This used to be so appealing.

If you're as neurotic and phobic as I am, you will never feel the same about cantaloupe again. Not even if they say it's perfectly safe. I'm still nervous about an article a read in Readers Digest twenty years ago about deadly olive oil. Now I'm afraid if we have too many of these scares, I won't be able to eat anything. We've already been panicked by tomatoes, broccoli, spinach. I got deathly sick from a single shrimp, one of my favorite foods, and haven't felt totally at ease eating shrimp since. But then, of course, the news loves to put us into states of fear. They feed us constant trigger words: Listeria, Ecoli, Ptomaine, Hepatitis a, b, c, d, whatever. And if food scares aren't enough, this week's news told us all about the new horrors that can be inflicted by mosquitoes, not to mention the killer bees and vampire bats heading this way from—where else?—South America. I wonder what new fear I can expect when I put on tomorrow's news. I hope it's not infected ice cream. In that case, I would have to risk death.

Note; Well I wasn't disappointed. This is the first paragraph of a story that greeted me this morning on Huffington Post. Apparently we should soon expect marauding, hairy, biting ants.

NEW ORLEANS -- It sounds like a horror movie: Biting ants invade by the millions. A camper's metal walls bulge from the pressure of ants nesting behind them. A circle of poison stops them for only a day, and then a fresh horde shows up, bringing babies. Stand in the yard, and in seconds ants cover your shoes.