FINGER FOOD

Ned wonders how many of his followers are concerned about the supposed widespread occurrence of food-borne diseases, and bad eating habits by kids, and adults, too. Assuming such diseases are rampant, Ned offers a few common-sense methods by which his friends can avoid most such unpleasantness.
First, buy local food as much as possible, and avoid ground meat. Most of the tainted ground meat that sickens thousands a year is industrially grown and mixed from many sources in plants hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Buying locally grown (or 'growed' as one of Ned's associates once remarked) is the best way to avoid meat-related sickness.
Next, avoid trying those samples of food that seem to be proliferating in groceries. Ned asks his friends to imagine the grubby little hands, fresh from their little noses or worse, that have been pawing those samples. And, of course, Ned counsels buyers to avoid bulk bins at the lowest levels in bulk sections, unless the food is something bland and harmless like flour. The lower level bins are the most likely to have been pawed over by grubby little carpet vermin whose parents seemingly couldn't care less. If you can't resist samples, ask your grocer if they will place the samples out of reach of the rug rats.
As an aside, Ned advises to avoid finger food. This stuff gives sends the wrong message to kids who generally ape whatever grown-ups do. If you eat finger food, that's what they'll want too. And most finger food--chicken "fingers", pizza, fries, fish sticks, etc, are pretty unhealthy to begin with. Never mind raw vegetables: kids won't eat those unless they are slathered in some sort of dip, equally unhealthy. And eating fruit slices with their hands is unsightly and unsanitary, besides being bad manners, or is Ned being overly insensitive to the emotional needs of four year olds?
Ned has seen kids who will eat most everything with their fingers if they can, eschewing a fork: cereal, fruit, bites of pancake, toast, you name it.
So let's agree to try to avoid eating food with our fingers if we can. Let's rediscover the beauty and utility of the knife and fork.