The essential kit for safe eating

I drool over Lamine Yamal as much as anyone, but let me offset this admiration for his precocious attacking ability with a solid defense of old age. Admitting that I'm constantly pushing my own old mill, I maintain that within this cultural framework that shapes and deforms our education, our perception, and our thinking, it never hurts to remember venerable sayings like the one that the devil knows more because he's old than because he's the devil.

I say that experience is the main pillar of wisdom, yes. And it requires no more merit than having lived, which is no small feat, by the way. There are other important methods of knowledge, of course, but experience is by no means a negligible measure and fosters forms of thought as complex as intuition.

I'm telling you this because on the Monday of the blackout, during the more than eight hours I was without phone service, I was already certain that once the line was restored I'd receive some media inquiries inquiring about the topic. Indeed, I did; more than one.

In fact, the issue has generated so much interest that news stories about it have become among the most viewed in recent days. I'm referring to how to identify which foods in our refrigerators and freezers could have become potential weapons of mass destruction for domestic germ warfare during the power outage.

So many doubts demonstrate that the now-famous power surge to zero once again highlighted our fragility in the face of the unexpected (many remembered the pandemic, albeit in reverse). And today, technology makes our lives easier (I had even gone to look for ice bars for my grandmother Pilar's pre-refrigerated refrigerator). We also have institutions and organizations that protect, inform, and help us with regard to the safety of our food, from the EFSA to the AESAN (National Association of Food Safety and Environmental Protection) through ACSA, AECOC, universities, laboratories, and even scientists eager to disseminate information such as Miguel Ángel Lurueña, among others… But the privilege of having more guarantees than ever before and nowhere else like them has allowed us to become too careless, even to the point of forgetting even the most basic principles.

Our relationship with what we eat has changed a lot lately. I've already shared my theory about how, in just a few years, we've gone from being a society quite reluctant to incorporate new foods to becoming obsessive seekers of the latest trends.

The famous omnivore paradox, as Claude Fischler explained in The (h)omnivore (Taste, Cooking, and the Body) , raises the tension between our neophilia, because every new food we discover is another way to feed ourselves, and neophobia, the fear or precaution against consuming new things because everything unknown we ingest could be toxic. It is the food transposition of Nietzsche's aphorism What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

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Well, yours truly suggests that the balance between fear and attraction to the new has become unbalanced. In an ancestral, natural, and wild environment, putting an unknown mushroom, fruit, herb, or animal in one's mouth meant a kind of Russian roulette (like Arguiñano's omelet in the film Airbag ), and that's why they continued to eat what their tribe's neighbors had traditionally eaten unless hunger forced them to experiment.

Obviously, we should enthusiastically applaud the progress that, thanks to the development of food science and technology, since Pasteur, but especially in recent years, has meant that government agencies are so vigilant about protecting us by legislating and inspecting issues such as hygiene control, monitoring critical points in the food chain, best-before labels, and expiration dates.

All the products we find in supermarkets today are guaranteed to be safe and healthy. As they are increasingly processed and packaged, their packaging includes storage and use instructions, under controlled conditions.

In this new environment, we citizens have delegated the responsibility of ensuring the food we eat is safe. But we cannot forget that a minimum level of knowledge, skills, and attitudes are necessary to manage our food. This will ensure that when the unexpected happens, we are left helpless and unable to react.

We must be aware that, without the guarantee that the cold chain has been scrupulously maintained at all times, some things must be discarded, no matter how good they look. Others, however, require observation, smell, or tasting to check their condition. Some, due to their acidity, lack of water, or significant presence of salt or sugar, last longer at room temperature; others are real time bombs. We must understand that cooking—not just heating—is a way of sanitizing, and we must be vigilant to avoid any cross-contamination.

Every citizen should have access to basic food literacy. It's a right, and I would say it should also be an obligation.

The best emergency kit is a minimum of culinary education.