Tag Archives: Food Service

Food service workers unite: Pink Floyd wins court battle with EMI over downloads

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The British rock band Pink Floyd, a favorite for North American food service workers, won its court battle with EMI on Thursday, with a ruling that prevents the record company from selling single downloads on the Internet from the group’s concept albums.

Is that good or bad for restaurant back kitchens across the nation? The tune, Time, holds up well on its own, but the band wants the listener to experience the entire Dark Side of the Moon experience, which was fairly groovy when it came out in the 1970s, but a little dated, slow and self-indulgent today.

And who says rock’n roll is about attitude. Pink Floyd’s body of work is a coveted commodity. The band members Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason all appeared on the 2009 Sunday Times Rich List with personal fortunes estimated at £85 million, £78 million and £50 million respectively.

Food service food safety failures made public in Sydney; public benefits

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The Sydney Morning Herald this morning – this being Sunday morning in Australia – has a huge feature on the effects of the New South Wales state Food Authority taking a more, uh, vigilant approach to restaurant inspections.

The newspaper concludes that 40 per cent of all restaurants, takeaways and other food businesses in NSW were caught breaching one or more of the critical food handling practices when first visited by an inspector.

That may not be an entirely fair representation. Lots of places have at least one critical violation, and in the U.S., how a critical violation is defined can differ from state-to-state, and even county-to-county. There needs to be some sort of control or comparative group to determine whether that number is high or not.

But it sure sounds gross.

Inspection rates are woefully inadequate in some local councils, and there is often a lack of follow-up.

Anna Cenfi, part-owner of the Belli Bar, got it right when she said inspections conducted in the past few months were more thorough than in previous years, but that she had received three letters warning that a food safety inspection was imminent.

"I think that warning people that they are coming to inspect is ridiculous. They should just spot check everyone, even if it’s just once a year. I’m not worried for myself but I know a lot of dodgy places out there."

Journalist Mathew Moore does clearly state that whatever the limitations, “making this information public we can now expect improvements in standards that transparency and public scrutiny of government information can bring. The Food Authority deserves praise for releasing this information and giving the public far more data than it can get in any other state. It’s an important addition to the name and shame list … With its website and release of the statewide data, NSW has gone further than any other state.

“Yet it still lags behind many cities in Britain and the US, where the results of every restaurant inspection are posted online. New York City even allows consumers to search restaurants according to their number of violation points.

“Governments there have learnt what the NSW Government is now only beginning to realise; there are major public health benefits in shining a public light into the kitchens of every food business that serves the public.”

Hepatitis A outbreaks in Australia

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A 22-year-old woman who helped prepare food at two catered events was diagnosed with hepatitis A in March, meaning that more than 200 people at one corporate event and about 100 at a second event, along with co-workers and roommates, had to be vaccinated.

South Australia Health refused to release any specific details, but did note there was an unrelated but "significant" increase in hepatitis A cases in SA and Victoria in a separate outbreak.

SA Health Communicable Disease Control Branch director Dr Ann Koehler said,

"We think it is probably a vegetable, but we just don’t know yet."
 

Domino’s food prep disaster

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Kristy and Michael used to work at Domino’s Pizza in North Carolina. Then they decided to upload their, uh, creative approach to food preparation to youtube.

The videos were later taken off of youtube, but GoodAsYou managed to snag all of them including one of Michael wiping his ass with a sponge and then using it to clean a pan.All the videos are there. Essential tools for future food service training.

Tim McIntyre, vp communications, Domino’s Pizza, LLC, wrote to GoodAsYou to say,

“Thank you for bringing these to our attention. I don’t have the words to say how repulsed I am by this – other than to say that these two individuals do not represent that 125,000 people in 60 countries who work hard every day to make good food and provide great customer service. I’ve turned this over to our security department. We will find them. There are far too many clues that will allow us to determine their location quite easily.”
 

Pink Floyd and Fargo Rock City: food service and music

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PhD student Ben Chapman went and worked in a restaurant as part of his food safety research. He saw lots of things, but his most memorable description of kitchen work was that he had to listen to a lot of Pink Floyd.

There was some Tom Petty, and The Clash, but a lot of Pink Floyd. So it was with a nod and a lighter raised in the air to food service workers everywhere upon hearing the nears that founding Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright passed today.

But Pink Floyd doesn’t get much airplay in the Midwest. For a full accounting of why the Midwest is home to terrible hair metal, check out Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City, which Chapman loaned me a couple of years ago. And today, a barfblog reader e-mailed me to say,

“What I find most amusing about these Listeria posts is the album cover from the (very horrible and untalented) metal band.”
 
A few e-mails later, and she says,

“There is at least one metal band for every disease, especially those involving vomit, blood, decay, puss, gangreen or amptutation.

“I just found ascaris, a death metal band in denver.  i think this should be an ongoing theme – each post should have an accompanying death metal promotion."

But the best was when she linked me to a Strongbad post – Amy’s been a fan for years – about cliché metal bands. The comments section of barfblog.com is developing nicely.