This Could Put Gallagher Out of Business

It was this kind of story that made reading newspapers such fun.


Not for the big headlines, or the Op-Ed, and Sports, pages, but the little gems you would find. 


Filler articles on page A18, and such, with a screaming, or intriguing, headline like "Man's Head Found In Toaster".


So, when I see, on-line, a headline with the words "Exploding Watermelons" that just,.automatically, gets clicked on.


Exploding watermelons put spotlight on Chinese farming practices

Fields of watermelons exploded when he and other agricultural workers in eastern China mistakenly applied forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator. The incident has become a focus of a Chinese media drive to expose the lax farming practices, shortcuts and excessive use of fertiliser behind a rash of food safety scandals.


It follows discoveries of the heavy metal cadmium in rice, toxic melamine in milk, arsenic in soy sauce, bleach in mushrooms, and the detergent borax in pork, added to make it resemble beef.


[snip]


The report said the farmers sprayed the fruit too late in the season and during wet conditions, which caused the melons to explode like "landmines". After losing three hectares (eight acres), Liu said he was unable to sleep because he could not shake the image of the fruit bursting. "On 7 May, I came out and counted 80 [burst watermelons] but by the afternoon it was 100," he said. "Two days later I didn't bother to count any more." About 20 farmers and 45 hectares around Danyang were affected. The fruit could not be sold and was instead fed to fish and pigs.


Farmers claim forchlorfenuron can bring the harvest forward by two weeks and increase the size and price of the fruit by more than 20%. Agricultural experts say forchlorfenuron has been widely used in China since the 1980s. Some said it was unsuitable for this fruit, but there was probably little health risk.

Yikes!


This could put Gallagher out of business.


I mean, who would pay to see him explode, instead of using his trusty Sledge-O-Matic, watermelons with chemicals?


But wait, there's more!


It seems to be getting to be a nightmare for Chinese consumers;

In the past week, the People's Daily website has run stories of human birth control chemicals being used on cucumber plants in Xian, China Daily has reported Sichuan peppers releasing red dye in water, and the Sina news portal revealed that barite powder had been injected into chickens in Guizhou to increase their weight.


More alarming still was a study by researchers at Nanjing Agricultural University that estimated a tenth of China's rice may be tainted with the cadmium, a heavy metal that can affect the nervous system. This caused a stir when it was published earlier this year in the pioneering Caixin magazine.


Many wary consumers choose to buy foreign products, which are seen as safer. But this is also vulnerable to mislabelling. The Fruit Industry Association of Guangdong province told reporters this week that "most 'imported' fruit are grown in China".

WOW!


Imagine that, a company mislabeling their food product ... 







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How 'Bout Some More Bacon, Mr. Taggart?


Haven't They Seen The Movie?


Strap On Your Tinfoil Chefs' Hats

How 'Bout Some More Bacon, Mr. Taggart?

We had to appropriate, and tweak, that classic line from 'Blazing Saddles' for the title on this one.



Bacon or Bagels? Higher Fat at Breakfast May Be Healthier Than You Think

The age-old maxim "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper" may in fact be the best advice to follow to prevent metabolic syndrome, according to a new University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) study.

The study, published online March 30 in the International Journal of Obesity, examined the influence exerted by the type of foods and specific timing of intake on the development of metabolic syndrome characteristics in mice. The UAB research revealed that mice fed a meal higher in fat after waking had normal metabolic profiles. In contrast, mice that ate a more carbohydrate-rich diet in the morning and consumed a high-fat meal at the end of the day saw increased weight gain, adiposity, glucose intolerance and other markers of the metabolic

[snip]

"The first meal you have appears to program your metabolism for the rest of the day," said study senior author Martin Young, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine in the UAB Division of Cardiovascular Disease. "This study suggests that if you ate a carbohydrate-rich breakfast it would promote carbohydrate utilization throughout the rest of the day, whereas, if you have a fat-rich breakfast, you have metabolic plasticity to transfer your energy utilization between carbohydrate and fat."

Actually, perhaps a better movie to tag with this, would be Woody Allen's 'Sleeper'.

Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.

Maybe you should think about starting the day with one of these sandwiches, and go with extra bacon.




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H/T to Charles Blow

Send Ronald McDonald To The Cornfield!

Where's Timmy, from that classic Twilight Zone episode, when you really need him?

To me, it has always seemed that Ronald McDonald was like the obsequious, caddy, bad-dressing friend/uncle/co-worker, take your pick, that doesn't get it that he is not cool and hip.

Even that they have regulated him, primarily, to their charity work, he still pops up and it still provokes a gastrointestinal groan.



So, we have someone out on the front lines, looking to address the situation;

Group Aims to Send Ronald McDonald to Retirement Home ...Compares McD's Clown to the Late Joe Camel

One of the groups that led the ultimately successful campaign to banish Joe Camel from advertising now has a new target: Ronald McDonald.

"It's time that Ronald McDonald joined Joe Camel in retirement," argues Corporate Accountability International on its "Retire Ronald" website. "These tired mascots should be spending their golden years relaxing and sharing tales of their bygone days spent targeting children with deadly products."

(Here's CAI's website)

It's past the level that Ronald McDonald does a disservice to clowns, real, funny, entertaining clowns.

And, it has long been specious for McDonald's to target the youngest of our population with the use of a manufactured, second-rate, corporate clown.

A commentor, on Ad Age's site has it;

The clown is over anyway. He has no appeal to children and despite sad attempts to yank him into the 21st century (slimmed down, riding a skateboard and using 'hip,' txt-speak) he is not relevant or fun. I mean, have you EVER known a kid who was into Ronald? CAI's campaign could be great for McDonald's. They start a dialog, act all concerned, then phase out this outdated brand figure. Or better yet, retire him to some bronze plaque outside the Ronald McDonald House Charity.

