What's that you were puting into your mouth?

A day or two ago, a Taipei city councilor told the press that several food venders were selling food that were recycled from funeral houses, previously used in some funeral ritual. He pointed out several venders (some reported a number of 6, others a number of 11), and since NTU is near a municipal funeral houses(about a mile from my dorm, I guess...), some amoung the list are near our campus, which we, our selves might had eatten some! (eew, sick...)

Overhyped
And so, I did a news search on google, and found some follow up reports. Apperently this councilor wasn't creditible. Of the listed names (the 6-numbered version, I really can't find the 11-numbered version although it was mentioned), as a reporter discovered, one has been closed for over a year, and others were non-existent. Fine with me, since I seldom trust politicians. So, this is an overhyped report, right? I think this is quite apperent. However, I never liked the food those venders near the back of our campus provided, either. Many of them are over priced and contain so much grease and MSG that they make you want to puke. Besides, it's a sticky and oily street with cockroches running about.

"So, just don't eat there..."
Well, I'd think there's much diference in the food in our campus, either. Nearly all the food options that a student could afford on a daily basis are servered over greased, over flavored, and lacks veggies. Sometimes I even prefer skipping meals or just drinking milk as a substitute.

Enter fastfood.
How about the bigger, highly known names?
I just read a book from the library, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
It tells you how these franchises are over charging you with low quality food. Let me point out a few. What you taste of almost every fastfood dish is of flavoring, not the food. For example, real french fries don't taste the way they do at the big M, instead, your tasting beef extract. They undercharge employees, and many of them are teenagers that don't care about your health. You may get a hamburger that has once been dropped on the floor. And the beef paddies. They come from big sloghter houses that care more about production speed then anything else, so your beef may contain shit from raptured guts that are carelessly removed. There are much more, just read the book and you'll know.

So what should we eat?
I don't know. I consider food that you cook a home yourself the only really safe food. However, that is not an option for us dorm dwellers, since cooking is prohibted for fear of fire hazards. So, I guess we are destinied to eat CRAP to get our education done. But is food at home really safer than the food outside? Think again. The "American Beef" you get at supermarkets are also from the same sloghter houses that provide the hamburger beef paddies, and germs that normally only live in the guts (such as E coli. 0157) are frequently found, according to the book. And we all know that vegtables with high levels of pesticides are also heard of from time to time...

I guess all we can do is avoid the foods that we are sure were unhealthy(like greasy foods), and through the rest out of our minds since there's not much we could do to avoid it.