Food restrictions

[ewx]

[Poll #1241007]

(I'm asking about the nature of the substance, not the process that led to it: I'm not asking whether you'll eat battery chickens or baby-killing coffee.)

Comments

[simont]

"Something more complicated": for the most part I delegate judgment to Coeliac UK, who do diligent research to see what products are safe for me to eat. I don't know how much of their judgment is based on qualitative considerations like whether there was gluten in the same factory or not, but I know that at least some of their judgment is based on doing actual chemical tests to see what things really do have gluten in them at the end of the process. Every so often they disqualify some foodstuff as a result of improving their test procedures.

"Any accidental contamination": I take armb's point about potentially being a bit uncomfortable if I knew a whole person had fallen into the sausage machine, but I don't think that's an ethical objection; my ethical objection to eating people is that I would not wish to cause or encourage any person's death or mutilation for the purpose. I imagine I would be unwilling to eat a large amount of human after a sausage-machine accident, but that would be for pure ick reasons rather than ethical ones: would it taste weird, would it carry human-transmissible diseases, would there be BRAAAAINS involved.

[lnr]

I decided against "any accidental contamination" on the principle I wouldn't want to eat soup with a whole thumb floating in it, and I agree I wouldn't want to eat a sausage that was *mostly* diced person. It's true that this is more a squick consideration than an ethical one. But equally I think that making sure such meat is considered unfit to eat is a good way of discouraging companies from allowing their people to fall in the sausage machine, so I'll not go correct the poll ;-)

[k425.livejournal.com]

I agree mostly with this - although because my symptoms are so mild as to be non-existent, I will eat food that has been produced on a line handling other gluten-containing products. And if the label says "contains gluten" but the ingredients make no mention of anything containing or derived from gluten (Morrisons Stir-fry veg, I'm looking at you) I'll eat that too.