Food Security Carnival Discussion Post.

[commodorified]

Solicit or offer ideas, cheer each other on, ask for or offer data or resources, team up and do a group-authored post or a mini-carnival cluster of posts, find a beta, be a beta ...

I would like to say: I am not at all worried about avoiding duplication, and suggest that nobody else be either.

If eight people do posts on How To Cook Eggs, they will all be different, they will all be right and useful, and each of them will be somebody's absolute most useful and favourite post of the whole carnival.

Carry on!

Comments

[synecdochic]

I ... am tempted to do something about "what to do when you like food, you really do, it's just that you literally grew up in food service from before the time you were born and therefore have SOME ISSUES AROUND FOOD SAFETY, not to mention you spent five years on a pain medication that totally and completely destroyed not only your appetite but your ability to actually put the food in your mouth and chew without gagging", except it might be a little specific. *G*

(Seriously, though. Growing up in a restaurant gives you weird issues. I can't eat leftovers at all -- if something has been out of the fridge/off the heat for more than about half an hour, I cannot make myself eat it -- and I absolutely have to overcook the fuck out of some foods in order to be willing to eat them (while not caring, oddly, about others). My sister -- who spent less time working in the restaurant before we sold it, but still did somewhat -- doesn't mind leftovers, but she won't eat any food that's touching or mixed with another food. And let's not talk about my issues regarding food transportation and storage before something's cooked. It's my experience that those of us who were restaurant kids either grow up to be completely unconcerned about food safety and will eat anything, anywhere, at any time, or grow up to be hyper-paranoid about food safety. I got the hyper-paranoia; my sister got "slight quirks", thankfully for her...)

I think that might be a little bit too specific, though, and probably a little too likely to kick off food issues in others, so I may write it up and post it on my own. I don't think "how to live with your own (mostly irrational) paranoia about food safety" necessarily fits the "food security" topic *G*

[nancylebov]

Not wanting to eat food which has been touching other food is something that some picky eaters have-- your sister might have felt that way regardless of your family having a restaurant.

[synecdochic]

Oh, absolutely, but she's pretty confident about it stemming from early experience in food service (and later discovering her husband has an intolerance allergy to something that's in nearly every single bit of American food ever, but the habit was already long set). Restaurant brats have very bizarre relationships with food a lot, even if we follow our parents into the biz. (Which I did not, obviously. I love feeding people -- for years my annual vacation involved a week-long retreat in which I would regularly feed 25+ people with dueling food allergies and preferences for the whole week -- but I don't love it the way you need to love it in order to survive in a commercial kitchen. I can work a commercial kitchen if I need to, in terms of skill if not in terms of physical ability, but boy howdy do I not want to.) I know a lot of people who grew up in the biz and a lot of people who came to it as an adult, and it really is drastically different than liking to cook a lot as a child and going into commercial food prep as a young adult or adult.

I mean, my father stopped at the grocer's to pick up the morning produce order and the coffee filters my grandfather had run out of while in the middle of taking my mother to the hospital 'cause she was in labor with me, and I literally spent most of my time before I was in school either in a baby seat on the end of the counter or in a playpen in front of the deli case, and I started waiting tables when I was five or six years old. It was ... a very bizarre childhood in a lot of ways.

[geeksdoitbetter]

if you had tips for working around these issues, it would so totally fit one of the themes

[sedvictacatoni]

Obviously I'm not the arbiter, but I feel like it could fall under food security and I'm sure it would be really helpful to some people including quite possibly me! I have a ton of food safety issues as part of a general set of anxieties about contamination, and while I don't really have much food security issues regarding money or knowledge I sometimes end up going hungry just because there's nothing around that I'm willing to eat, or because I don't have the spoons to make the effort of cooking (which I sometimes enjoy a lot) because I know it will ramp up my anxiety.

Also, I don't know what specifically you were thinking about posting, but even for someone without the anxiety issues I think dealing with food safety can be a stressful thing if you don't know a lot about it, so a post about food safety I'm sure could be helpful. I was thinking about writing one but because of my anxety I'm not sure I could do it without making it sound even more stressful and alarming.

[bemused_leftist]

In a safety post, I hope there will be something about things NOT to worry about. Unnecessary worry about safety can spend time and energy so you starve. ;-)

[sedvictacatoni]

See above: "I was thinking about writing one."