Tag Archives: dirt

Minnesota food plant worker gets jail time for contaminating chicken

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Elizabeth Licata of Fox News reports an employee at a chicken processing plant in Minnesota has been convicted of intentionally contaminating chicken and causing a massive poultry recall in 2016.

In June of 2016 the Minnesota-based GNP Company had to recall almost 56,000 pounds of “Gold’n Plump” and “Just BARE” branded chicken after it was found to be contaminated by sand and black soil. After an investigation, 37-year-old Faye Slye of Cold Spring, Minnesota, reportedly confessed to contaminating chicken with plastic bags of dirt and sand she’d filled from the plant’s parking lot.

Slye was reportedly filmed by the company’s surveillance cameras, and there was dirt and sand from the parking lot on her sleeves.

Slye has been convicted of two counts of causing damage to property in the first degree, a felony, and she’s been sentenced to 90 days in prison. She will also be on probation for five years, and she also has to pay $200,000 to the company in restitution for causing the recall. The tainted products were reportedly shipped to foodservice and retail operations nationwide, and nearly 28 tons of poultry had to be recalled and destroyed.

Dirt possible source of botulism in California infant

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Botulism is so rare the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention note only approximately 145 cases are reported yearly – 65% of those are infant botulism.

Here in San Diego, the county’s latest stats show 3 cases from 2009-2013. While people are familiar with honey containing the bacteria for infant botulism, Bri Escobar was surprised to find her daughter may have contracted the bacteria when her father unknowingly brought dirt home from his construction job.

“Spores grow in the ground and when a baby under 6 months inhales or ingest it their intestines are like a good area for that botulism toxin to grow,” Escobar explained.

She’s not a doctor, but after a week at Rady Children’s Hospital, she’s had to learn a lot about what’s ailing her daughter.

She said her daughter is slowly starting to regain the movement she lost a week ago and getting her personality back.

Dirt on the menu? It’s ‘hyper-local’

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My friend Steve managed his four kids and mealtime with frozen veggies, and I sorta did the same.

mqdefaultBut in provactive food porn, for those who’s lives are hopelessly dull, Toronto’s Globe and Mail reports chef Justin Cournoyer is heading north of Toronto in his Subaru Forester (because only soilvares would drive a Subaru, or that it would matter) to forage in the wilderness. He’s on one of his biweekly pilgrimages to harvest wild bounty, such as chamomile, ginger, peas, woodruff or ground elder. These he will place into a cooler to take back to his small hyper-local Ossington Avenue restaurant, Actinolite. While he’s out, he’s also seeking an ingredient that the average forager might overlook: soil.

“You want soil that is near maples and pines,” he says. “If it’s too into the pines, it’s too acidic.”

He prefers not the silty topsoil that one could procure from a front lawn, but the stuff that is rife with pine needles, decaying organic matter and broken-down leaves. He wants the scents and sensations of an Ontario forest captured in a handful of dirt, and he wants to cook with that dirt.