Sorry, but there's a conversation going on outside my door that is indicative of the people I work with and I couldn't let today go without mentioning it.
Seems someone found a sweet potato hidden in a pantry in her house, and it was still intact after what she said was two years. Some sprouts and such, but that's about it. Still looked like a potato. The conversation, in part, was something along these lines:
"Well, you know, you see these agribusiness-grown things that are gray and full of radiation, and it really makes you wonder what we're doing to our food. I mean, they take these things and irradiate them, supposably [sic] to make them safe, and they'd rot in two weeks, and then you have these organic ones and they last for years!"
The depths (or widths) of the idiocy around here are simply breathtaking.
Potatos, if kept in a cool, dark place, will pretty much keep indefinitely, but I wouldn't eat a two-year old one no matter how nice it looked.
Irradiation does not leave radiation in the food.
Potatoes that have been irradiated are done so to for several reasons, including to prevent sprouting--the potato she found just might have been one grown by one of those filthy Big Agriculture places and zapped with evil radiation.
Correlation is not causation--just because you think you've found something that confirms your warped little world-view doesn't make it so.
And please quit getting huffy about conservatives being antiscientific and close-minded goobs who're out to kill everyone on the planet just to make three extra cents on a potato.
Posted by Terry Oglesby at January 10, 2006 05:05 PMJust one problem: you're using logic. That's against the rules!
Posted by: helluva at January 10, 2006 06:27 PMWell, it's either that, or start thwacking people with a mallet.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at January 11, 2006 08:14 AM