My kids love smoothies. For them, snack time doesn’t get much better than when I whip out some frozen fruit, a splash of juice, a little oat bran and some yogurt, throw it all into our blender and churn it up.
I do this regularly and it makes me feel good. I feel like this is a truly healthy, wonderful thing for my kids to eat — and they all like it, something that can be rare when you have three kids with a multitude of different food preferences.
I also know that they all like pomegranate, so I didn’t think twice when I saw a new variety of frozen fruit in the freezer aisle of the grocery store. Pomeberry Blend, which had the aforementioned fruit plus blueberries, strawberries and cherries, sounded like a great base for smoothies.
I dropped one in my cart without a second thought.
Later on, I blended it up and served the smoothies to my three children, and had a glass myself. My kids actually complained that the smoothie was “too seedy” from the pomegranates, so I didn’t make any more.
But I was more than a little worried and nervous when a press report about potential contamination came to my attention. The BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), the regional health authorities and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have been investigating five cases of hepatitis A in people who have consumed Western Family brand Pomeberry Blend frozen fruit. On Thursday, April 5, the BCCDC warned the public not to consume this product and to discard it, which I did as soon as I heard. The warning applies only to the Pomeberry Blend frozen fruit, not the other varieties. I realized with a sinking feeling that this was exactly what I had fed to my kids.
Hepatitis A is caused by a virus, which can last from a few weeks to several months, but does not lead to chronic infection. It can, however, take 15 to 50 days before you feel sick.
After calling HealthLink BC for more information, the kids and I headed for the doctor. We have now been given the vaccine and have to simply wait and hope that blood tests show no abnormalities. The overall risk is said to be very low.
But I am worried. I’m a mom. That’s what we do.
Frankly, it also makes me a bit frightened about everything I’m putting in my grocery cart. It hits home that I don’t often really know where my food has come from, who has been handling it, or where it has been before my family eats it. I know the only way to really know is to grow the food yourself, which is entirely unreasonable. But it does make me feel like paying greater attention to the food I buy.
It also makes me support public funding for agencies like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which monitors the safety of our food supply.
This situation is a reminder that they play an important role in consumer safety and that things can go wrong with the products we buy.
That’s food for thought.