#424 Body of Work

So when I was at this party the other night I reflected that the biggest challenge we face at holiday times is the threat of cross contamination. No, I’m not talking about accidentally becoming a Christian with all the commercial nativity exposure; I’m talking about food born illness. Food born illness is second only to the flu in debilitating diseases of the holiday season. Forget about peace on earth and lines at the supermall. Pieces of toxic chicken wings and lines at the lavatory are more to the point. During the holidays many people are exposed to the anatomical reality that their bodies are like the post office at Christmas. They have an input function and an output function and both of them are being co-opted to do the outputting. I don’t know about you but there is nothing more festive after a great Christmas party than going home and warmly embracing the thundermug all night. Red and green are Christmas colors, perhaps because of the mucus-laced chunks one hurls after tainted shrimp cocktail and mint eggnogs. Holiday eating increases your risk: There’s the number of parties that feature sneeze-guard free grazing on rented banquet tables of food; The number of overwhelmed guest bathrooms that feature one tiny guest towel and a bar of untouched expensively-sculpted guest soap. It’s no wonder you have a recipe for gastric disaster. Forget about the baked salmon, it’s the baking at Sam and Ella’s you have to worry about. I don’t trust my own self all the time in the cross-contaminatory kitchen, why I would subject myself to the possibility of ptomaine shows what a powerful hankering I must have for tiny crockpot meatballs. It’s funny. Hell, when I tried to sell my fudge commercially I had to go through amazing regulatory hoops. Commercial equipment that couldn’t be contaminated with any—God forbid—commingled home cooking. Extensive test in three languages about the ins and outs of food preparation and handling. Hot temperature optimums, cold temperature optimums, how to bring something from hot to cold safely to keep it out of the toxic danger zone. But some ambitious unlicensed semi-cook can have a holiday party, invite more people in one night than the average home kitchen sees in a year, rent a couple of tired old chafing dishes from the party rental place, then skimp on sterno so the hot dishes quickly plummet to ptomaine tepid. Voila, suddenly the county’s sewer systems are taxed to capacity by a chain of porcelain-packing events featuring the three horsemen of the gut-pocalypse, Ralph, Wolf, and that toilet-mouthed rapper, Upchuck-a-lot. Hors d’ oeuvre, by the way, is a French word that means outside of work. Hors means outside, oeuvre, in this case, work. You know, kind of like when you go to a party and are outside of work the next day¾ when you call in sick.
America, ya gotta love it.