It was probably 2009 that me and Amy and the 6-month old kid went on a southern U.S. road trip, featuring many stops to breastfeed, and many talks.
Sure, it wasn’t the same as me and the ex taking our now 33-year old to see the Grateful Dead north of Toronto when she was 6-weeks old, but it was cool (the Dead went back to Americana roots in 1970 and 71, producing two albums that had nothing to do with psychedelia and everything to do with, we are America, this is our music). The theme of the 2009 road trip was, how did food safety get so shitty (see future posts). I found resonance in The Talking Heads, and David Byrne resurrected the iconic song which was the soundtrack of my 2009 tour last week on Saturday Night Live.
I have great memories of that trip, but now, all I have is memories, and they are fading fast.
Chacour Koop of the Star Telegram reports a woman who pooped in cop car to create a hiding spot for her drugs is going to prison, officials say.
Two years ago, Shannen Martin, 34, was arrested during a theft investigation at an H-E-B grocery store in Corsicana, Texas, police said. She was handcuffed and put in the patrol vehicle after resisting the cops, police said.
On her way to jail, Martin “intentionally defecated” in the car and hid 2.3 grams of crack cocaine, a crack pipe and a Valentine’s Day card in the poop, police said.
An officer had to dig through the poop to find the evidence, police said.
Martin pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance and tampering with evidence. She also pleaded guilty to injury to a disabled person for macing a relative during an argument, according to the Navarro County District Attorney’s Office.
Last year, Martin was sentenced to probation instead of prison.
As part of her sentencing, she also was required to write a letter of apology to the officer who had to dig through her poop, court records show.
However, Martin’s probation was revoked in September after she violated terms of her agreement multiple times, prosecutors said. Last week, she was sentenced to three years in prison.
For decades, sex education in the classroom could be pretty cringey. For some adolescents, it meant a pitch for abstinence; others watched their teachers put condoms on bananas and attempt sketches of fallopian tubes that looked more like modern art.
Me and my veterinarian first wife had no qualms about explaining biological reality to our young daughters– no stork, no parthenogenesis, no saviour prince.
Emma Goldberg of New York Times writes that on TikTok – which my children are still trying to explain to me — sex ed is being flipped on its head. Teenagers who load the app might find guidance set to the pulsing beat of “Sex Talk” by Megan Thee Stallion.
A doctor, sporting scrubs and grinning into her camera, instructs them on how to respond if a condom breaks during sex: The pill Plan B can be 95 percent effective, the video explains.
The video is the work of Dr. Danielle Jones, a gynecologist in College Station, Tex., and so far has racked up over 11 million views. Comments range from effusive (“this slaps”) to eye-rolling (“thanks for the advice mom” and “ma’am, I’m 14 years old”).
“My TikTok presence is like if you had a friend who just happens to be an OB/GYN,” Dr. Jones said. “It’s a good way to give information to people who need it and meet them where they are.”
Dr. Jones is one of many medical professionals working their way through the rapidly expanding territory of TikTok, the Chinese-owned short-form video app, to counter medical misinformation to a surging audience. The app has been downloaded 1.5 billion times as of November, according to SensorTower, with an audience that skews young; 40 percent of its users are ages 16 to 24.
That would be the food service audience. Guess I better get hip.
I’ve learned to text more. Seems like an entire generation missed e-mail.
Although medical professionals have long taken to social media to share healthy messages or promote their work, TikTok poses a new set of challenges, even for the internet adept. Popular posts on the app tend to be short, musical and humorous, complicating the task of physicians hoping to share nuanced lessons on health issues like vaping, coronavirus, nutrition and things you shouldn’t dip in soy sauce. And some physicians who are using the platform to spread credible information have found themselves the targets of harassment.
Dr. Rose Marie Leslie, a family medicine resident physician at the University of Minnesota Medical School, said TikTok provided an enormous platform for medical public service announcements.
“It has this incredible viewership potential that goes beyond just your own following,” she said.
