Sharon Kennedy: Precautions ensure safety, not sensibility
The other day my feline friend, Miss Peggy, was demanding a serving of her favorite treats. I had just purchased a new container of Temptations Catnip Mix-Up Fever Flavor and was about to open it when I saw the flip top was already open. Well, I thought, isn’t that peculiar. Why would anyone open a treat for cats when there are dozens of cookie and candy packages to rip open and enjoy before getting arrested. My belief that people are definitely an odd lot is usually confirmed on a daily basis.
But once I was home and pried the lid off the treats, the piece of plastic covering them was intact so I wasn’t concerned about anyone adding something to the container that might prove dangerous to my cat. It doesn’t take much to mystify me when it comes to packaging. The precautions taken by the food industry are good examples. First we must snip the plastic around the outside rim of whatever item we’re opening. Then we must enlist the aid of a strong person to unscrew the top. Then it’s on to the challenge of removing the piece of paper glued to the inner rim. I usually take a sharp knife and jab it through the paper which allows me to pull it off with a minimum amount of effort. Naturally, some of it refuses to yield and remains stuck at which point I simply give up and leave it.
Mystification also occurs when I think about the factories where the products are packaged. At one time I watched a show called “Unwrapped with Marc Summers.” I learned a lot about how jars and cans are filled and the process of adding cream filling to Twinkies, Ding Dongs and lots of other sweets. The one thing I did not learn was how the machines are cleaned. All those tubes squirting cream into cupcakes, ketchup into bottles and Miracle Whip into plastic jars must be cleaned at some point, but when? If a factory runs 24/7, when are the tubes cleaned and the grease vats emptied and the interiors sanitized prior to adding more oil and potatoes for Lay’s chips? Ditto for dispensers coating chocolate on candy bars. The list of machinery requiring cleaning is endless.
Forty years ago tampering with products first came to light and spawned the trend towards adding multiple layers of plastic and paper for consumer protection. At that time, potassium cyanide was added to a bottle of Tylenol and deaths resulted from swallowing what appeared to be an innocent looking pain killer most of take for minor aches and pains. It’s a wonderful idea to make packaging tamper-proof when it’s on the store shelves, but who’s monitoring what’s going on in the factories? I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say cameras are everywhere and watch every move employees make giving them very little opportunity to insert or inject something that might cause harm to consumers.
While thinking about product tampering, I drew a parallel between that and tampering with our psyche. It doesn’t take much to implant false narratives in our mind and ingest them as truth. The result is akin to swallowing a lethal substance. Although falsehoods do not physically kill a person, they’re capable of destroying brain cells. In some states, the midterm election proved that swallowing malarkey, aka hogwash, is as dangerous to our country as cyanide is to our body. Thankfully Michigan wasn’t one of them.
— To contact Sharon Kennedy, send her an email at authorsharonkennedy.com. Kennedy's new book, "View from the SideRoad: A Collection of Upper Peninsula Stories," is available from her or Amazon.
This article originally appeared on The Sault News: Sharon Kennedy: Precautions ensure safety, not sensibility
