drive after rodent meat found its way into chicken curry served to students.
A spokesman told the BBC,
"One student detected the head of the rat while eating his lunch. That 
student instantly suffered a stomach upset."
Soon after the incident hundreds of angry students staged a demonstration demanding action against the chef.
The chef has now been suspended and handed over to police who have been called in to investigate the incident.
Running a restaurant is hard enough without dealing with rats and wackos.
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The Post-Crescent reports that a woman who attempted to extort money from an upscale restaurant by putting a rat in her lunch entered no-contest pleas Tuesday to two criminal charges.
Judge Dee Dyer found Debbie R. Miller, 43, guilty after she entered the no-contest pleas to a felony extortion charge and a misdemeanor for obstructing police. She will be sentenced March 8 in Outagamie County Court.
Miller planted a rat in her lunch at The Seasons on April 17, 2008, and then demanded $500,000 from the owners. She threatened to alert the media if the money wasn’t paid.
Bob Doller, who owns The Seasons in Grand Chute with his wife, Jessica, said,
“This has been a long, drawn out battle and it has affected my business. We would hope that if anyone had any doubts that it was a true claim, they would know now that it was extortion. In April, it will be two years since this happened. If you compare 2007 to 2008 (the year of the incident), the loss was tens of thousands of dollars.”
The Dollers kept the rat after the extortion attempt. Insurance investigators sent it for testing and determined that it not only wasn’t a wild rat, but rather a domestic, white rat that had been cooked in a microwave. The restaurant doesn’t use microwaves.
The aptly named Campaign for Responsible Rodenticide Use (CRRU) reports that a survey of British farmers and countryside managers found 61% of respondents noticed a rising rat population already and 74% believed that climate change would exacerbate the problem.
The survey is corroborated by the National Pest Technicians Association (NPTA), which found a 15% year-on-year increase in treatments in local authorities for rat infestations.
CRRU chairman, Dr Alan Buckle, said the UK rural rat population consumes an estimated 200t of food a day that would otherwise be destined for humans. One in every two farm fires, he adds, is believed to be started by rat damage causing electricity cables to short.
Even in Kansas, rats have twice sought shelter in our parked car’s engine and gnawed through the ignition wires.
And if those rats are frolicking and fornicating in the country, their numbers will only get worse in the city.
According to the CRRU:
• One rat produces about 40 faecal pellets and 15ml of urine each day, or 14,600 and five litres respectively per year.
• Salmonella, leptospira, toxoplasma, listeria, campylobacter and cryptosporidium are some of the highly pathogenic organisms carried by rats.
A top French restaurant in Belfast has apologized after a rodent was spotted running amok on the premises.
A complaint was lodged with Belfast City Council’s public health department yesterday after a group 
of diners claimed they spotted a rat in the restaurant on Monday night.
Timothy Kirkpatrick said,
“At one stage the rat sat on top of a woman’s handbag for a good 10 to 20 seconds. I couldn’t believe it, I don’t think anyone could.”
Mr Kirkpatrick said he was very disappointed in the way the restaurant handled the situation.
“The staff tried to catch it and continued to serve food,” he added. “It was quite unbelievable, to be honest.
“They didn’t apologize or offer to waive the cheque or anything. At the time I didn’t mind, but the more I think about it now it is just ridiculous.”
Cora Pizza, (the One Stop Pizza Shop), apparently a favorite of University of Toronto students, was shut down Dec. 21/09 by Toronto Public Health due to a rodent infestation and to prevent gross 
unsanitary conditions.
Among the findings were a bucket that was used for pizza sauce showing obvious "signs of contamination with dirt and mold” and "dead rats and rat droppings in the kitchen."
blogTO reported that previous inspections in March and June of this year found a long list of infractions, including failure to:
* ensure food is not contaminated/adulterated;
* use proper procedure(s) to ensure food safety;
* provide hand washing supplies; and,
* provide adequate pest control.
The Toronto Star reported that this week’s discovery of rodents at a Spadina Ave. pizza shop and a bakery outlet at a subway station has put the spotlight on Toronto’s restaurant inspection program.
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The pass-fail card system, in which a red card closes the eatery until problems are corrected, was set back by last summer’s 39-day civic workers’ strike and the fight against the H1N1 flu pandemic.
Inspectors have since been working hard to catch up.
Nearly every week in Toronto, an establishment is closed down temporarily for food safety infractions. There were 41 closures this year and 46 in 2008.
Those statistics indicate the city, which has some 16,000 restaurants, food stores and bakeries, is staying on top of the serious cases, said associate medical officer of health Dr. Howard Shapiro, who notes they inspect "probably a few hundred places a day."
