What I thought was just a 48-hour bug turned into a four-alarm gastrointestinal crisis over the weekend. My malady was diagnosed as bacterial, which means it was probably (irony of ironies) a foodborne illness. There is a handful of common foodborne illnesses out there, none of which you would wish on any of your friends. Most of them are contracted by ingesting bacteria that either live symbiotically within the animals we eat or are spread by careless food handlers in processing or preparation. After being ingested, these microbes lodge themselves in the intestinal wall and start to do their dirty little business. Symptoms can range from cramps to vomiting to (eep!) bloody diarrhea, all with or without fever. Dozens more foodborne illnesses have been documented, some of which you would not wish even on your worst enemies. Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the brain-wasting illness linked to mad cow disease, is one of these. It takes years to incubate, affects mainly people in their twenties, and has a 100% mortality rate.

I won't tell you where on the spectrum of unpleasantness my symptoms fell, but I am not experiencing any degenerative neurological effects. Suffice it to say after four days of not being able to leave my apartment (within which the greatest distance to the lavatory is about twenty feet), the doctor put me on Cipro. Yeah, the stuff they send in to get rid of anthrax. I'm feeling much better now.

So is the reckless gourmand chastened by his brush with the dangers of indiscriminate eating? Does he emerge from his sickbed resigned to a diet befitting his delicate constitution? Are the days of foie gras and anchovies lost forever? Hell no. If you're going to go your whole life without trying a raw oyster, or a steak tartare, or a raw-milk cheese, just because you're worried about the tiny chance that somewhere along the line you might have to endure a few days of intense abdominal distress, you're probably the type of person that has eight rolls of duct tape in your closet and a bomb shelter in the backyard. You and I will never understand each other. I don't know what it was that made me so sick, but I enjoyed everything I ate last week, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Let germs to come do what they may. I've got modern medicine and a pocket full of sick days.