The Last Straw/Frank McNally: I was browsing iThe Irish Times Health Supplement a while back when a detail in the popular "On the Couch" column caught my eye. Among other things, the column invites health professionals to nominate the person they most admire. And on this occasion the interviewee named Prof Patrick Wall, former head of the Food Safety Authority, who (the interviewee said) did for food hygiene "what Michael Flatley did for Irish dancing".
This was startling idea. Before I could stop it, my mind was picturing food inspectors in tight leather trousers, their chests glistening with baby oil as they high-kicked their way through restaurant kitchens like sex on legs, plunging their temperature probes into unsuspecting chickens and collecting sample mouse droppings to the throbbing beat of a Celtic rock orchestra. But then I pulled myself together and realised the interviewee was just making a general comparison with Irish dancing post-Flatley. No doubt he meant that in the old days, food safety experts used to hold their arms rigidly by their sides. Now they waved them around excitedly to better communicate the message: "Don't eat that - it'll kill you!"
They were waving them around at a conference in UCD this week, which heard of low food safety standards in Irish homes. It seems that despite the success of Riverdance, a shocking 60 per cent of Irish households still engage in "at least one risky kitchen practice". A third of all homes store raw meat above cooked; one in five keeps eggs unchilled, and 12 per cent have food past its use-by date. All this was according to a study carried out over a three-year period by undercover agents: children from 78 primary schools who mapped the contents of their parents' fridges. The little traitors. (I have news for primary students: some of you eat food straight off the floor!)
Based on extensive research carried out in my own fridge today over a three-minute period, I plead guilty on the use-by charge. But before I continue, my wife has asked me to say that our household is fully aware of the crucial difference between the terms "best before" (where food is non-perishable and may be safely eaten after the date mentioned); and "use-by" (where the item is a perishable dairy or meat product, and should never be consumed after that date, except maybe by your husband). The problem is that some members of our household think use-by dates are a mixture of guesswork and bluff by the manufacturer, and that obeying them blindly is for wimps.
I was reared to believe that wasting food was a crime. A favourite parental mantra assured you that, whenever you didn't clean your plate, you were adding insult to the suffering of the millions who didn't have enough to eat, and the guilt stayed with you afterwards. To this day, I still divide foodstuffs into three categories: "best before", "use by", and "you'd eat that if you were in Africa". When I was a single man, most of my fridge contents fell into the last category.
Besides, we know that much modern food is so full of preservatives that it has more of a half-life than a shelf-life. We also know that in these litigious times, manufacturers err on the side of caution. So there's a temptation to play poker. Last week, finding sausages in the fridge that were five days past the use-by date, I reasoned the manufacturers must have built at least 72 hours' grace into their safety estimate. "I'll see your three days and I'll raise you two," I said, putting the sausages under the grill. And I have to say they were excellent (although I burned them to a crisp to be on the safe side).
Time was we used to buy food from the dairy, or the butchers, or the fishmongers. Maybe we even killed it ourselves. Either way, it didn't come with a use-by date. You had to be guided by your sense of sight and smell, and (hopefully) by that sixth sense that alerts you to the presence of invisible but homicidal microbes. Trying to gauge the real use-by dates of food, as opposed to the ones on the label, replaces some of the excitement that we as a species lost when we stopped using spears, and the skills we lost when we became dependent on supermarkets. That's my theory anyway.
Of course, none of this is to criticise Patrick Wall, a fine man who has made Ireland a safer place to eat. Neither is it to criticise the 78 schools that participated in this week's survey and that - all kidding aside - have done excellent work too.
In fact, the children involved deserve nothing but credit. It's Michael Flatley I blame for everything.