Striking a chord on TikTok, Dr. Leslie said, means tailoring medical messaging to the app’s often goofy form. In one post, she advised viewers to burn calories by practicing a viral TikTok dance. She takes her cues from teen users, who often use the app to offer irreverent, even slapstick commentary on public health conversations. She noted one trend in which young TikTokers brainstormed creative ways to destroy your e-cigarette, like running it over with a car.
TikTok’s executives have welcomed the platform’s uses for medical professionals. “It’s been inspiring to see doctors and nurses take to TikTok in their scrubs to demystify the medical profession,” said Gregory Justice, TikTok’s head of content programming.
Earlier this month, Dr. Nicole Baldwin, a pediatrician in Cincinnati, posted a TikTok listing the diseases that are preventable with vaccines and countering the notion that vaccines cause autism.
Her accounts on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Yelp were flooded with threatening comments, including one that labeled her “Public Enemy #1” and another that read, “Dead doctors don’t lie.”
A team of volunteers that is helping Dr. Baldwin monitor her social media has banned more than 5,200 users from her Facebook in recent weeks.
Dr. Baldwin said she started out feeling enthusiastic about the opportunity TikTok provides to educate adolescents, but her experience with harassment gave her some pause.
“There’s a fine line physicians are walking between trying to get a message out that will appeal to this younger generation without being inappropriate or unprofessional,” Dr. Baldwin said. “Because of the short content and musical aspect of TikTok, what adolescents are latching onto is not the professional persona we typically put out there.”
Corinthian Trading, Inc./DBA Corinthian Foods is recalling 5 lb. retail bags of Uncooked Sweet Potato Crusted Alaska Pollack Nuggets 1 oz. with date code CF35319 due to mislabeling. The bag contains Chicken Nuggets instead of Fish Nuggets. The product is packaged in clear 5 lb. bags with a white label with black writing.
Product was distributed in the state of Michigan, and may reach consumers through retail stores.
All allergens are properly declared, and no illness have been reported.
The problem was discovered when cases were opened to put out for retail sale, and the label on the retail package did not match the label and description of the master case. Subsequent investigation indicates the problem was caused during the packaging process. The incorrect labels were applied to the product causing the product to be mislabeled.
Nick Hall of Franchise Business reports fast food chain Red Rooster has made the drastic decision to shut two Perth outlets after leaked photos raised concerns over food safety.
Images posted on Facebook appear to show cooked chickens piled into the back of a Red Rooster delivery vehicle; unwrapped, unrefrigerated and in seemingly unsanitary condition.
Furthermore, reports suggest the chickens were being transported on day when the Perth sun was at its deadliest.
Social media users slammed the outlet for its unsanitary practices, with many questioning why the chickens were placed in the back of the car in the first place.
“To me this looks like a store has ran out of chicken and someone has transferred these from one store to another,” one user speculated.
In response to the alleged food safety breaches, Red Rooster quickly moved to close Forrestfield store, along with another in Waypoint also under the same franchisee’s direction.
In a statement, Red Rooster confirmed that the stores would remained closed until investigations were finalised.
“These stores will remain closed while detailed investigations are conducted, required actions are taken and we are satisfied that the operating standards of these locations meet the high expectations of our strict brand standards,” the brand said.
“We have alerted the relevant authorities and are working with them closely while our local staff on the ground undertake the investigation and actions required to meet our brand standards.”
In a previous life I was the scientific advisor for the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors.
We would meet a couple of times a year, and I would provide my food safety thoughts on what was going on at retail, but what struck me was that the first three hours of every meeting were like a self-help therapy session.
These heads of food safety at major Canadian retailers would bemoan their diminishing status at the corporate level: No one cares about food safety until there’s an outbreak. Twenty years later, the song remains the same.
Alexis Morillo of Delish writes that Chipotle workers claim that food safety practices are at risk at the fast casual restaurant due to managerial procedures that cause workers to “cut corners.”
A total of 47 current and former Chipotle workers from New York City locations came forward about the malpractice in a report to Business Insider. This news follows recent allegations that the company has been violating child labor laws.
