While exploring the world of Canva I came across a VERY disturbing piece of breaking news befalling my home province Laguna.
Around 200 elementary schoolchildren in Calamba, Laguna suffered from food poisoning via ice candy and cupcakes after a feeding program. After typing this up authorities are looking into how did the food-poisoning happen.
Below are links to a few PH food-poisoning-related fiascoes for the past month:
From CNN Philippines: Thousands hospitalized due to candy poisoning in Surigao del Sur [One of the first cases of massive food-poisoning to date.]
From CNN Philippines: Thousands hospitalized due to candy poisoning in Surigao del Sur [One of the first cases of massive food-poisoning to date.]
From Rappler: 'Poisoned' durian candy contaminated with Bacteria - DOH [This news report contains the DOH's findings of the killer durian candy in Surigao del Sur, which tested for staph (staphylococcus) bacteria commonly found in toilets.]
From PhilStar.com: 2 teachers, 13 students hospitalized for food poisoning. [A bit closer to Surigao. This time involving pastil candies.]
And those are just three links alone. Each of these news sites has more food-poisoning related articles...
Around April 2015, I went to a Facebook page and read posts of some netizens bashing each other with stuff like "milk tea pa more!" (Have some more milk tea!) after reports of two people who got killed by oxalic-acid-rigged milk tea went rampant both on- and offline. [From The Summit Express: VIDEO: 2 die of ErgoCha milk tea poisoning in Manila.] I feel bad because it took me a while before I can think of milk tea as a fun and tasty beverage again. (Well, the last time I had milk tea was in 2012 at a mall, so technically I'm very much safe.) Fast forward to today, anyone who came up with those "funny" jokes about the milk tea poisoning will (and IMO should) be horrified with guilt as more cases of food poisoning pop up like crazy. And the current two kickers are (1) any dish can be a catalyst for food poisoning (2) a lot of the new victims are students below college level.
MY QUICK CHECKLIST FOR SAFE STREET FOOD
Here is my personal guide for street food that's relatively safe for your system.
- Ingredients made from food factories that heavily and really comply with sanitary standards. It's possible such food factories can be sabotaged from within, but really great food companies do make sure to fry such snafus.
- Properly clean utensils. (On a side-note I'm pretty merciless about dish-washing. I wouldn't even want to wash dishes unless there's dish-washing liquid/paste available.)
- Properly prepared fare. We all know how salmonella and E. coli lurk around undercooked food. And people who regularly read up on health food issues know a lot more.
- An environment clean enough for said street food to be prepared. To be more specific, it's scary to even see someone prepare and serve food in unclean places like directly next to garbage dumps, and heaven forbid, under the sewers.
We can all agree on one thing: food poisoning is serious and it can happen anytime. Proper eating choices are no longer enough; proper food preparation and ingredients from reliable food sources are now important as well.
That's all for now. Tune in for more RandOM Access!
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