I don’t trust what I’m eating
MY QUERIES are about two different food items that I have eaten recently, both of which made me feel very, very ill and with the selfsame symptoms.
The one is bread sold over the counter of a grocery shop in Erasmia. The second is a slab of chocolate that my wife and I have come across in only one shop in Midrand.
The bread from the shop in Erasmia is of a yellowish colour – in fact, the shop calls it “yellow bread” – a little smaller than the average loaf and about 20% cheaper, with a pleasant texture and taste.
What you soon notice about the bread is that it has an exceptionally good shelf life; kept in the fridge it seems that it can last for weeks.
The chocolate is dark brown in colour, with a rather un-chocolatey taste, but not unpleasant. It comes superbly packaged in big slabs deeply grooved into generous segments.
What you first notice about the chocolate is how much effort it takes to break off a segment, and the second thing you notice is how firmly the chocolate clings to your teeth (my wife says it’s the fat content, and she went off it a long time ago).
For me, neither of these two products is particularly unpleasant. Taken in small doses, at long intervals, neither the yellow bread nor the chocolate may ever become suspect as being somehow harmful to one.
But when you take them at regular ingestion rates, things can start to go wrong, and I start feeling ill.
My suspicion is that the culprit ingredient is a preservative that is in both the bread and the chocolate, and that there is a cumulative effect whereby the substance reaches its “critical mass”. My queries are: 1) How easy is it for there to be unapproved foods out there for the unsuspecting shopper to fall prey to?
2) Is there a service whereby one could buy samples of the suspect food and hand them in for an official, government-approved analysis of their content?
3) Could such results then be made available to the complainer?
4) If the suspect food were to be found to contain some banned substance/s, what recourse would there be for the complainer to take up the matter with an appropriate authority to ensure that it gets permanently taken off the market?
5) If the sample contained no hitherto banned substance, how could one take it further to officially have the suspect ingredients thoroughly analysed and investigated with a view to having it declared a banned substance? Harry SG Friend