SC - alcohol revisited

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Balthazar of Blackmoor wrote:
>Wow!  With so many allergic people on this list, and
>now such talk of inadequate cooking and poor food
>handling, it's a wonder to me that anyone actually
>GOES to these feasts!  Does everyone bring their own
>take-out, and just use the feast hall as a warm place
>to wait until the bus gets there??  Sheesh!

Well, if the allergies are not severe - and most allergies are not 
life-threatening - the folks can just avoid the food they wish to 
without much difficulty at a feast.

I have a few allergies - mostly to air-borne tree pollens - the only 
food allergy i know of is to some kind (but not all kinds) of fake 
vanilla flavoring and i have a sensitivity to under ripe fresh 
pineapple (which is noticeable in the US, but didn't affect me in 
Indonesia where the fruit was actually picked ripe). These don't seem 
like problems i'll encounter at SCA feasts :-)

However, under cooked whole chickens seem to be a recurrent SCA feast 
problem. I made sure that we were careful at my feast - no meat on 
wooden cutting boards, people doing meat handling wore rubber gloves, 
and the sausages and chickens were very carefully cooked and watched 
over and checked to make sure they were really cooked through.

You know, most cases of diarrhea are due to poor food handling not 
"stomach flu", and many of these cases occur in home kitchens. 
Fortunately, for the most part, the human organism is pretty tough. 
If we were as fragile as some folks seem to fear, we wouldn't have 
survived this long. This is not to defend inadequate cooking and poor 
food handling, however.

When i was a kid, my mom had a friend who used to talk about how her 
kids seemed to have diarrhea all the time. My mother pointed out that 
this woman made hamburger patties out of meat that she left out of 
the fridge for hours - and left the patties out for an age before 
cooking them. Of course, this woman denied that this could possibly 
have been the problem...

Anahita