SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION
Upon opening my fourth protective seal on something this morning, I came to realize just how ridiculously many of these things there are. I appreciate that each of these little barriers is keeping people out of my food and medicine- the less thumbs pressed into my cottage cheese and snot rockets blasted in my ibuprofen containers the better, and honestly, when I was a young gad-about, I would've thought it was hilarious to fart into a tub of yogurt and put the top back on. But on a certain level, all this protection seems fairly arbitrary. After all, the FDA allows an alarmingly high percentage of rat feces and cockroach parts in our canned goods, and what's to stop the guy who's bored off his tit day-in and day-out on the Claritin packaging line from squashing one in his armpit for an hour or two before sealing its fate inside the little protective package?
Fact is- we don't trust each other anymore. And we shouldn't. Not because of terrorists or anthrax or poisoned Halloween candy (of which there was only one documented case- a shitty father trying to collect his kid's life insurance policy.) We shouldn't trust the public with our food and medicine because people are bored and craving any kind of feeling, no matter how minor, and will screw with something just for that momentary thrill of realizing someone will eat the banana they just had in their butt cheeks (fortunately, nature gives them their own protective seal...)
Once upon a time, you'd go get aspirin from a pharmacist, milk from a milkman (Oberweiss commercials aside) and meat from a butcher. People didn't worry about them screwing with your stuff, because their job description explicitly points out that they shouldn't. That doesn't mean they didn't, but it was understood that that was an unlikely and mostly isolated thing.
But in the age of chain drug and grocery stores, you really can't trust anybody- so little barriers from the public on everything it is.
So the lesson here is that nothing is truly safe until it's hermetically sealed from human contact, and even then there's a government allotment for how many rat feces and cockaroach parts you can have in there.
Now go break the seal off some ibuprofen to stifle that headache that's been mounting. And mind the one with armpit sweat all over it.
Upon opening my fourth protective seal on something this morning, I came to realize just how ridiculously many of these things there are. I appreciate that each of these little barriers is keeping people out of my food and medicine- the less thumbs pressed into my cottage cheese and snot rockets blasted in my ibuprofen containers the better, and honestly, when I was a young gad-about, I would've thought it was hilarious to fart into a tub of yogurt and put the top back on. But on a certain level, all this protection seems fairly arbitrary. After all, the FDA allows an alarmingly high percentage of rat feces and cockroach parts in our canned goods, and what's to stop the guy who's bored off his tit day-in and day-out on the Claritin packaging line from squashing one in his armpit for an hour or two before sealing its fate inside the little protective package?
Fact is- we don't trust each other anymore. And we shouldn't. Not because of terrorists or anthrax or poisoned Halloween candy (of which there was only one documented case- a shitty father trying to collect his kid's life insurance policy.) We shouldn't trust the public with our food and medicine because people are bored and craving any kind of feeling, no matter how minor, and will screw with something just for that momentary thrill of realizing someone will eat the banana they just had in their butt cheeks (fortunately, nature gives them their own protective seal...)
Once upon a time, you'd go get aspirin from a pharmacist, milk from a milkman (Oberweiss commercials aside) and meat from a butcher. People didn't worry about them screwing with your stuff, because their job description explicitly points out that they shouldn't. That doesn't mean they didn't, but it was understood that that was an unlikely and mostly isolated thing.
But in the age of chain drug and grocery stores, you really can't trust anybody- so little barriers from the public on everything it is.
So the lesson here is that nothing is truly safe until it's hermetically sealed from human contact, and even then there's a government allotment for how many rat feces and cockaroach parts you can have in there.
Now go break the seal off some ibuprofen to stifle that headache that's been mounting. And mind the one with armpit sweat all over it.
posted by Pete Klockau at 6:05 PM
1 Comments:
Y'know, Claritin only works on me every once in a while. I wonder if that production line guy's perspiration is my penicillin?
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