gozzterLeave a Comment on Unquiet meals make ill digestions

Unquiet meals make ill digestions

You can never know enough about a kitchen; I’ve never felt completely comfortable in one at any rate. There is so much that can go wrong, so many things happening at the same time, it’s hard to keep track of them all. And those are just the easy-to-spot things -the things you can actually see or smell: the things that agree to play by the rules. I feel I’m a responsible kitchen user. It’s just that you never know -okay, I don’t know- what escapes my eye because it blends in with the counter and doesn’t wave at me.  

People rarely visit my kitchen; I don’t entertain and would probably make some horrible gaffe if I did, so I don’t risk it. And I know nothing about kitchen protocols -I used to leave that to my wife but she didn’t leave a list of helpful instructions after she left. I think she figured that anything with a dial on it would be self-explanatory. I suppose she was right: the stove has dials, the barbeque has dials; even my old fashioned non-digital microwave has a dial I can turn as the mood strikes. Still, any proper instructions for them have been lost for years.

I suppose a kitchen is much like a scientific laboratory, though: a trial and error arena where bad decisions coexist with good ones. I remember the bad meals I’ve cooked for years; the good are oft interred with the bones.

But my concern, since I have no one around to confirm or deny my opinions, is more epistemological: what, exactly, constitutes a good meal? Over the years, I’d come to construe those which I have been able to digest as good, and those I fed to the dog as bad. Now that I no longer have a dog, however, I am floundering. Hell hath no fury like an stomach scorned.

I hope you see what I’m getting at: I’m confused. In the autumn of my years, I have tried to simplify main meals and of necessity, have divided their preparation between barbeque and microwave.

But I have always lived with the hope that, no matter the disarray in the kitchen, no matter the unwiped corners of the counter or the unplumbed depths of the toaster, there was a safe place -a space eternally scouring itself with each foray into its charted depths, and all without my conscious effort. The microwave was just such a chapel, forever disinfecting itself with each use. Okay, from time to time, material splashed onto its walls from an unguarded casserole, or bubbled onto its floor from an over-full bowl of soup that I forgot to coddle in clingwrap, but I knew there was nothing to worry about: it was a microwave, a kitchen-sized hospital sterilizer for goodness sakes.

Of course, I sometimes wiped its inner walls if they looked bedraggled enough to embarrass me, but I certainly wasn’t worried they were dangerous fomites, or anything. I mean do you worry about stains in an oven? Come on, eh? Still, the microwave was my saviour, my rock in the storm that was my kitchen. We all need a grotto to rely on: an elfin grot like Keats describes in his Belle Dame sans Merci, where I can shut its wild, wild eyes with kisses four… Okay, a bit of a stretch, but sometimes I find myself rudderless in a kitchen.  

So, imagine my despair when I discovered that each microwave oven, like each intestine, has its own unique microbiome. No, really; that’s actually what’s going on according to a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.[i]

I should have guessed: there are no free lunches. Yes, food contains bacteria like everything else, but I thought the microwaves were supposed to kill them. Okay, I wouldn’t volunteer to sit in one to refute the claim or anything, but there are some scientific claims you just have to accept in good faith. Still, this claim borders on apostasy.

For years after reading a Good Housekeeping article (actually I’ve forgotten the name) on the subject of kitchen cleanliness, I had been microwaving my scritchy pads, and occasionally even my washcloth in the sure and certain belief that I was scouring them of germs -sterilizing them, or whatever. Five minutes on ‘high’ would do the job, I was assured. The article didn’t raise a comparison with bowel microflora though, so perhaps the advice column in the magazine was appealing to a different readership.

But at any rate, I can assure you that I have come to see the microwave oven in a different light nowadays, and I walk past it with similar misgivings which I have for the implements of the bathroom. I suppose, like its cousin, I should wash my hands each time I put food into it, but I’m guessing the bacteria which hang out in the microwave are really just clones of the ones that have escaped the untrained cloth that wiped the counters, or those which cling to the kitchen taps.

Still, it has occurred to me that, much like my own biome, it is no doubt also composed of the good, the bad and the ugly, most of whom just want to get on with their lives and wish me no harm. I mean we have to live in harmony with Nature, right? After all these years of coexistence, I am still here and they are still there; perhaps we serve each other’s purposes. Maybe I have trained them to behave; maybe I am just lucky.

Nevertheless, I now try to cover whatever food I am heating, am more diligent in cleaning up any obvious splatters on the microwave walls, and am no longer wedded to prolonging the useful life of various kitchen ephemera that should be recycled rather than being pressed into a lifetime of indentured service. I have no idea what that has done to the resident fauna in there, but I’m sure it has adjusted satisfactorily; Nature will adapt if you give it enough time.

For some reason I’m still reluctant to clean the big oven, though. I’m pretty sure there are some pretty tough hombres living in there by now, but I never bother them -I mean I don’t know how to bake, eh?

[i] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/your-microwave-is-teeming-with-bacteria-study-suggests-180984861

, , , ,

Leave a comment

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close