A solid breakdown here
They are meant to assure shoppers that animals have been treated humanely, but they can confuse or even mislead.
Source: What to Make of Those Animal-Welfare Labels on Meat and Eggs – The New York Times
More and more people are getting sick.
Source: Cucumber-Related Salmonella Outbreak Grows to 30 States – Eater
The Food and Drug Administration is banning imports of some fresh cilantro from Puebla, Mexico, after a government investigation found human feces and toilet paper in growing fields there.
The FDA announced the partial ban Monday after cilantro imported from the state of Puebla was linked to 2013 and 2014 outbreaks of stomach illnesses in the United States. The FDA said health authorities in Texas and Wisconsin also suspect cilantro from the region is responsible for more illnesses this year.
Following up on the outbreaks, U.S. and Mexican health authorities investigated 11 farms and packing houses in Puebla over the last three years. The FDA said it discovered “objectionable conditions” at eight of those firms, including five that were linked to the U.S. outbreaks. The FDA said the officials discovered the feces and toilet paper in fields and found that some of the farms had no running water or toilet facilities.
via FDA Bans Some Mexican Cilantro After Human Feces Found In Fields.
Food companies would not have to disclose whether their products include genetically modified ingredients under legislation passed by the House Thursday.
The House bill is backed by the food industry, which has fought mandatory labeling efforts in several states around the country. The legislation, which passed 275-150, would prevent states from requiring package labels to indicate the presence of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
via Government Says Food Companies Don’t Have To Disclose GMOs.
E. coli O157:H7 did not burst onto the scene in the early 1990s, as many in the big food business like to think. It slowly crept into our food supply, spreading in the enormous feedlots that began to dot the U.S. landscape during the last century. The bacteria is now endemic and can be found in cows, sheep, and wild animals such as boar, elk, and deer. As few as fifty E. coli O157:H7 bacteria are enough to cause human illness—and as many as 100,000 can fit on the head of a pin.
Once this strain of E. coli makes it into our small intestine, it can damage the intestinal wall, causing severe cramping and bloody diarrhea. In some instances, the toxin that the bacteria releases gets into the bloodstream, damaging red blood cells and causing severe complications like kidney failure, stroke, brain damage, and death.
BOARD THE BOB BARKER, in the South Atlantic — As the Thunder, a trawler considered the world’s most notorious fish poacher, began sliding under the sea a couple of hundred miles south of Nigeria, three men scrambled aboard to gather evidence of its crimes.
In bumpy footage from their helmet cameras, they can be seen grabbing everything they can over the next 37 minutes — the captain’s logbooks, a laptop computer, charts and a slippery 200-pound fish. The video shows the fishing hold about a quarter full with catch and the Thunder’s engine room almost submerged in murky water. “There is no way to stop it sinking,” the men radioed back to the Bob Barker, which was waiting nearby. Soon after they climbed off, the Thunder vanished below.
It was an unexpected end to an extraordinary chase. For 110 days and more than 10,000 nautical miles across two seas and three oceans, the Bob Barker and a companion ship, both operated by the environmental organization Sea Shepherd, had trailed the trawler, with the three captains close enough to watch one another’s cigarette breaks and on-deck workout routines. In an epic game of cat-and-mouse, the ships maneuvered through an obstacle course of giant ice floes, endured a cyclone-like storm, faced clashes between opposing crews and nearly collided in what became the longest pursuit of an illegal fishing vessel in history.
via A Renegade Trawler, Hunted for 10,000 Miles by Vigilantes – The New York Times.
Those planning on grabbing some smoked meats in the barbecue-crazed town of Lexington, N.C., this week may want to steer clear of Tarheel Q. According to the Winston-Salem Journal, the barbecue joint is linked with a Salmonella outbreak that has affected 216 people to date, including a 20-year-old woman who is 27 weeks pregnant. That number includes people from 15 North Carolina counties and five different states.
The connection was made after the North Carolina Department of Health tested samples from the restaurant’s barbecue and a patient who had ingested its food, concluding both tested positive for Salmonella. Most of those who began experiencing symptoms dined at the restaurant between June 16 and June 21.
Not only did the restaurant have to close as a result, but it’s now facing seven separate lawsuits from customers who allege they became ill after eating there. Ron Simon, of Texas-based law firm Ron Simon & Associates, has filed six lawsuits on behalf of its clients and states, “The injuries range from pretty serious to serious enough to be hospitalized for several days.” Simon also confirmed plans to file more lawsuits in the near future.