If they don't retire him, at least they can change their signs to read "Over 1-Billion Duped".

I Won't Gladly Pay You Tuesday, For A Tainted Hamburger Today

It's 11PM, do you know where your hamburger has been?

I tell ya, it's stories like this one, today, that can easily have you thinking the movie, 'Idiocracy' was a documentary, not a feature film.

Yves Smith, over on his Naked Capitalism, has a whopper (pun intended);

Tainted Burgers Show That Corporate Profits Trump Public Safety (Cargill and McDonalds Edition)

The object lesson is America’s addiction to hamburgers versus E coli. E coli gets into the food chain when feces get into the meat. Period. It’s a very straightforward contamination mechanism. And in this case, the party fighting for the right to eat contaminated food is Cargill, and one of its major suppliers in its burger business, a company called Beef Products.

It is a detailed, and tremendously fascinating, tale, on just how contaminated meat sold to the public is, how the enormocorps, in this case Cargill, are totally cool with that, as they, sanctimoniously, cite bullshit boilerplate tributes to "following regulations", and such.

And, in using information from NYT articles, Smith gets to the diss, who else, the NYT, for not connecting the dots in their own reporting.

I am hesitant to quote more from the post, as you need to read it, jaw-dropping paragraph, after jaw-dropping paragraph.

How does this happen?

Check out the post we did last year, on Food Inc., and the corruption deeply rooted in our food industry, and ties to Congress.

But go read "Tainted Burgers Show That Corporate Profits Trump Public Safety (Cargill and McDonalds Edition)", and, if you do eat hamburgers, start checking out the source they traveled before slapping them on the grill.


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Retro Garlic ... “There’s a food Ponzi scheme going on’’

Food, Inc. has opened in movie theaters this weekend, or, more to the point, in wider release.



In today's Boston Globe, Devra First interviews director/producer Robert Kenner;

Filmmaker offers 'Food' for thought

Q. Yet it seems so perfectly timed, with all the food-safety scares we’ve seen recently, the growing interest in locally produced foods, books such as Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma’’ . . .

A. I feel like we’re part of an exploding movement. There are so many things coming to a head. On the one hand, there’s the financial crisis. People are realizing there was a credit Ponzi scheme, and we’re all paying the price. The government didn’t regulate it. The parallels with the food world are pretty identical. There’s a food Ponzi scheme going on. The system is totally unsustainable. It’s based on gasoline, based on pollution. Twenty to 25 percent of our carbon footprint is from growing and transporting food.

[snip]

Q. The movie seems as much about corporate power as it is about what we eat.

A. It’s about our rights, our First Amendment rights. We’re not being given information, and we’re being denied certain rights because of the “veggie libel laws’’ that make it dangerous to disparage a food. People used to be scared of governments having so much power. Now we’re realizing it’s the corporations that have it.

Q. And yet corporations aren’t particularly well represented in the film, often declining comment. It seems they missed their chance to control their message, leaving the floor to people like Barbara Kowalcyk and Moe Parr.

A. I could have done a film on nuclear terrorism and had greater access than I had here. I wanted to talk to all producers, organic and industrial. I found the industrial producers ultimately didn’t want me to look in their kitchens. They didn’t want to go on camera. They don’t want us thinking about our food. There’s this myth that our food still comes from farms. They don’t want you to know what’s in it or how it’s produced.

The Retro Part;

Strap On Your Tinfoil Chefs' Hats

Food, Inc




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Top Ten Cloves: Ways Spinach Industry Plans To Overcome E. Coli Setback

Strap On Your Tinfoil Chefs' Hats

And, with good cause.

I had been looking at various articles, and posts, on the burgeoning Swine Flu pandemic (breaking this evening: 1. U.S. Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu, and, 2. It may be enormo-corp Smithfield Foods at the epicenter of it), and came across DownWithTyranny (you should book mark this blog - typically, excellent writing, research and perspective).

Behind The Food, Inc Movie-- Massive Bribes To Congress From AgriBusiness

Last night I went to see the Anvil movie. It was great. But a trailer for Food, Inc stuck in my consciousness as much as the story about these Jewish Canadian heavy metal rockers. And I found that trailer... for you ...

It's not just about healthy and nutritious food either. With the whole country alarmed about an unending series of food-borne illnesses and, courtesy of the "Free Market" Bush gang and their Republican accomplices in Congress, a hollowed-out FDA, more frequent sudden death from taking a bite-- whether from China, Mexico... or Georgia-- food industry lobbyists are pressuring the members of Congress they've financed to prohibit even debate on the food industry! Tools of AgriBusiness run the regulatory industries meant to protect consumers but that, under the GOP and the equally corrupt Blue Dogs, now protect only company profits.

And this video was posted;

Food, Inc



DWT details the huge money behind AgriBusiness Lobby, and also details the pols getting bagloads of it.

Then, I checked out the Food Inc website.

How much do we really know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families?

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that's been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of e coli--the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farm's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising -- and often shocking truths -- about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

It's not Grandma's kitchen anymore.

It will be worth your time to check out the DownWithTyranny post, and Food Inc website.


Bonus Food Riffs

M'm! M'm! Good!

Forget About Tuesday, Cash On The Barrelhead Today, Wimpy!

Top Ten Cloves: Ways To Tell Tomatoes Are Safe Again

Spam-A-Lot ...The Eating Kind!

Top Ten Cloves: Ways Spinach Industry Plans To Overcome E. Coli Setback