In the report obtained by Business Insider, workers outlined concerns about the way things are done behind the scenes at Chipotle. It said that many incentives like pay bonuses let other responsibilities like cleanliness audits and food safety fall to the wayside.
Workers said in the report that working at Chipotle is “highly pressurized environment” with goals that include “minimizing labor costs.”
It was also said that managers are often told in advance when a restaurant will be inspected for cleanliness so they can be prepared. Meanwhile, when an inspection isn’t taking place the cleanliness standard is much more laid back. In the past, people have questioned Chipotle’s safety standards because of the E. Coli outbreak a couple years back. The chain also has an interesting sick day policy, where there are on call nurses for workers to check if they’re actually sick.
Chipotle said in a statement to Delish that the company is committed to safe food and a safe work environment and that the pay bonuses actually incentivize workers to be even more precise when following company policies.
Jose Bolanos of the UK Food Standards Agency writes in Organizations, culture and food safety, 2020that FSA has a longstanding interest in organisational culture and its impact on the capability of a food business to provide food that is safe and what it says it is.
However, while there has been some work carried out on assessing organisational culture in some regulatory areas, there has been limited progress in the development of a regulatory approach specifically for food safety culture.
And on it goes in bureau-speak.
Can’t take an agency seriously when they still recommend that meat be cooked until piping hot.
Ashley Nickle of The Packer wrote in Oct. 2019 (did I mention the bit about catch up, 8 broken ribs and a broken collarbone) PMA chief science and technology officer Bob Whitaker gave an impassioned presentation at Fresh Summit on the improvements that need to be made in food safety across the industry. Ten years after the formation of the Center for Produce Safety, companies can’t assert anymore that there isn’t relevant research to inform practices, Whitaker said.
Whitaker gave specific examples of potentially risky practices that are common. He mentioned setting harvest containers on the ground before they’re filled, and spoke about relying on the presence of generic E. coli in agricultural water to indicate pathogenic E. coli, along with several other examples.
Whitaker encourages companies to get competitive on food safety if that will get them to push past the status quo. He urged industry members to consider the costs when outbreaks happen, and he mentioned the death of a toddler during the 2006 outbreak linked to spinach.
“If we look at the recent issues we’ve had, we had an issue that involved water,” Whitaker said. “People said, ‘Well, we measured the water, we looked at generic E. coli.’ Well yeah, but the research has told us for years that generic E. coli does not represent the presence of pathogenic E. coli or salmonella. And In fact, at the volumes we do, we’re not going to find it.
“We also know that in every water system we’ve looked at around the U.S., I don’t care what crop, it has nothing to do with crop, every place the researchers have looked at and we’ve had a concentrated effort, we found contamination in open water sources — back east, out west, up north, doesn’t make a difference,” Whitaker said. “That’s where it is.”
Growing near concentrated animal feeding operations is another practice that the research indicates carries some risk.
“We know that dust will make the stuff travel,” Whitaker said. “Now we don’t know how far, but we know the one experiment that was done went out to 600 and it was there, so maybe it went farther …”
He also noted several practices in the field that he described as problematic yet commonplace.
“If I had a nickel for every picture I get every summer of people showing me Port-A-Johns being serviced in the field next to a harvest crop, I could have retired a couple years ago,” said Whitaker, who plans to retire from PMA in January.
“Don’t tell me it doesn’t drip, and then we wonder how we get some of these things like parasites in our fields,” Whitaker said.
He mentioned harvest sleds being left in the field overnight with the day’s debris still on them as another potential problem.
“I’m seeing companies now breaking away from what everybody else is doing and say, ‘You know what, this is what we’re going to do,’” Whitaker said. “And we’ve always abhorred that idea. We’ve always said that food safety is something we share with each other, we don’t compete on it.
“To hell with that,” Whitaker said. “One thing this industry knows how to do is compete … You’ve always been marketing it anyway — you know you have. I see the stories. I see myself show up in people’s marketing things to their customers. I know that they’re marketing that.
