Tag Archives: Barf

Top-8 countries for barfing while on vacation

Posted on by
3

It’s a fact of the traveller’s life that you’re going to get sick while you’re on the road.

So writes Ben Abraham in the Sydney Morning Herald’s travel blog, which follows below.

Peru?
There’s some great food in Peru – ceviche is like God’s gift to tongues. But uncooked fish isn’t always the best thing for travellers, and there’s some other stuff there that can make you violently ill. And it’s not what you’d expect. I ate a guinea pig and was fine. I ate a hamburger and spent four days lying in a hotel room sweating like Renton’s cold turkey scene in Trainspotting.

Vietnam?
The first sign is the butcher on the side of the road with his wares laid out in bamboo baskets. Refrigeration’s not big here. Then there are all the weird and wonderful things that are just eaten as a matter of course. Washed down with home-brewed street beer.

Uganda?
It may not be typical, but the sickest I’ve ever been was in Uganda, and I assume it was something I ate, so that’s what I associate the place with. For the record, the toilet blocks of a Kampala campsite aren’t the best place in the world to spend your much-anticipated holiday.

Nepal
I’ve never actually been to Nepal, but I’m yet to meet anyone who hasn’t come back from there without a horror story. My friends Russ and Rox had an unfortunate case of dual food poisoning in Kathmandu, and found that nothing brings a couple closer together than having to stand outside the bathroom waiting for your partner to finish vomiting so you can go in and have your turn.

Italy?
Not food poisoning, as such. I just ate so much I felt sick. Every night.

Bangladesh
I love street food, and never had a bad experience in India, so when I visited Bangladesh, I was keen for some more of that action. That is, until the girl I was staying with put me off slightly. "See the open drains running next to them on the street," she said, pointing near the vendors’ carts. "Where do you think they get their cooking water from? Don’t. Eat. The street food." Plus, giardia is rife.

China?
You can travel relatively safely in China. You can order food you recognise, or just spend your time solely at that bastion of communist ideals, KFC. Or, you can take a chance, and give everything a shot. Most of it will be delicious. But I defy anyone to plow through an entire Sichuan meal without it doing some atomic damage to their insides.

Thailand?
There’s a problem with Thai food: it all tastes so good. Meaning, you want to try everything. Every bizarre morsel you find in street stalls and markets and restaurants looks like it has to be eaten. The end result will be a few hours riding the porcelain, but it’s usually worth it.

Harvard Faculty Club still closed after norovirus sickens over 300

Posted on by
1

The Harvard Faculty Club, home of a norovirus outbreak that sickened 308 people in late March and early April, remains closed and no one is sure when it will reopen.

Louise Rice, senior director of public health and school health nursing for the Cambridge Public Health Department, told The Cambridge Chronicle,

"They’ve done a very thorough cleaning at this point and they have done retraining of their staff.” Rice also said the city’s Inspectional Services Department recently toured the facility and gave the club a passing grade.

Food porn, not food safety, dominates public statement from PEI noro restaurant

Posted on by
1

In further evidence of how seemingly good people confuse food safety with food pornography, Francine Thorpe, the owner of a Prince Edward Island restaurant at the center of a norovirus outbreak that has now sickened up to 48 people decided to make a public statement:

“In our history we are proud to say that we have never been cited for any food-related infractions by provincial health officials. … We take pride in our food service, our people and more importantly we value our loyal, cherished customers. We maintain a modern, sanitary kitchen, employing some of the best experienced food preparation people in the business. We try to buy local products and serve only the very best of fresh ingredients. We very much regret what has transpired and are determined to find out exactly what happened.”

Local and fresh do not mean safe. Never been cited for food infractions doesn’t mean you haven’t made people barf, or that your employees haven’t shown up for work while sick. Tell the good citizens of PEI about your employee training and hygiene procedures rather than how local and fresh your ingredients are. It has to do with a lot of people barfing.

NCAA swimming and diving delaying because of barf

Posted on by
Reply

Basketball is interminably dull.

The first college game I ever went to on Jan. 30, 2008, Kansas State beat the University of Kansas – who went on to win the national crown – for the first time in 24 years.

All games should be like that. They’re not.

But I’ll watch tonight as K-State goes up against Xavier in a sweet-16 showdown, the first time K-State has been to that particular dance since 1988.

What would be a great storyline is if West Virginia met K-State for the final. Bob Huggins was rescued from career oblivion when they hired him as coach a few years ago. Huggins repaid K-State’s generosity by leaving after one year.

Locals are still upset.

