Perspectives, Harvest Bounty, and When Food Goes Bad...

My apologies if my title ends up being a bit misleading.  You see, I had the very best of intentions of sitting down to write a lovely, informative post today, all about how a change in perspective can turn what seems like a problem into a real blessing.  I was going to start with a quote from Return of the Jedi,

"Luke, you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." - Obi-Wan Kenobi

I was then going to turn our thoughts back to early spring, when a mislabeling error prior to planting resulted in the grave imbalance (as anyone who has ever raised even one cherry tomato bush would recognize) of five cherry tomato bushes to three regular tomato bushes.  How, in the present moment of late August, the cherry tomatoes are threatening to drown us in their unbelievable abundance of red, yellow, and purple fruits.  How I've slowly been resigning myself to just letting them rot on the vine, having exhausted most ways of disposing of the bounty via recipes or charity, and how all of this changed with the serendipitious discovery of a recipe for oven-dried cherry tomatoes.  I had glorious plans to display a few choice pictures of the harvest, process, and result:

(for reference - these two bowls are only half of what I picked yesterday)

(Here's the other half)

(And the finished product)

I could be writing right now about how the tasty "tomato raisins," as someone described them, had turned my thoughts on tomato bounty from "ugh" to "hurray!"  I was even planning to make some lovely resolutions about finding uses for all the odd bounties of my garden, as well as for using my crock pot more this fall (having, as a side note, really enjoyed how much easier it is to dry things than to can them, and having reflected that the crock pot would likely make dinner preparation similarly easier).

So what's the problem, you might ask?  And why aren't you reading a post that looks like that, rather than a lament for the post that could have been?

Well - the problem is Google.  Google, and the fact that your food is trying to kill you.

It started when I, innocently, was trying to determine the best oven temperature, and how I could store the beautiful (and yummy - oh so yummy) finished product.

Some two hours later, and pages upon pages of info about Botulism! Salmonella! Listeria! and lots of other bacteria that I don't even want to think about, I began to realize a few things.

1)  It's all well and good to want to preserve food at home, to try and eliminate some of the more nasty "preservatives" present in store bought food.  There's just one catch, though - those preservatives happen to be there because your food is trying to kill you.
2)  Very well, you might say, I'll just cook my food very well after it is preserved!  Then it will be so yummy and healthy for me!  Right?  No.  Because in order to kill the food before it kills you, you have to boil it for so long, or cook it at such a high temperature, that it no longer has any nutritional content whatsover.  And yummy taste at that point is right out.
3)  And if you try to get the food by choosing to eat only raw items, the food will still win because of the pesticides.
4)  Even if you go organic to avoid the pesticides, the food is one step ahead, because the pesticides were there for a reason, to save you from all the nasty bugs (visible and invisible) that would otherwise be there, again as part of the plot for your life.
5)  You can try to freeze the food to preserve it, which works great, but it becomes dangerous as soon as it begins to thaw.  Alternately, you can cook it to high temperatures, but again it becomes deadly as it cools.  Perhaps we could eat everything either stick-to-your-tongue frozen or scald-your-mouth hot...

Of course, the real conclusion is, it's pretty dangerous for anyone with just a little medical knowledge, a hypochondriac streak, and a wildly active imagination to spend very much time on Google.

I will say that my little oven-dried tomatoes really do taste great.  They may end up killing me, but I bet they'll be good on pizza...

In all seriousness, for those who are wondering, just drying tomatoes isn't a problem, although sources do differ on how high or or low the oven temp must be.  The problem that had me searching for hours was whether having greased my baking sheet with olive oil, and sprinkled everything with garlic powder might have created a potential botulism-growing environment.  I'll store them in the freezer, and then use on pizzas or in sauce, so my logical reasoning says it will probably be ok, but in the meantime I really did learn just enough about food safety to pretty much never want to eat again. 

So maybe it really is all about perspectives: choosing a perspective that accepts the inevitable margin of risk, rather than striving for a perfect black and white of safety; balancing potential consequences with likely outcome, and holding fast with one hand to science, the other to faith.