Long before Instagram and YouTube, the barfblog crew — I can’t believe I just wrote that, I never called my lab members the crew but I did call them the kids, even if I was the immature one — we were making food safety videos and taking pictures.
Just didn’t know what to do with them.
We had an entire website devoted to handwashing signs in bathrooms — as you do.
And then when I moved to Kansas in early 2006, it sorta got lost.
Someone in the lab was taking care of it and I was posting pictures of bathrooms from our trip to France, as we sat on the coast of Marseilles, but then the University of Guelph decided the sandbox wasn’t big enough for both of us so kicked me out.
Now there’s thing called Instagram, which may not be as cool as Snapchat, but whatever, I like pictures.
So Chapman created a barfblogben Instagram account, and I created a barfblogdoug account, because someone already has barfblog and it’s probably me (but linked to a previous e-mail).
I did one post — Amy did it and I immediately forgot how to do it — so I’ll put this picture in here, and maybe some time she’ll show me how to do it again.
This is from the University of Queensland bathroom in the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation building/centre/whatever it’s called.
(All those people who used to work with me, if you know where that website it, send me a note).
Travel woes en route to an FAO meeting (oh, that is a food safety hook) in Russia resulted in me having 12 hours to kill in Paris. Instead of staying in the city, I did something today that I’ve thought about for a while but had not had the chance- rented the world’s smallest stick shift car and traveled to Normandy. I drove through the French countryside and walked along Juno Beach where many Canadians landed on D-Day.
Most emotional for me was seeing an area of the world that had an impact on my life – the small villages of Le Mesnil-Patry and Norrey-en-Bessin. My grandfather, who Sam is named for, was part of a small group of seven that survived a battle where their company lost 98 soldiers. My grandfather was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal. Although we were very close he never spoke about it.
Catherine Woteki, served as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for research, education and economics in the Obama administration.
She recently told Pro Publica “This position is the chief scientist of the Department of Agriculture. It should be a person who evaluates the scientific body of evidence and moves appropriately from there.”
Trump expects to appoint Sam Clovis — who, according to sources with knowledge of the appointment and members of the agriculture trade press, is President Trump’s pick to oversee the section — appears to have no such credentials.
Clovis has never taken a graduate course in science and is openly skeptical of climate change. While he has a doctorate in public administration and was a tenured professor of business and public policy at Morningside College for 10 years, he has published almost no academic work.
Morningside College sounds like painting with Dali (below) on SCTV’s Sunrise Semester.
Clovis advised Trump on agricultural issues during his presidential campaign and is currently the senior White House advisor within the USDA, a position described by The Washington Post as “Trump’s eyes and ears” at the agency.
Clovis was also responsible for recruiting Carter Page, whose ties to Russia have become the subject of intense speculation and scrutiny, as a Trump foreign policy advisor.
Neither Clovis, nor the USDA, nor the White House responded to questions about Clovis’ nomination to be the USDA’s undersecretary for research, education and economics.
Clovis has a B.S. in political science from the U.S. Air Force Academy, an MBA from Golden State University and a doctorate in public administration from the University of Alabama. The University of Alabama canceled the program the year after Clovis graduated, but an old course catalogue provided by the university does not indicate the program required any science courses.
Clovis’ published works do not appear to include any scientific papers. His 2006 dissertation concerned federalism and homeland security preparation, and a search for academic research published by Clovis turned up a handful of journal articles, all related to national security and terrorism.
The only skill they have is describing cooking in prose equivalent to some soft-core porn Harold Robbins novel.
Avert your eyes, because the more attention they get, the more stupid their pronouncements.
(And yes, others have recently published about the food safety failings of celebrity chefs, but me and my gang did it first, 13 years ago, so all you posers, go find some authenticity, and go fuck yourselves.)
According to the Canberra Times, MasterChef star George Calombaris is facing legal action over food poisoning at his Hellenic Republic restaurant in Kew (some suburb in Australia).
According to a writ filed in the County Court earlier this month, Mr Schreuder claims to have become seriously ill with norovirus encephalitis after dining at the Cotham Road restaurant on Mothers Day in 2014.
An investigation by the Victorian Department of Health subsequently found that a staff member was most likely responsible for the infection of norovirus – a common, highly contagious cause of gastroenteritis.
“Of the 300-plus diners we interviewed, around 90 reported illness, which could have been associated with eating at Hellenic Republic Kew,” a department spokesperson said in 2014.
