod’ blew up with gas like a weather balloon. And forthwith things went from bad to worse. Much worse.  Resolved: pour the puréed asparagus stems down the drain, praying that it doesn’t clog the plastic plumbing as it seems to have done the human plumbing.

Soon, though, it became apparent that this was a viral infection, with the classic collywobbles, headache, and a rather startling fever.

On reflection, it’s unlikely the asparagus soup harbored a virus, since it was cooked until the stringy stems dissolved into mush — a good 45 minutes or so. It was still very hot when I ate it.

What suspects had I encountered over the previous 24 hours, typical incubation period for an enterovirus?

• boxed salad greens
• mango
• avocado
• raw fruit bowl at a restaurant
• banana blended into OJ

Uh huh. Right now we’re told people in a dozen states are complaining of stomach infections associated with a salad mix — not the type I favor, and not here in Arizona. But still. This isn’t the first time.

No, indeed. This is far from the first time. And although I was brought up in a place where we had to disinfect every bite we put in our mouths, I’ve always been pretty complacent about produce purchased in the Safeway and waypoints.

This is America, after all! We’re a First-World country! We never fertilize our fields with human waste. We have safety regulations. We have health regulations. We have…effing globalization…

And so yes, we’re getting plenty of produce grown under unknown and probably questionable conditions.

When I was a little kid, my mother treated every head of lettuce, every piece of fruit, ever radish, every stick of celery, every other vegetable we might eat raw by soaking it in a sink of Clorox-laced water, as she had been taught to do by company officials. Anything that couldn’t be soaked in Clorox or cooked to insensibility was simply off-limits.

Strawberries were off-limits.

Raspberries were off-limits.

Blackberries were off-limits.

Fruits with rinds that could be peeled had to be doused in Clorox, too, and washed with soap and water before eating. Even though you cut off the peel, if you hadn’t taken care of the microbes, the knife would pick them up as you sliced into the fruit and smear them through the juicy center. Et voilà! Amoebic dysentery!

Watermelons of the time — we had none of these tiny little seedless melons in those days, but wonderful, juicy, incredibly sweet mammoth things that your Daddy had to pick out because he knew how tell which one was the ripest and because he could lift the the behemoth — watermelons were too big to submerge in a sink full of chlorinated water. So we were told to wash them all over with soap and water. Then dry. Then slice and serve. But…

But we were not to eat any juice that dripped out and puddled up on the plate. Which of course was exactly what every little kid craved to do: as soon as Mom’s back was turned, grab the plate, lift it to the lips, and slurp down that sugary watermelon juice! My mother watched me like a hawk whenever she set a piece of watermelon in front of me.

Every time my mother dragged the groceries in from the commissary, she would wash and disinfect all the fresh fruit and vegetables — which were considerable, because back in the Day real food was all we had to eat, except for some drech that came from cans. And some ur-processed-cereals — puffed wheat, puffed rice, Cheerios, and something gross that was coated in goopy syrup sort of like the stuff that holds popcorn balls together. Most of our food was actual food, and most of our meals were prepared from scratch.

At any rate, this sanitary regimen worked for ten long years, during which no one in our family developed a serious intestinal disease.

Ten. Long. Years.

Week after week and day after day of disinfecting every bite of food in Clorox and detergent…

Then came the day my mother persuaded my father to retire from the Arabian American Oil Company. She and I were to go home a few months before the end of his contract, during which time my mother would establish a base of operations in the San Francisco Bay Area, out of which Standard Oil tankers sailed. My father would move from his handsomely paid shore job in God-forsaken Ras Tanura to handsomely paid captain of a tanker sailing up and down the West Coast.

The evening before we were to fly to New York, our next-door neighbors invited us over for a farewell party. Dinner included a small green salad — in those days, a mound of iceberg lettuce. Our hostess had not bothered herself with disinfecting the stuff. And wouldn’t you know it…

By morning, my mother was deathly sick.

Our journey back home was summarily canceled, and within hours she was on a hospital plane bound for New York, bearing a diagnosis of amoebic dysentery.

In those days, the treatment for amoebic dysentery was akin to chemotherapy. They put you through three regimes of highly toxic medication, each one of which would make you as sick as the parasite did. Or sicker. She was in the hospital in New York for three months while the doctors subjected her to this hideous routine. By the end she no longer had diarrhea. But they couldn’t guarantee that she was free of the parasite — in fact, they told her she probably would harbor it for the rest of her life, and that for my and my father’s safety she should wipe down the toilet seat with Lysol every time she used it.

And that, my children, was why one dipped one’s food in Clorox before eating it.

Well, I’m not making like a raccoon with a puddle of chlorine bleach. But after this, I most certainly am going to wash every piece of raw produce before eating it. And I’m never going to eat anything raw in a restaurant again.

I do favor baby romaine lettuce in those plastic boxes. It all goes into a sinkful of detergent and cold water. Pick out any sickly leaves. Rinse well in clean, cold water. Spread over towels to dry. Wash plastic box well. Dry. Repack lettuce into clean plastic box, with a sheet or two of paper toweling. Hope for the best.

Everything fresh and vegetal picked up at Sprouts and Safeway today — the first time I’ve been able to crawl to the grocery store in a week — went into the detergent-filled sink:

• lettuce
• grapes
• mangoes
• tomatoes
• papaya
• nectarines
• avocados
• lemon
• and yeah, even some strawberries

If it has a tough skin, it gets scrubbed. If not, it at least sits in the soapy water for a good ten or fifteen minutes.

This was a nasty bout of stomach bug, but it was as nothing compared to what a lot of Americans have gone through in recent years. Past time, it is, to accept the fact that we are no longer a “First-World country” where our food supply is concerned. Vast amounts of produce are shipped in from countries like China and Mexico, and even produce grown and packed in America cannot be trusted to be safe.

I don’t wanna go through this again. And pretty clearly, the only way to avoid it is to treat fresh produce as though it came from a Third-World country. Which it did — no matter where it was grown. Can’t cook it? Wash the hell out of it! And never eat anything in a restaurant that doesn’t come out of the kitchen hot.

Don’t drink the water, either.