My friend Jim calms me down almost as much as my puppy, Ted.
I’ve known Jim since about 1996. We collaborated to shut down emotion-not-evidence-based rules on genetically engineered foods in Canada, and he has always brought a practical sense of what a farmer goes through to make a buck.
He also used to terrorize my then young girls by telling them how he shot stray cats left at his dairy farm, because cats carry toxoplasmosis, and it impacted his money-making side.
We were grateful for the three cats from Walkerton.
Jim and Donna’s Walkerton farm is across the road from the source of the E. coli O157 outbreak in 2000 that killed seven and sickened thousands, and I still get chills when Jim recalls another chopper going over the farm, probably another dead person.
Or as I said at the time (Jim had to remind me), media wanted cows, manure, river, and townhouses all in one photo.
I spoke with Jim the other day, primarily to balance myself against the most moderate person I know.
Jim has gotten into the maple syrup biz in Ontario (that’s in Canada), he’s got grandkids, like I do, and a seemingly stable situation, running his B&B with Donna, substitute teaching, and new farming ventures.
For the thousands of students I have had the privilege of teaching over the past three decades, a reminder: read Strunk and White, and know it inside out.
For assignments, I always gave 60% for content, 40% for style.
So learn to fucking spell and write in coherent sentences, or stop wasting my — or anyone else’s — time.
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.
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.
Gretchen Reynolds of the NY Times writes that super-short workouts are a favorite topic in this column. I have written about seven-minute, six-minute, four-minute, and even one-minute workouts. They are appealing because they require so little time, but they also demand straining effort.
Martin Gibala is the scientist we most have to thank for the popularity of very brief, very hard exercise. All of these workouts are built around the concept of high-intensity interval training, in which you push yourself almost to exhaustion for a brief spurt of minutes or seconds, and then rest and recover for a few minutes before repeating the intense interval.
Athletes have long used interval sessions as part of a varied weekly training program to improve their competitiveness. But Dr. Gibala, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, has helped to popularize the idea that we can rely on high-intensity intervals as our only exercise, and do very, very few of them while still improving our health and fitness.
Since 2004, he has published multiple studies about the potent effects of intervals.
Donald Trump is the Sid Vicious of Presidents. Can barely play the bass, all show, will probably OD.
I’ve kept a low profile and will continue, but when someone responds to a blog post about USDA food safety scientists being muzzled, and says I should stick to food safety, I will use my pulpit to say something.
We have a paper that has been years in the making, has been peer-reviewed, accepted and will be published in April, that talks all about going pubic.
But I’m not about to break my ban on press release before publication.
Pete Townsend’s Rough Boys was his response to Sid, The Sex Pistols and punk. Neil Young’s Into the Black was his response.
Punk went nowhere. Rock will last.
If you can’t see the link between popular culture, and the kid making minimum wage serving your lunch, then you must really believe in faith-based food safety. Praise the Lord and pass the guacamole — or ammo.
Saw Neil on this tour in 1991 in Toronto.
Took Chapman to a Neil concert in the 2000s. It’s what responsible graduate student advisors do.
dp
You should probably stick to writing about Food Safety.
For the many who have asked, barfblog.com is on hiatus while I chill and focus on other things.
But some things deserve a wide audience.
Buzzfeed reports the U.S. Department of Agriculture has banned scientists and other employees in its main research division from publicly sharing everything from the summaries of scientific papers to USDA-branded tweets as …