Although the restaurant originally had plans to reopen on Sunday, it remained closed through Monday. While several diners were hospitalized, there have been no deaths in connection to the outbreak. The trouble comes a few weeks after a popular Charlotte restaurant was linked to several sick diners.
via N.C. Barbecue Restaurant Responsible for 216 Cases of Salmonella – Eater.
Even for people who don’t enjoy eating mushrooms, there is still intrigue in learning how they grow. There’s something mystical and magical—I mean I do get a lot of people asking about “magic” mushrooms but I always comment that I think all mushrooms are magical.
I really like being able to watch a culture start from a little piece of tissue. From one tiny piece you’re able to grow thousands and thousands of pounds of food. We start our cultures in petri dishes. To create that culture you can take a piece of a mushroom—you can take any mushroom out of a grocery store and put that into a petri dish—and it will grow an exact replica of the original mushroom.
Once I establish the culture on the petri dish, I put it into a test tube. The test tube is my master culture that I put into a refrigerator, and I can keep that for five to ten years. You want to keep track of each of your generations and how far you’ve separated it from the initial spawn; mushrooms, unlike plants, break down and cause genetic mutations really quickly if you don’t keep track. All of our bags are labeled.
We grow our mushrooms first in grain. I use barley or millet. We soak the grain in water then sterilize it in a pressure cooker for about four hours. After that it we cool it down and put it in front of hyperfilters that blow sterile air out at us so we can open up all the bags of grain without fear of things (i.e. competing fungi or bugs) flying into them. Then we take the mycelium—the fungal network of the mushroom from the petri dish—and add them to the sterile grain. That goes out on the shelves to grow. How long depends on the species; oysters usually take about two weeks on grain. Then from there, we break the mycelium back up into grain and put it into our next substrate, which is a sawdust mixture. That’s what will eventually produce mushrooms.
We set up fifty-pound barrels with stacks of forty sawdust bags each, and then steam-pasteurize them. We’re lucky to live in an area where there’s lots of wood substrate, so it’s easy to get cheap sawdust. We take the sawdust and mix it together with barley and oat flour, and that gives it the carbohydrates and sugars to make the mycelium happy. If we just put it in sawdust, it wouldn’t work—maybe it would produce one or two mushrooms. We go through three or four yards of sawdust every other week, and to see that sawdust turned into food for people, that’s really rewarding for us.
We have a regular greenhouse that we’ve tarped so we can control the sunlight and the heat. A lot of people think mushrooms need to grow in complete darkness, but that really isn’t true: they like a little bit of light. We just open up the bags in here and give them high humidity. They like 80 to 90 percent humidity. As long as they don’t get too hot, usually we can grow year-round. When the mushrooms are grown, we’ll do one long slice down the middle of the bag—then after a while, when the bag ages to about a month or so, we’ll do a second slice, just to try to get as much out of it as we can.
Every mushroom is different. Oysters usually take about four weeks from start to finish; shiitakes are about forty-five to sixty days. This is why the prices are different with mushrooms, generally; some take longer than others to grow. Maitake takes up to seventy days to get mushrooms, so that’s why they’re $18 a pound in the grocery store.
Ria Kaelin, Christian’s wife and partner in the business offers a concluding thought.
We so traditionally think of growing food as you put a seed in the dirt and nurture it and it will give you something. Whereas with this, you go, How does that even work? Almost like we’re not connected to that microbiological world. We are! But we don’t sometimes stop to see it.
Check out how the world famous Peter Luger Steakhouse in Brooklyn, chooses only the best steaks for its operation.
How New York’s Peter Luger Chooses Its Steak – Eater.
Jessika Tantisook of Starvation Alley Farms knows the image everyone has of cranberry farming. “Yes,” she laughs, when I ask about the Ocean Spray ads featuring guys in waders submerged to their chests, surrounded by floating berries. “It’s just like that.” For a few weeks each year, anyway.
In 2010, Tantisook and her partner, Jared Oakes, moved to Washington to take over ten acres of cranberry bogs from Oakes’s parents. They decided to turn it into the state’s first organic cranberry farm—despite all expert advice to the contrary.
Five years in, the farm is now certified organic. They produce their own raw, unsweetened cranberry juice, which has found devoted customers among health-seekers, craft-cocktail connoisseurs, and farmers’ market shoppers alike. And the pair is working with neighboring farms to help them make the same transition to organic. Tantisook estimates there are fewer than twelve organic cranberry farms in the country, totaling three hundred acres—compared with about forty thousand acres of cranberries grown nationally.
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