But he left behind assistant coach Frank Martin, who’s turned K-State into a national competitor. The prodigy going up against the mentor. It would be like me and Chapman going on an all-nerd food safety Reach for the Top (trivia note: Chapman was actually on Reach for the Top or whatever the Ontario version was called when he was in high school).

In other NCAA news, the start of the Men’s Swimming and Diving Championships has been delayed 24 hours to Friday after 18 student-athletes and a coach were treated for a possible gastrointestinal illness since arriving in Columbus, Ohio.

K-State’s Bramlage Coliseum would make an excellent hockey arena.
 

Safe food is food that doesn’t make you barf; don’t like it, make your own definition

Posted on by
Reply

“Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.”

That’s from the truly terrible movie, The Godfather III (see below), but I prefer Sil’s impersonation on the truly terrific television series, The Soprano’s (right).

Safe food is food that doesn’t make you barf.

At least that’s my definition. Food safety has come to mean all things to all people, but to me, food safety is about minimizing the chemical, physical and especially microbial risks that can be found in food. The risks that make up to 30 per cent of all people in all countries barf every year (or at least that’s the number the World Health Organization says; when are those updated U.S. numbers coming out?)

Animal welfare, genetic engineering, local/organic/natural, trans fat and fat kids, these are all bandied about under the rubric of food safety, but have little or nothing to do with safety. These issues are valid on their own but are primarily about lifestyle choices and food porn. Americans love choice.

And to talk.

Reminds me of that scene from Monty Python’s, The Meaning of Life, when death visits the dinner party:

“Shut up. Shut up you Americans. You always talk, you Americans. You always talk and you talk and you say, ‘Let me tell you something,’ and ‘I just wanna say this.’ Well you’re dead now, so shut up.”

(Python food safety note: The dinner guests all died at the same time from presumably botulism in the salmon mousse. “Darling, you didn’t use canned salmon, did you?”)

Every time I focus on core food safety issues, someone tries to pull me back in to lifestyle debates. Sure I dabbled in genetic engineering and food production systems – doesn’t everyone in college – but I got enough to do focusing on the things that make people barf.

For the past week, the Intertubes have been pneumonically spewing out messages about the risks of antimicrobials in animal husbandry since a CBS News so-called special report aired on the issue.

Antimicrobial resistance is one of those persistent ag issues where — like me crossing the border into the U.S. – every journalist or customs officer thinks she’s discovered something no one else has yet.

They’re always wrong.

Antimicrobial resistance has been on the public agenda since the Swann report of 1969. It’s a risk, it needs to be managed, just like any other risk, to maximize benefits and minimize risk.

But leave it to Whole Foods to go over-the-top, in a blog post entitled, Our meat: No antibiotics, EVER!

(The capitalization and exclamation marks are from the Whole Foods original blog post, the authors and editors who apparently think their readers have disorders and need to be bashed with punctuation and capitalization)

Theo Weening, the national meat buyer for Whole Foods Market, says he “can assure our customers that our standard is: No antibiotics, EVER! We work very hard to make sure that the people who produce our meat have raised their animals without the use of antibiotics, growth hormones* or animal byproducts in the feed.”

Meat-buyer Weening fails to distinguish between the routine use of antibiotics as growth promotants and the use of antibiotics to treat animals that are sick. Should sick animals be deprived antibiotics? Wouldn’t that go against animal welfare standards?

And note the asterick beside the no growth hormone BS. At the end of the blog post, there is an asterick with the comment, “*Federal regulations prohibit the use of growth hormones in raising pigs, veal calves, bison and poultry.”

Tyson already tried this line of labeling. Didn’t work. Whole Foods is hopeless.

What I really want to know is if the Whole Foods or any other steak has been needle tenderized or not so I can adjust my cooking temperature (as verified by a tip-sensitive digital thermometer). Those are the kinds of things that make people barf.
 

BARF sucks, barfblog doesn’t; raw pet food recalled

Posted on by
Reply

barfblog is a reasonably OK name for a blog. At the time we didn’t know we’d be going up in Google searches against BARF – the ridiculously inaccurately named biologically appropriate raw food diet for pets.

Salmonella doesn’t discriminate. The Oregonian reports that Nature’s Variety, headquartered in Lincoln, Neb., is pulling its chicken formula raw frozen diet for both dogs and cats. The chicken was sold in retail stores nationwide and online.

The company said it received a customer complaint about a particular batch after its pet developed digestive problems. The call prompted a salmonella test, which turned up positive in another batch of the food.

Maybe the company should have more routine testing of its products rather than waiting for pets to start barfing. And make those results public.
 

