I miss you: But barfblog needs to stop living in my basement

Hated the song, Miss You, when it came out on Some Girls, the go-to Stones album of my high-school yout in 1978, but saw them live in Buffalo in 1981 and they rocked it up and I sorta got it.

Respcectable is much better from Some Girls.

Journey still sucks.

barfblog.com will be back, but a little different.

No longer tied to any sponsorship, academic or anyone.

(Chapman is, but he needs his job; I don’t).

I’m Canadian. Get used to the fucking swearing or get the fuck off.

A few years ago at the International Association for Food Protection annual meeting, I told the audience, after revealing my wife’s breast size because she asked me to shop for bras – which I did — that the audience of food safety geeks now knew more about my wife’s breast size than they knew about the food they were about to eat for dinner, where it came from, and how it was prepared.

A government-type said she couldn’t read me anymore.

Then don’t.


Or the way 1.5 million attended my farewell blog.

But a few thousand have written in so:

After 25 years of food safety risk communication, nothing has changed.

A self-congratulating-largely-taxpayer-funded crowd to tell people food safety is their fault is not a movement.

Cut-and-paste press releases do not make a publication, regardless of medium – and I’ll take on anyone who wants to talk the medium is the message by University of Toronto prof Marshall McLuhan.

I miss you probably not in the same way Jamie Oliver misses his parents, who own The Cricketers Pub in Essex, England, and was downgraded from the highest rating of 5 to 2 for poor hygiene after inspectors found dead uncooked pheasants next to pre-cooked potato chips, frozen chicken that expired three months ago, and dirt and grease through tout the kitchen.

Then there’s the academics, going on about food safety culture, about eight-years after it jumped the shark.

I’ll let the abstract speak for itself:

In an intensifying climate of scrutiny over food safety, the food industry is turning to “food safety culture” as a one-size-fits-all solution to protect both consumers and companies. This strategy focuses on changing employee behavior from farm to fork to fit a universal model of bureaucratic control; the goal is system-wide cultural transformation in the name of combatting foodborne illness. Through grounded fieldwork centered on the case of a regional wholesale produce market in California, we examine the consequences of this bureaucratization of food safety power on the everyday routines and lived experiences of people working to grow, pack, and deliver fresh produce. We find that despite rhetoric promising a rational and universal answer to food safety, fear and frustration over pervasive uncertainty and legal threats can produce cynicism, distrust, and fragmentation among agrifood actors. Furthermore, under the cover of its public health mission to prevent foodborne illness, food safety culture exerts a new moral economy that sorts companies and employees into categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ according to an abstracted calculation of ‘riskiness’ along a scale from safe to dangerous. We raise the concern that ‘safety’ is usurping other deeply held values and excluding cultural forms and experiential knowledges associated with long-standing food-ways. The long-term danger, we conclude, is that this uniform and myopic response to real risks of foodborne illness will not lead to a holistically healthy or sustainable agrifood system, but rather perpetuate a spiralling cycle of crisis and reform that carries a very real human toll.

Oh Fonz.