KFC may be dabbling with marketing food safety (see the lid from a bucket of chicken), but marketing has to be backed up with data. And having a lousy restaurant inspection report will turn anyone’s stomach, no matter how many checkmarks are on things.
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Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is being prosecuted after environmental health inspectors reported finding cockroaches, mice and flies at one of its busiest UK restaurants.
Officials from Westminster Council said that a cockroach scurried across a counter when they visited the fast food outlet in Leicester Square, central London.
They claimed a mouse was seen running across the floor and flies buzzed around their heads at the Coventry Street premises, Press Association reports.
In total, KFC faced 13 charges brought under food hygiene regulations following an inspection on August 15 last year. It has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
eatmedaily.com reports that UCLA French professor Laure Murat will present, “Queering Ratatouille: A Rat Reclaiming French Cuisine” this afternoon. Having just returned from the NeMLA (which Doug lovingly calls NAMBLA) annual meeting in Boston, my first thought was ratatouille is the perfect dish to represent queering. Then I realized this is a talk about a gay rat in a cartoon.
Ratatouille is a relatively safe dish from a food safety perspective. It’s a combination of vegetables like eggplant, zucchini, green bell peppers, tomatoes, garlic, onions and the like, simmered or roasted together until the flavors meld into a gorgeous Mediterranean flavor. Any unsavory microorganisms should be amply cooked out by the time it is ready to serve.
Green bean casserole is one of my favorite dishes. Lots of people serve it as a side dish, but it always ends up being the main course for me. It’s a typical staple at our family Thanksgiving dinners, so much so that I decided to bring my own GB casserole to Doug’s Canadian Thanksgiving. I’ve never had any food safety problems (that I know of) with my casseroles, but unfortunately a woman in Utah had quite a nasty surprise when she went to make her GB casserole. A dead rat head in the green beans ruined a Super Bowl green bean casserole in Texas. Even more disturbingly, the company that produced the green beans is a repeat offender. A can of Allen’s Italian Green Beans was found to contain a rat head back in June, along with another report in 2007 from Utah.
But don’t worry about the rat head. It’s “commercially sterile.” Though high temperatures for cooking (265 degrees) ensure that the product is free from bacteria, the appearance of rat heads in a vegetable product is unsettling for most consumers. The fact that there have been three reports of rat heads in this particular brand of green beans should cause a big blip to appear in anyone’s food safety radar.
Unless Allen’s Canned Vegetables wants to start listing “dead rat” on it’s ingredient list, a thorough cleaning and inspection of the packing facility is in order.
A former employee of the Georgia peanut plant at the center of a criminal investigation in a nationwide salmonella outbreak told CBS News he saw a rat dry-roasting in a peanut area.
Jonathan Prather, one of 50 people who lost their jobs last month when the Peanut Corporation of America shut down its plant in Blakely, told Early Show national correspondent Jeff Glor the facility is dirty.
"Roaches get up there in the dry roast. Some of them blend in with the peanuts. You’d never know they’re there.” … (There were) "plenty of holes in the roof, throughout the roof. And when it rained, water just came through the whole plant."
Prather says it saddens him that many people have been impacted by the salmonella, adding he’s speaking out now because his mother always raised him to tell the truth.
Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler told The Early Show Tuesday,
"… The problem is we don’t have a system of preventive controls. We’re always reacting in this country. It’s always chasing the horse after it’s out of the barn. … We have the safest food system in the world, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be safer. And each of us has responsibilities. Making sure that our food is well-cooked, good hygiene, those things are still important. … (Our food is) certainly safe, but our system is broken. And it needs to be improved, and it needs to be improved quickly."
Not sure what the basis is for the good doctor’s safest-food-in-the-world bit. Are rats in the roaster part of the equation?
The rats must have seen the Stephen Colbert bear-visiting-Subway bit cause they showed up for a video performance in a Toronto Chinatown restaurant last night.
A passerby originally posted a photo of the rat-in-the-restaurant to blogto.com. Video footage soon followed.
Inspectors visited Happy Seven, a Chinese restaurant on Spadina Ave. known for late-night munchies, yesterday after seeing the video, but did not find any signs of vermin.
The restaurant passed an inspection on Oct. 2, and public records show it was inspected an average three times per year.
In February, someone photographed a rat in the window of the Dumpling House, about a block south of Happy Seven. The restaurant was forced to close while it disinfected the premises and called a pest control company. Between clean-up expenses and the temporary closure, the restaurant lost about $10,000, a manager said at the time. It has since re-opened.