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