Could someone please tell me what century I'm living in? The reason I'm a little confused is because of my contemporaries' reaction to a little technological marvel called the "microwave oven". It's as if the typical microwave is run by a gang of little gremlins, like the cameras in Discworld. Instead of painting pictures, these gremlins shoot your food with magic rays.
My first experience with this amazing superstitious attitude was with a friend of the family. Now, this guy is like an uncle to me. I love him and his family dearly, but he and his wife went through a rather kooky period.
These are the folks who turned us on to the folk-remedy miracle that was comfrey. The comfrey plant sports broad, fuzzy, dark green leaves, just like something you need to fight growing up between your prized petunias. Our friends sang its praises so loudly and insistently that even my parents, the perennial cynics, decided to give it a try. We'd chop up the leaves and steep it to make a nasty herbal tea. It tasted exactly as you'd expect: herbal and green. Surprisingly, the stuff worked. I remember suffering from aches and a fever. A cup of comfrey tea seemed to just knock the flu symptoms right out of me. Of course, I also will never forget having a fuzzy strip of comfrey leaf lodge itself into the tender flesh under my tongue. It stuck like Velcro and hurt like hell. Eventually we just fell out of using the stuff. Good thing too. With the latest resurgence of herbal remedies, comfrey's been put under the microscope. Apparently, large amounts of comfrey taken over a long period of time turns your liver into sludge.
These are the same folks who heard that fat was bad., that cholesterol clogs up your arteries. They responded by cutting fat out of their diet… totally. It wasn't very long before they learned first-hand that your body needs to take in at least some fat. Sure, one Big Mac with fries has enough oil to grease a tractor, but cutting out all fat in your diet will lead you on a path that leads straight to your doctor explaining how you're going to die unless you eat like a sane person, just like our friends did.
Our friends also had heard of ultraviolet radiation and the evil effects it has on the eye. Just about everyone will concede that UV rays do bad things to various parts of the body, especially the eyes. Our friends decided to protect themselves in the extreme by wearing opaque-black, Terminator-style glasses everywhere and keeping the inside of their house shuttered like a cave. Years later my dad read a study that determined that greatly reduced light exposure is bad for the eyes because the muscles of the eye begin to atrophy, eventually degrading visual acuity.
Speaking of "radiation", this is what originally set me off. Our herbal, back-to-nature, anti-establishment friends had a fear of microwave ovens that bore all the hallmarks of superstition. Now, the husband was an electronics technician. This guy reveled in technology and just about anything mechanical. This entire body of knowledge retreated in a mad frenzy when faced with the magic of the microwave. Just consider that folks flippantly refer to "nuking" their food: an entire dank quagmire of superstitious fear to wade through there. You stick a hot dog in a microwave oven, press a few buttons, movie-style machinery noises happen, and, in a few seconds, your hot dog has plumped. It's so fast and you can watch as your wiener waggles, rolls, puffs, contorts, and convulses under the influence of the microwave radiation. It's all just so unnatural.
Our pals basically objected to the idea of their food being "irradiated". Holy hoppin' Haysoos on a pogo stick folks! What the heck did they think happened every time they cooked their plain oatmeal on the stovetop? Why, they were "irradiating" their food with invisible rays of infrared radiation! Just because the element glowed like fire and they had a mundane word like "heat" to call the radiation, they were perfectly fine with the whole setup.
Recently, almost the same thing was brought up again by an officemate of my wife's. This lady is highly educated. She's from overseas, but in my experience, physics works the same in Scotland, Ecuador, and Turkey as it does here in the States. So this woman loves yams. She'd like to eat more of them. My wife suggested bringing them to work and cooking them in the microwave like another coworker. (Yes, my wife works with a bunch of yamophiles.) The officemate in question mildly objected on two counts.
The first was that the microwaves somehow change the proteins in the yam. Good god folks! It's called "cooking". Technical folks might call it "denaturing". It means using energy to break those big bad protein molecules up into smaller molecules that are easier to digest. Why the heck do you think people cook things in the first place? Are you suspicious of the egg whites that turn opaque in the pan? You're changing those proteins! Bouncing Buddha people! Your stomach does the same thing during a process called "digestion", except that instead of using heat, it uses nasty acids and these weird, scary things called enzymes. Anything with a name like "enzyme" can't be good. This reminds me of the kooks who are into whole foods, amino acids, and all that steaming crap. Raging Ra folks! As if those huge proteins are transported directly into your bloodstream as you swallow. As if your body would know what to do with a giant, convoluted bean or chicken protein. If that were the case, then these folks might be able to take in enough protein to grow a freakin' brain.
The second trepidation that my wife's workmate expressed regarding her yams involved iron. She feared that the microwave oven might diminish the amount of iron in her yams. Right. Now we're not even talking proteins. Now we're dealing with elements. Sure, cooking might alter some of the iron compounds, but iron is iron. As if the microwaves would add a few neutrons, stick in a dozen or so protons, and provide enough electrons to turn the iron into plutonium or something. Yes, the microwave represents the fulfillment of generations of alchemists' arcane experimentation: leave your hot dog in the microwave long enough and it will be transformed into gold… or at least charcoal.
We can put a man on the moon and write with atoms, but psychic hotlines are raking in the dough and microwave ovens still inspire the same irrational fear once set aside for witches and bogeymen.
Pakeha