Food Tampering

THE END OF INNOCENCE

When I was a child I found a Mars Bar in my mailbox. It was somewhere around the end of June, probably just after school had ended. I was all like, "yeah! Free chocolate bar! I'm 7 years old! This is the best day of my life!" But, being a kid, I was an idiot. Finding a chocolate bar without having done anything to deserve it triggered whatever semblance of Christian guilt I still had at this point. I had to run it by my Mother.

She snatched the chocolate from my hand and proceeded to kill my innocence. No longer was the world a gloriously large playground full of wonder, mountains of amazement around every corner...not after the tale Mother weaved. She informed me of the evil that lurks in this life. She said that there are people in the world that only want to see you harm. They want to hurt you at any chance they get, and they will use the things you love to get at you. You'll never see it coming until it is too late, because they look, if you even see them at all, just like regular people. The monsters of my childhood were no longer giant, green one-eyed brutes but people. People, just like me that sometimes put poison in candy to get kids to eat it.

Shocked, destroyed even, I sought comfort in the closest thing that could provide, which unfortunately was still that same chocolate bar. I had yet to fully comprehend what Mother was telling me. "It doesn't look like anyone opened it. Why can't I just eat it?"

"Someone could have put poison in a needle like at the hospital and injected it through the wrapper and you'd never know!" She placed the chocolate bar on top of the fridge, knowing that if she were to simply throw it out, I would pick it out of the garbage and tempt this new invisible enemy. Mother poured me a glass of milk and I chugged it down. "Now go outside and play."

I couldn't make it past the end of the drive way. Twenty minutes ago I was just a kid, the summer had just started and the world was mine. But this new information had changed that. People are evil, and this world belonged to them. I was being hunted, my new life boiled down to being prey simply trying to evade capture. I stayed close to home that day, climbing the tree in my front yard like a watch tower. This new shade of grey tinted the rest of the neighborhood. The world beyond that, where people became even more faceless, was too frightening to imagine.

I AM A GUARDIAN

I'm cautious about what I eat. To me, it is common sense: do not eat found food. Recently, however, this fear has come under scrutiny from friends. Me and two friends were on the TTC after spending a night watching movies at another friend's apartment. My friends had both been smoking pot, but I had not been. We get on at Union Station and sit down on a relatively empty car. To my left I spot a box of Lindt Dark Chocolate, those 70% cocoa bars. Like, I'm talking a

box. One of those special gift packs, probably a value of 25 dollars (those things ain't cheap!) One of my friends on the TTC with me is vegan and therefore is limited in her consumption of chocolate bars. These, she can eat. So the excitement of finding chocolate mixed with being kind of stoned, obviously, she wanted to crack them open right there and eat them.

But I stopped her, imparting the wisdom Mother imparted to me.

She's not buying it. The box clearly has not been opened and it would be a safe bet that someone simply dropped the box as they were leaving the train. But I know how much evil lurks in this world and that is not a bet I am willing to take. I toss the box back down to the end of the train, and my other friend (who was also stoned, and I'm not convinced he would have resisted the temptation had I not been there) convinces her that I am right. She's upset, but I just chock it up to her being stoned, and that sober minds will prevail.

WRONG!

Fastforward a few days and the rest of our friends know this story and they're all calling me the idiot for passing up an opportunity to consume such valuable chocolate! Turns out that I have lost this debate by like 8-1. All I can say to that is: YOU PEOPLE ARE INSANE!

Honestly, it seems like a fundamental piece of common sense that one does not eat food found on the floor. Especially if that floor is the floor of a TTC subway. I mean, I saw a dude taking a shit on the subway before. It seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion that I do not want to eat food from that same place, even if just from a hygienic standpoint. Add that to the fact that you have no idea what the packages origins are, and that right there, friend, is you entering the danger zone. I'm honestly a little concerned about my friends and their willingness to eat tampered, poisoned food.

But I guess that's just me. I guess I'm the only one who cares that some stranger has probably stuck a poison needle through the box of those chocolates. Does no one remember the Tylenol Tampering case in Chicago, 1982? Or that baby food tampering deal in Southern California in like, 1990, or something? Or more recently and closer to home, that crazy guy who soaked bread in antifreeze and then scattered pieces of it around the dog park in High Park in the summer of 2009? Seriously, what if that guy had decided to do the same with Lindt 70% Cocoa Chocolate bars?

CONCLUSION

Think of it mathematically. Food you prepare yourself has an almost 0% chance of being tampered with (you could have a Jekyll/Hyde thing going on, with one trying to murder the other, but unlikely.) This risk increases with the amount of packaged foods you introduce into your daily consumption, but grocery stores are generally a safe zone in that they have security and cycle through product enough and have tracking measures that packaged food in and of itself is probably safe if bought from the grocery store. This security is at once removed once it leaves the grocery store and is placed on the floor of the TTC (or a comparable location) because it had to get there by some means outside of the grocery industry (probably some evil dickhead) and the chances of it being tampered with becoming infinitely higher. INFINITELY!

Make fun, if you must. Call me paranoid, call me insane, call me whatever you will. I'm not eating any goddamn floor food, and I'm checking every package I buy for needle marks. This is a completely legitimate and reasonable fear, and one that will probably save my life at least twice.

Just sayin'.