I seriously hope you're not bleaching your fruit

Issue 168: The CDC says fully 1 in 4 Americans have gotten themselves sick by excessively sanitizing food during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter with a serious punctuality problem.

Read yesterday’s dispatch: Goodbye to the Dude-itor-in-chief

I have a confession to make: As the Covid-19 pandemic has dragged on, my motivation to sanitize my groceries has plummeted. I still wear a mask everywhere and wash my hands obsessively, of course, but at the beginning, I was also careful to clean every item that entered my apartment. Now, most grocery trips end with a direct bag-to-fridge transfer.

Although the CDC now says the primary transmission vector is respiratory droplets from person-to-person contact (which I’m careful to avoid as much as possible!), I suppose you could argue I’m not going far enough. But a new CDC survey says many, many Americans are going TOO far.

One in four respondents (!!!) said they’ve gotten themselves sick from their cleaning habits. The survey pool was small (502 adults, weighted for demographic/geographic representation), but the results are still interesting, maybe horrifying, and definitely tragic.

Here are more of the findings, courtesy of The Counter:

According to a new CDC report, nearly 40 percent of Americans report that they’ve taken extremely unsafe measures to sanitize their food and kitchens. Nearly one in five say that they’ve tried to clean fruits and vegetables with bleach, and a similar number have tried to use cleaning products on their skin. One in 10 people have tried spraying disinfectants around their bodies…and four percent report having gone so far as to eat or drink them.

Don’t clean produce with bleach!! Don’t drink disinfectants! Don’t spray cleaning products on yourself like a middle schooler cracking open a fresh can of Axe body spray!

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Here’s… what not to do:

(screengrab from Dr. Jeffrey VanWingen on YouTube. I’d prefer not to link because this video, as I’ll explain, is full of misinformation!)

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As to why people do seem to think these ideas are the right move, obviously misinformation — both from official and nonofficial sources — has a massive impact. You have Trump casually floating the idea of injecting disinfectants and actively disregarding public health advice from the CDC and other organizations. And you have wide-reaching online sources, like the well-intentioned Grand Rapids, Michigan, doctor (pictured above) who advised in a massively viral YouTube video to wash produce with soap and to leave groceries in the garage for three days before bringing them into your home. (To be clear, both are bad ideas, as public health agencies around the world have noted. He’s since corrected his video.)

This all fuels people’s pandemic anxiety and makes it extremely hard to explain why it can sometimes be better to not be so extreme during a global health crisis. Should we all be wearing masks and social distancing? Absolutely. Should I clean my groceries? Yeah, probably. But I’m gonna go ahead and say that if you’re getting sick from your vigorous attempts to avoid getting sick… maybe dial it back, there, friend.

Yesterday here at Nosh Box, we talked about the resignation of Bon Appétit editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport. The inciting incident for his resignation was the circulation of a photo of him dressing in a brownface costume — but, as I explained yesterday, it was more importantly the result of his complicity in the pervasive culture of racism at the magazine.

For several weeks now, Rachel Premack at Business Insider has been talking with current and former staff of color at BA about this very subject. The toxic culture, classist popularity contests, and glaring double standards they describe are truly appalling:

“I am the only Black woman on his staff. He treats me like the help,” said Ryan Walker-Hartshorn, who was Adam Rapoport’s assistant.

Walker-Hartshorn, who’s paid significantly less than editorial staff, said she had to clean his golf clubs, run personal errands, teach his wife how to use Google Calendar — all while being denied a raise after three months of missing rent. At one point, she said, she asked Rapoport how he wanted his coffee and he replied “I don't know, like Rihanna.” (ostensibly meaning, black. Big yikes.)

“It's odd to be held up as this one big happy family to the media when we are all being unequally compensated and there is an implicit understanding that white talent is more valuable than their non-white counterparts,” said Priya Krishna.

Under Rapoport, the magazine “went from old and irrelevant and white-washed content to young and trendy white-washed content,” said Rick Martinez.

“You see your coworkers every day of your life, and to go into work every day and feel isolated is misery-inducing. Nowhere have I ever felt more isolated than at Bon Appétit,” said Nikita Richardson.

The full article is absolutely worth reading.