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Urban legend history points the way toward a healthy skepticism of food scare stories
By Steve Palopoli
WHEN THE finger-in-the-chili story broke, it seemed like the entire world was set to hurl. But there was one group that failed to experience sudden nausea, dizziness or other symptoms associated with sick-ass news of alleged food contamination: followers of American folklore and urban legend. These folks were skeptical to say the least, and many called bullshit immediately on the digital display that supposedly went down in Wendy's.
The reason: they've seen this story, or one like it, before, and 99.9 percent of the time, it's not true. Flipping through the works of urban legend pioneer Jan Brunvard, or better yet doing some reading on snopes.com, the premier urban legend site on the Internet, reveals how many food scares are the stuff of legendand nothing more.
Contrary to what a friend of a friend may have heard:
Also, ignore the mass emails your ³helpful² co-worker in the next cubicle keeps sending you, because the following neverrepeat, neverhappened:
There are far too many such urban legendsand too many dozens of variations on eachto cover them all here. As even this small sampling demonstrates, racism, homophobia and a general fear of the unfamiliar have fueled our society's fear of food for a mighty long time.
Incidentally, many former and current owners of fast food chain franchises will tell you that the purposeful (and often hilariously improbable) planting of foreign objects for profit is an old, old scamoften tried, rarely (if ever) successful. So the next time you hear what sounds like a crazy story about food, chances are it really is a crazy story. Always check out tried-and-true resources like snopes.com to get the real story.
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