“So do it,” Whitaker said. “If that’s what it’s going to take to get better, to create competition to get better, then do it. Because that’s what we need to do. We need the impetus to do it.”
A report by the UK Health Protection Agency concluded that 529 patrons paying a ridiculous amount of money for food-porn styled dishes were sickened with Norovirus – this at a restaurant that only seats 40 patrons per night — introduced through contaminated shellfish, including oysters that were served raw and razor clams that may not have been appropriately handled or cooked.
Investigators identified several weaknesses in procedures at the restaurant that may have contributed to ongoing transmission including: delayed response to the incident, the use of inappropriate environmental cleaning products, and staff working when ill. Up to 16 of the restaurant’s food handlers were reportedly working with Norovirus symptoms before it was voluntarily closed.
Last week it was announced that Heston Blumenthal’s scandal-plagued Australian restaurant appears doomed after its landlord and financial backer, Crown Casino, said it had moved to terminate its lease.
The company behind the Dinner by Heston restaurant appointed provisional liquidators just before Christmas. It came just days after it missed a deadline with the Fair Work Ombudsman to pay back staff the millions it owed them for underpayment.
In a statement Crown said due to the appointment of the provisional liquidator “it has taken action” to terminate the lease of restaurant owner Tipsy Cake Pty Limited.
“While this is disappointing, Crown is working to provide assistance to Tipsy Cake employees looking for employment within Crown,” a Crown spokeswoman said. “The provisional liquidator of Tipsy Cake, however, will need to deal with employee matters at the first instance.”
In December 2018, a Sunday Age investigation revealed that Dinner by Heston was dramatically underpaying staff and Tipsy Cake, the company that owned the restaurant, was based in a notorious tax haven.
The investigation revealed chefs at the Southbank eatery regularly worked 25 hours of unpaid overtime a week. That pushed pay down to as little as $15 to $17 an hour, well below the minimum rates of the award, the wages safety net.
The Fair Work Ombudsman soon after launched an investigation.
The spokeswoman said Crown would allow customers who purchased Dinner by Heston gift cards to exchange them for Crown gift cards. No timeframe was provided by Crown on when the lease of one of its high-profile tenants would end.
The move to terminate the lease creates further uncertainty for employees who had hoped that Crown may financially support the restaurant to keep it open.
Crown had provided the business – one of its marquee tenants – with a $750,000 interest free loan. Industry sources said the interest free loan could have been used as a way to lure such a high profile business to the casino, boosting its appeal to visitors
Before Christmas Fair Work Ombudsman Sandra Parker said it was disappointing that Tipsy Cake had not resolved the underpayment issue before it went into provisional liquidation.
Accounts for the Dinner by Heston restaurant show it has reported persistent losses since opening in Melbourne in 2015.
The accounts disclosed it was dependent on interest free loans from a related company run through a Caribbean tax haven and Crown Melbourne ‘’to continue operating’’.
But its opaque structure – restaurant owner Tipsy Cake is based on the volcanic Caribbean island of Nevis – made it hard to determine the true health of the business.
The ownership of companies incorporated in Nevis is never disclosed so there is no way to know who is behind companies created there.
But the company has said Blumenthal sold his shareholding more than a decade ago but remained its chef patron and “integral’’ to its operation.
Chapman used to write wonderful 1-page fact sheets that were used around the world, and maybe he can be persuaded to do so again, or find a skilled student.
The important graphic is below. The rest is filler.
Sure, it wasn’t the same as me and the ex taking our now 33-year old to see the Grateful Dead north of Toronto when she was 6-weeks old, but it was cool (the Dead went back to Americana roots in 1970 and 71, producing two albums that had nothing to do with psychedelia and everything to do with, we are America, this is our music). The theme of the 2009 road trip was, how did food safety get so shitty (see future posts). I found resonance in The Talking Heads, and David Byrne resurrected the iconic song which was the soundtrack of my 2009 tour last week on Saturday Night Live.