5 possibly sick with campylobacter from raw milk in New York

Posted on by
Reply

The New York State Department of Health and the State Department of Agriculture and Markets today warned consumers in Saratoga County and surrounding areas not to consume "unpasteurized" raw milk produced at Willow Marsh Farm located at 343 Hop City Road in Ballston Spa due to possible Campylobacter contamination.

The state Health Department received 5 reports of Campylobacter enteritis, from people who have also consumed raw unpasteurized milk purchased from Willow Marsh Farm.

The farm has voluntarily suspended milk sales since it was first notified of the reported illnesses on January 22.

Preliminary tests concluded today at the New York State Food Laboratory found that raw unpasteurized milk produced at Willow Marsh Farm and collected on January 25 may be contaminated with Campylobacter. Final test results will be available in the coming week. If the raw milk sample is confirmed positive for Campylobacter, the producer will be prohibited from selling raw milk until subsequent sampling indicates that the product is free of pathogens.

Fear and loathing in Las Vegas: mint (julep) and food safety family values version

Posted on by
Reply

As the plane landed in Las Vegas, I barfed.

I’d been sent here to speak about food safety issues at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Mint Industry Research Council and, since their product is processed during harvest and the oil extracted by heat and then used primarily in toothpaste and chewing gum, I had little to offer.

Whether it was the turbulence throughout the flight into the record western U.S. rainfall – and we were at the back of the plane so we could get an extra seat for daughter Sorenne – or something else that upset my delicate constitution, there really is nothing quite like barfing into one of those paper bags provided in every seat jacket while a plane lands. In a rainstorm. In Las Vegas.

(The volume those bags can hold is amazing.)

Next it was off to one of those hotel-casinos where the meeting was to be held, just as news broke that a norovirus outbreak had sickened hundreds of guests and staff at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and Hotel in North Carolina.

Workers at Harrah’s are cleaning slot machines every two hours with a solution of water and bleach in an effort to control the outbreak. Door knobs, escalator handrails and restrooms are being sanitized hourly.

The night was spent zoning-bordering-on-hallucinating. I didn’t sleep. A bottle of Gatorade later, I was ready, and spoke during lunch about the need for growers of anything to explain and articulate their practices in a consistent and compelling manner, or face the wrath of a public wary of unsubstantiated food safety claims.

I still really like hanging out with food — including mint — growers. Mint Industry Research Council executive director dude, Rocky Lundy (above, with me, left), explained to me there were about 550 growers in 7 states with total acreage close to 120,000. That’s a lot of mint. But the numbers have declined somewhat from foreign competition. It’s a familiar tale.

Feeling better the next day, we decided to take in Jimmy Buffet’s Magaritaville restaurant. Sure it’s touristy stuff, but who doesn’t like Jimmy? (Chapman). And while the establishment did feature the usual, “Employees must wash hands before returning to work” sign (above, right), at least it was under the apt words from Jimmy’s underappreciated 1978 song, Manana:

Women and water are in short supply

(The next line is, “Not enough dope for us all to get high.” The song also contains bits about Steve Martin asking if anyone wants to get small, and Jimmy hoping that Anita Bryant never ever does one of his songs. So many cultural touchstones for 1978 in one song. Oh, and usually when I take pictures in bathrooms I do it when no one else is there because people might think it was creepy, but traffic flow – I said flow – was constant so took the pic anyone with the dude at the urinal and another, properly, washing his hands.)

Las Vegas also features a prominent letter-grade restaurant inspection disclosure system as shown in this picture from a Vegas-strip Denny’s. Promote that A (above, left).

Today it’s family, football and food in Vegas before a hopefully less eventful return to Manhattan.

And this is Sorenne watching the Minnesota-New Orleans game this afternoon, with a bunch of Minnesotans in Las Vegas.

If cruising on a ship you’re now less likely to barf; norovirus outbreaks down

Posted on by
Reply

USA Today today says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta recorded just 13 outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness on cruise ships in 2009, down from 15 in 2008, 21 in 2007 and 34 in 2006.

The decline, moreover, came even as the number of people cruising continued to rise. The Cruise Lines International Association says the industry carried 13.2 million passengers in 2008, the last year for which data is available, up from 12.6 million in 2007 and 12.0 million in 2006.

Cruise ships arriving in U.S. ports must report all cases of gastrointestinal illness treated by on-board medical staff to the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program division, and a separate notification is required when the number of cases exceeds 2% of passengers and crew. When the number of cases exceeds 3% of passengers and crew the CDC issues a public report.