Is living on this planet safe?

Is living on this planet safe?

JAKARTA (JP): Asking my visiting aunt to eat in a restaurant
is just like asking Mother Teresa to go to a rock concert. She
won't budge.

"Oh, no! That restaurant serves English beef that could carry
Spongiform Encephalopathy," she reasoned when we asked her to eat
at a prestigious steak house. "It causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease," she continued like a scientist.

Failing to find the terms in dictionaries, Tanty, her friend,
assumed that my aunt was talking about some kind of virus, and
then offered a Chinese restaurant as an alternative.

"Haven't you heard of Chinese-restaurant syndrome?" my aunt
answered in her scientific style. "The food you wolf in that kind
of restaurant is full of monosodium glutamate."

I know what monosodium glutamate is. It is used to enrich the
taste of cooked food, and experts warn that taking too much of it
can cause indigestion. But I never think of quitting Chinese
food. As far as I am concerned, crabs with oyster sauce, served
with shark-fin soup and rice, is the most delicious dish. To be
polite, however, I pretended to agree with Aunt Rosa.

"That's right," I said. "Traditionally cooked food is always
safe. Let's go to a Padang food restaurant."

Instead of raising from the chair, Aunt Rosa looked at me,
square in the eyes. "Where the hell have you been?" she retorted.
"That kind of food is no longer the favorite dish. Eating rendang
is just like drinking coconut milk mixed with grease."

I'll bet my Aunt takes too much information from newspapers.
But in a way what she said made sense. The way food is cooked
currently exposes human beings to risks. How can you guarantee
that cooking oil in a famous fried chicken restaurants is not
used repeatedly? According to an article on health science,
cooking oil is not supposed to be used to fry more than twice.
Excessive exposure to heat will cause changes in its molecular
composition and the oil can cause cancer. However, you cannot
inspect the kitchen of a restaurant just to find out if the cooks
do dispose of cooking oil after the second frying as recommended
by scientists.

Forget fried chicken and switch to baked fish. It's low in fat
and rich in Omega 3, the kind of substance that helps lower the
cholesterol content in your blood. But how can one know the fish
are not taken from Jakarta Bay where the water is contaminated by
mercury? Fish do not have an identification badge, do they?

Thinking about those facts and risks, you would think that
living on this planet is no longer safe. You can't go anywhere
without breathing carbon monoxide, eat fish without thinking
about the Minamata case nor drink water free from germs.

But you've got to live anyway. The risks and dangers are
there, but you've got to survive. All you need to do is select
the least dangerous way of life, eat less risky food, and breath
air with less carbon monoxide content.

That requires a lot of efforts and sacrifice. The government,
for a start, could reduce the emission of carbon monoxide by
eliminating the number of vehicles on the road, especially aging
vehicles which emit a high level of the poisonous gas. At the
same time, the condition of public transportation must be
improved to discourage the use of privately owned vehicles.

Controlling the operation of restaurants could be difficult,
but enforcing regulations issued by the Ministry of Health for
the safety of the people, especially the younger generation,
would help.

"Talking about safety," my Aunt said, gulping a glass full of
water. "It is safer to drink water from your own well."

So, she has missed something in the papers! Only I didn't have
a heart to tell her that recent research shows that 70 percent of
well water in Jakarta is contaminated by human feces.

-- Carl Chairul