Mr Schreuder is seeking damages for the injuries which he claims were suffered due to negligence and breach of contract by the restaurant in “causing or permitting the infected food to be served to him”.
The 200th anniversary of Soren Kierkegaard’s birth has brought some stereotypical outpourings about angst and existentialism.
Me, it’s better to play hockey.
I have a soft spot for the Danes. Spending five summers hammering nails with a couple of Danish homebuilders in Ontario (that’s in Canada) taught me the value of being well-read and beer at morning coffee, lunch, and afternoon coffee. My friend John Kierkegaard would say, the beer is nice, but the work, it isn’t really so good.
When I went to Copenhagen in 1998 for a scientific meeting, there was beer at morning coffee.
Gordon Marino wrote in The New York Times that the way we negotiate anxiety plays no small part in shaping our lives and character. And yet, historically speaking, the lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, have all but repressed thinking about that amorphous feeling that haunts many of us hour by hour, and day by day. The 19th-century philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard stands as a striking exception to this rule. It was because of this virtuoso of the inner life that other members of the Socrates guild, such as Heidegger and Sartre, could begin to philosophize about angst.
The adytum of Kierkegaard’s understanding of anxiety is located in his work “The Concept of Anxiety” — a book at once so profound and byzantine that it seems to aim at evoking the very feeling it dissects.
Perhaps more than any other philosopher, Kierkegaard reflected on the question of how to communicate the truths that we live by — that is the truths about ethics and religion.
“Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. A person keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there.”
Kierkegaard understood that anxiety can ignite all kinds of transgressions and maladaptive behaviors — drinking, carousing, obsessions with work, you name it. We will do most anything to steady ourselves from the dizzying feeling that can take almost anything as its object. However, Kierkegaard also believed that, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
In his “Works of Love,” Kierkegaard remarks that all talk about the spirit has to be metaphorical. Sometimes anxiety is cast as a teacher, and at others, a form of surgery. The prescription in “The Concept of Anxiety” and other texts is that if we can, as the Buddhists say, “stay with the feeling” of anxiety, it will spirit away our finite concerns and educate us as to who we really are, “Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them.” According to Kierkegaard’s analysis, anxiety like nothing else brings home the lesson that I cannot look to others, to the crowd, when I want to measure my progress in becoming a full human being.
But this, of course, is not the counsel you are likely to hear these days at the mental health clinic.
I can attest to that.
So when Tyson launches a no antibiotics ever campaign, it is appealing to crass consumerism, making a buck, and throwing science back to when Kierkegaard was born.
We want our social media and technology, but we want our food produced in some 200-year-old barn.
Tyson President and CEO Tom Hayes said earlier this year that the company would continue to innovate in product development while remaining focused on sustainable production practices. “For us, sustainability isn’t a single issue; it’s about focusing on multiple dimensions in order to advance the whole,” Hayes said during the 2017 Consumer Analyst Group of New York (CAGNY) Conference in Boca Raton, Florida. “We will use our reach, capabilities and resources to drive positive change at a scale we believe no other company can match.”
Amy and I went to a Phoenix Coyotes hockey game when Wayne was coach, maybe 2006, and this loudmouth behind us was bragging about some cougar he hooked up with in Boca.
That’s your benchmark, Tyson.
I have vague memories of another company, back in 2006, that turned its back on science and proclaimed no antibiotics.
They forgot about food safety, too busy being posers.
How’s that working out, Chipotle?
The language of this presser is full swallow-whole.
The company’s sustainability plans include establishing strategic partnerships to set science-based sustainability goals; continuing third-party audits of farms to certify humane treatment of chickens; improving how chickens are raised through a concept farm, with innovations designed to be better for the birds, the environment and food safety; and increasing transparency across the business, including sustainability efforts.
I’ve know people who can write this stuff.
Not me.
Not Kierkegaard
I’ve got no genius for evil, that makes me common.
The name “Kierkegaard” means “graveyard,” and “Søren” is an affectionate Danish moniker for the Devil.
Sorenne, you know you have some devil in you, and some science.
Two diners suffered food poisoning and others suffered symptoms after eating a dish containing the meat at the restaurant.
Luscombe was fined £4,434, ordered to pay £5,284 costs and a victim surcharge of £120.
Luscombe admitted serving food on the premises that was unsafe as it had been inadequately cooked and failing to implement and maintain legally required food safety procedures, including those for the safe cooking of high risk foods.
