by Samara Alpern
Daily Lobo columnist
Lunch meat - for many, the plastic crackle that comes with the first rent of bright yellow packaging is the harbinger of the new semester. Time to brown bag it for another four months.
Lunch meats - from the unspecified meat bologna to hot dogs engorged with processed cheese, like a Twinkie gone terribly wrong - are often rich in fat and sodium and offer little in terms of flavor or texture. The vendors seem to know this and disguise the food in distractingly bright packets with the product safely sealed from inspection. Our tradition of American lunch meat is of dubious glory.
And a product recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration may depress the appeal of our convenience meats still further - your favorite cold cut may now be coated with "friendly" viruses as part of the latest wacky food safety science innovation.
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Other cultures have proud and ancient traditions of specially prepared animal flesh. These foods have names like linguisa, sujuk and chorizo. In Spain, there is an extensive chain of restaurants called El Museo de Jam¢n, or Museum of Ham, that thread across the country as a living imperious homage to local meats. Smoked pig haunches and turgid tubules of dry-cured sausage are draped around the dining room as if the restaurant were an art gallery.
Germany, too, has a sweeping appreciation of local meat. Germany has about 1,500 varieties of sausage on the market. As the tourism Web site, Deutschland Online, earnestly explains, "Anyone who has gazed at the display counter in a butcher's shop in Germany knows what people really enjoy - eating sausage in all shapes and sizes."
It's a little different here in the U.S. We've got our lunch meats, and our most venerable local preparations have all become synonyms for crap.
Take for example, American bologna. Baloney is a straight synonym for bullshit. I don't know about you, but I don't enjoy eating bullshit.
And what about that other proud American meat product, Spam? That's also a synonym for crap, only the electronic kind.
Baloney, Spam - they're not the sorts of associations that are borne from a fine culinary tradition.
Well, I hate to say it, but things aren't improving when it comes to our American lunch meat heritage. This August, the FDA approved something even less appetizing than that moldering pimento loaf in the back of your refrigerator meat drawer. Now, your favorite lunch meat is approved for a light misting of six different viruses to help fight listeria, a pathogenic bacterium that causes 2,500 serious illnesses and 500 deaths a year. The vanguard virus cocktail is the product of extensive efforts to address bacteria contamination without resorting to antibiotics.
Lee Couch, a professor of microbiology at UNM, agreed with the FDA in that the viruses are safe for human consumption, as they only target the bacteria and not human cells.
But there is a caveat.
"I still think that exposing bacteria continuously to something like these viruses may eventually force the bacteria to adapt and evolve to become resistant to the virus," Couch warned. "This could lead to even more hardy, and possibly more virulent bacterial organisms."
While these viruses may be safe for human consumption - at least in the short run - the FDA's labeling protocol doesn't do much to summon confidence. The government has determined the public need not be notified about the application of these viruses to your midday meal. Virus-treated meat will not be labeled as such. What kind of microbe is subsisting on that slice of turkey ham? Well, apparently it's none of your business.
Meanwhile, let's consider this - there's a reason why the U.S. lunch meat heritage is so bad. It seems our industrious, problem-solving American attitude toward life in general is singularly ill-fitted to good food. Only in the U.S. would these three categories come together harmoniously in the grocery aisle: bacteria, mass-produced processed meat and viruses.
Wow, I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. I can't wait until lunchtime.
