Teen Vogue - April 2004

Unhappy Meals

Beef tainted by mad cow. Milk full of hormones. Vegetables sprayed with pesticides. Alexandra Zissu asks: What's safe to eat? Photographed by James Wojcik.

"I'm not eating beef now," says Kristin, a fourteen-year-old from Westchester, New York. Her vehement refusal to indulge isn't entirely unusual. Girls have been denying themselves ice cream, or pizza, or even bread for years, all in the name of thinner thighs or a flatter tummy. But nowadays, the untouched items on cafeteria trays across the country aren't left behind because girls are afraid of gaining weight. It's because they're afraid they'll get sick. "The food companies say they check the meat for mad cow, but you just never know," Kristin continues. "I don't want to take that chance."

When the media reported on December 24 last year that mad cow disease had been found in the United States, 35 nations banned our beef. Our government responded with its own ban-no more sick or lame cattle would be allowed in the food supply-and other changes, such as recalling thousands of pounds of meat. Companies best known for their burgers, like McDonalds, released statements swearing their meat was safe. But it's hard to feel reassured, especially when mad cow-and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is known to cause an especially horrific form of brain deterioration and death-isn't the only food scare of late. With everything from Frankenfood (genetically engineered foods) to killer scallions making headlines (three people dies from Hepatitus A and more than 600 were sickened after eating contaminated scallions at a Chi-Chi's restaurant in Pittsburg last October), it's difficult to know just what's edible. "It seems like you can't eat anything anymore," laments Cornelia, a fifteen-year-old New Yorker. "Tuna fish contains mercury; and supposedly you shouldn't be eating salmon more than four times a year." She's referring to recent claims that farmed salmon-thought to be healthful, especially as a beef alternative-potentially harbors ten times as many cancer-causing chemicals as its wild counterpart. "It's ridiculous! I try to avoid eating these at all costs."

All the food phobia is taking its toll. Nneya, seventeen, also from New York, has given up meat at fast food restaurants, and while she still eats hormone-free beef at home, she can't eat it at school: The parents' association actually voted to pull beef from the cafeteria. Other girls are turning to vegetarian friends for advice. "I don't get scared eating. I feel like i'm safe from the foods that are gross," says Lena, a vegan high school senior from Brooklyn. Yael, a freshman from San Francisco, agrees. "Crazy things happen with the meat industry," she says. "Vegetarians have a lower risk of health problems, including adult onset diabetes, heart disease, and obesity." And while this is true, removing entire food groups from your diet doesn't equal safety. Cornelia has been sticking to the salad bar lately because, she says, "so far vegetables can't hurt you." But truthfully, anything can be harmful-even school salad mixes, which have been linked to outbreaks of potentially lethal strains of the bacteria E.coli.

Still, there are ways to eat as safely as possible. Knowledge is teh key. "The more you learn about the particular food that scares you, the better," says Tina Fuchs, coordinator of Community Health Resources at New Yorks City's Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers. Figuring out how what you're eating is produced is the first step to a safer diet. "Almost allof the big scares that have come up lately happened because large commercial production has been used at the expense of quality," says Marion Nestle, author of Safe Food and Food Politics (University Of California Press). "Each particular accident has been an example of companies cutting corners to save money," she says, citing mad cow as the most obvious case. The cheapest way to dispose of cow carcasses is to turn them into feed for other cows-and many companies, until recently, continued to do this, even though it's how mad cow is spread.

Icky factor aside, it's hard to motivate to change your habits when it feels like statistically, this stuff can't really hurt you. In fact, the cahnces of getting the human form of mad cow are extremely low. In Britain, fewer than 150 people died even though 180,000 cows were infected. Compare that to the one infected U.S. cow. Still, Nestle says "voting with your fork" and giving up beef will put pressure on the industry to use better production and screening methods. "As long as Americans insist on food being as cheap as possible, this problem will continue," she says. Though American food companies claim that our food supply is the safest in history, our government's standards aren't nearly as strict as those of Europe and Japan, where cows going to the slaughter are stringently screened for disease.

Even if meat isn't something you're willing to give up, learning about its production will help you make an informed choice. Factory livestock is usually fed hormones and antibiotics, which some experts think can be toxic. For this reason, Stefanie Bryn Sacks, a culinary nutritionist in Manhattan, prefers meat, fruits, and vegetables that are organic, which means that they were not genetically engineered and were grown potentially unhealthy materials like pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. If you see an organic stamp on eggs, meat, poultry or dairy products, the animal it came from was fed a 100 percent organic diet, and was probably free-range (uncaged). Also, organic foods aren't irradiated (nonorganic meat is sometimes passed through a radioactive electrical energy field to kill harmful bacteria).

Liz Applegate, a professor of nutrition at the University of California, Davis, notes that the trace amount of hormones that might be in milk is insignificant and that genetically modified produce hasn't been proved to have ill effect on humans. But she agrees with Sacks and Nestle that even if eating organic, locally grown foods isn't necessarily more healthful, it is more socially responsible. "We don't know what the impact of genetically modified foods might be on the environment," Applegate admits.

Meanwhile, Kristen says she's waiting for the government to give her the all clear, so that she can go back to beef. "I like meat. I'm not one of those people who doesn't," she says. Until then, she'll be trying to learn about food safety-and basing her diet on that information.