Magistrates heard South Oxfordshire District Council, the environmental health authority, was asked to investigate after a member of the public suffered campylobacter food poisoning after eating at the restaurant.
Environmental health officers carried out an immediate unannounced inspection and found that the diners had been offered a set menu including calves’ liver for the main course.
They found the calves’ liver had been cooked at too low a temperature.
The restaurant was found to have no protocol to ensure high risk items, such as liver, were cooked according to recommendations from the Food Standards Agency.
It also failed to complete required monitoring records for almost three months, meaning it was failing to meet its legal requirements for food safety.
I love that barfblog Ben’s partner, Dani, wrote today that, “For those of you wondering, Barfblog Ben has no idea how to actually clean up barf in real life,” after she cleaned up dog barf at 1 a.m. and kid barf at 1 p.m. at the hockey store.
I feel your pain – and irony.
There was this one time, we were driving home from Florida, and we were already back in Kansas, and Sorenne barfed, so I barfed in response.
I viewed it as a pathetic fallacy barf.
And this other time, one of my daughters barfed as the plane landed and I handled it like a pro.
Maybe it’s a cleaning of convenience that Chapman suffers from.
That’s a lot of people barfing, and a disturbing lack of knowledge about what a deep clean actually means.
The Yolo County Health & Human Services Agency announced the virus, which causes fever and diarrhea, was rapidly affecting students, teachers and staff at area schools.
“The number of sick people is increasing every day at a very alarming rate,” the agency said in a press release.
The gastrointestinal illness, for which there’s no treatment, has impacted 32 schools in the county, located northwest of Sacramento.
Norovirus is highly contagious, health officials said. People can catch it by touching contaminated surfaces, coming in close contact with others carrying it and eating infected food.
I don’t get the kosher-halal food thing, seems to involve excessive animal suffering, but hey, who doesn’t want to make a buck and fly live animals for slaughter 150 years after frozen food transport was invented.
According to Michele Henry of the Toronto Star, for the first time in Canada, the country’s food inspection agency has laid criminal charges against a businessman and his company for allegedly trying to pass off run-of-the-mill food as kosher.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has charged Creation Foods and its vice-president, Kefir Sadiklar, with sending cheddar cheese falsely described as “kosher” to Jewish summer camps in June 2015. The agency alleges forged documents were created to make it seem like the cheese adhered to Jewish dietary laws.
The regulatory body, which polices food labels across Canada, has laid five charges against Sadiklar and his family-run Woodbridge-based distributor related to cheese products sent to two camps — Camp Moshava near Peterborough and Camp Northland-B’nai Brith in Haliburton.
The agency alleges that forged letters of kosher certification were slipped into boxes of non-kosher Gay Lea Ivanhoe shredded “Ivanhoe Old Cheddar Cheese” that Creation delivered to “strictly kosher” Jewish summer camps in June 2015. Kosher products are typically sold at a higher price than non-kosher products.
In an email to the Star, the federal food inspection agency said this is the first case it “has brought before a provincial court related to the misrepresentation of a kosher food product.”
Sadiklar, 39, is scheduled to make his next appearance in Newmarket court on May 20.
If convicted, he and Creation could face steep fines and even jail time.
The allegations made by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have not been tested in court.
The term “kosher” refers to food that follows Judaism’s strict dietary rules that dictate not only what observant Jews can eat, but how the food is prepared and handled. In the case of making cheese, a rabbi would be responsible for adding the coagulation enzyme at the first stage and certifying that no non-kosher products touched the kosher cheese on the line.
A rabbi has more microbiological knowledge than a microbiologist?
Market food passed on safety, not some weird religious stuff.
One of the first science columns I ever wrote for a newspaper 36-years ago was about domoic acid in shellfish.
Everything old is new again.
According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency DOM International Limited is recalling Kelly Oysters brand Gigas Oysters from the marketplace due to marine biotoxin which causes amnesic shellfish poisoning. Consumers should not consume and retailers, hotels, restaurants and institutions should not sell, serve or use the recalled product described below.
This recall was triggered by the company. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is conducting a food safety investigation, which may lead to the recall of other products. If other high-risk products are recalled, the CFIA will notify the public through updated Food Recall Warnings.
There have been no reported illnesses associated with the consumption of this product.
This is what creativity looks like at its ugly peak (even though this was filmed with makeup and tricks 7 years after being written, it’s still the best vid)
Just didn’t know what to do with them.
