Fresh From The Grocery: More Vomitous Products
(Be Afraid • Factory Food)
Hamburger, peanuts, pistachios, spinach, tomatoes, hot peppers, cookie dough – what grocery store fare has turned out to be contaminated this time?
Just about everything, as it turns out. For some reason, however, this isn’t considered news by most local outlets so, as I am wont to do, it is presented here as a public service.
Yesterday afternoon, the Food and Drug Administration announced it has discovered Salmonella in an artificial food additive called HVP (hydrolyzed vegetable protein). “Food” manufacturing companies use it to achieve that certain verve in pre-processed dips, salad dressings, soups, “snacks,” “pre-packaged meals,” gravies, chilis, stews and hot dogs.
As of about 5 a.m. today, 57 products that contained HVP made by Basic Food Flavors of Las Vegas had been recalled. Basic Food customers recalling products included the likes of T. Marzetti, Johnny’s Fine Foods, Oak Lake Farms, Follow Your Heart, Trader Joe’s and Castella – so far. Given the widespread use of this additive, you can bet big money this recall will expand by at least a couple hundred products and likely far more.
It wasn’t the FDA or state health inspectors who discovered the Salmonella. That tip came from one of Basic Food’s customers, using a tattle system the FDA has wisely set up.
As for Basic Food Flavors, the contamination dates back to at least last September, according to FDA, which found machinery at the company’s Las Vegas plant was itself contaminated with Salmonella, and thus continued to crank out tainted HVP, batch after batch. This calls into question the company’s sanitation practices, naturally, although information about its past safety inspection history wasn’t immediately available.
Basic Food also has facilities in Texas, Washington, Oregon, California, Illinois, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina and seven countries outside the U.S. Hope they’re cleaner than the one in Nevada.
No one has yet been identified as having become sick or dead as a result of the HVP adulteration, however, 245 people in 44 states including mine (Texas) have contracted food poisoning over the past few weeks as a result of Salmonella-contaminated crushed red pepper and prepared meats whose manufacturers used the contaminated pepper in their products.
Most of the meat involved – and we’re talking more than 1.5 million pounds of it – is one or another type of salami made by Daniele International Inc., and some under the Boar’s Head brand. Follow that last link for the complete list.
In Texas, you may have purchased some at Walmart, Kroger, Brookshire Bros. or Albertson. I can’t find information indicating which stores have been selling the recalled dips, salad dressings, etc.
So start checking those kitchen cupboards. And consider – home-made not only tastes better, it (assuming you adhere to basic sanitation and food-preparation practices) also provides the benefit of keeping your family from throwing up so much.
Update: We here in this part of Texas take great pride in our native pecans – in their flavor and our ability to provide them to friends and family as a tasty and healthful dietary additive. We’re also pretty proud of our ability to process and prepare them in a manner that does not make people barf. Thus it is with heavy heart I must report that American Pecan Co. of Yancey has recalled 1-pound bags of pecan pieces because they may be contaminated with Salmonella. The bad pecans were sold in Yancey and by mail to other Texans and to people in New York and Massachusetts, too.
Salmonella originates in the intestines of animals and birds. That means that all the stuff mentioned in all the recalls above was contaminated in one way or another by some kind of animal poop. And then presented for sale for your dining pleasure.
That, as they say, is messed up.
→ B.Dunn, Mar 05, 2010, 06 29 am
Too Bubba Not To Fail
(Be Afraid • Economy)
Bank Bailout III – Thanks to your local commercial-real-estate top-heavy regional or community financial institution, this movie is coming fast to a wallet near you.
It was so easy to make those Skyscraper Erection loans, wasn’t it, especially when the developers were big-time pals with your board directors? Who knew the economy wouldn’t continue growing forever?
Not the nitwit bankers, obviously. Thus, sayeth the Congressional Oversight Panel:
The commercial real estate market is currently experiencing considerable difficulty for two distinct reasons. First, the current economic downturn has resulted in a dramatic deterioration of commercial real estate fundamentals. Increasing vacancy rates and falling rental prices present problems for all commercial real estate loans. Decreased cash flows will affect the ability of borrowers to make required loan payments. Falling commercial property values result in higher LTV ratios, making it harder for borrowers to refinance under current terms regardless of the soundness of the original financing, the quality of the property, and whether the loan is performing.Second, the development of the commercial real estate bubble, as discussed above, resulted in the origination of a significant amount of commercial real estate loans based on dramatically weakened underwriting standards. These loans were based on overly aggressive rental or cash flow projections (or projections that were only sustainable under bubble conditions), had higher levels of allowable leverage, and were not soundly underwritten. Loans of this sort will encounter far greater difficulty as projections fail to materialize on already excessively leveraged commercial properties.
The really swell thing about this latest looming multitrillion-dollar economic hurricane is that small and mid-sized banks have generally, percentage-wise, much greater exposure to bad commercial real estate loans than the bigger banks. This is bad if you happen to operate a small business or were thinking of doing so because your job went away forever over the past two years of recession.
That’s because the smaller banks are just about the only institutions making loans to small business owners. They are not by any means too big to fail, and so when they go away, one of the last sources of small-business loans goes with them.
The big banks? Oh they still will be expecting your tax money to bail them out the next time they get caught investing in something really stupid, but until then, they aren’t willing to give you the time of day let alone a business loan, ‘cause they need it for executive bonuses.
Meanwhile, think Timothy Geithner or Ben Bernanke will stop this latest train wreck? Neither does the Congressional Oversight Committee.
The Panel is concerned that until Treasury and bank supervisors take coordinated action to address forthrightly and transparently the state of the commercial real estate markets – and the potential impact that a breakdown in those markets could have on local communities, small businesses, and individuals – the financial crisis will not end.
Which is why, in 2010, the fashionable American peasant is serving gruel for lunch.
→ B.Dunn, Feb 11, 2010, 10 50 am
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Total Recall
(Be Afraid • )
I remember this like it was yesterday…wait, it was yesterday…
Got up early and drove off in the dark before the coffee was ready, because “Tammy” at the Toyota dealership advised me that if I got there by 6:50, I’d be the first one in line. See, my 2007 Camry was subject to two recalls, Tammy said, one having to do with an accelerator pedal that apparently periodically grows, extending down into the floor mat and getting stuck. The other recall involves an accelerator pedal that doesn’t bother changing in size – it just sticks itself to the floorboards til you hit 120 MPH. But only in extremely rare circumstances, so no worries really – it’s like playing Russian roulette with a gun that only has one bullet, but holds 187.
I pull in to the dealer’s service area in the early morning darkness, and park the car amongst several others. Four people are inside ahead of me and I take my place in line. I notice the ceilings all over the dealership are covered in helium-filled balloons. It’s amazing how much that makes me want to buy a new car.
When I finally get to sit down at the service desk, some guy comes around the corner and stares straight at me while speaking to my service dude. “Excuse me, but I’ve been outside waiting for at least 10 minutes before anyone else even got here.,” he whines. I guess he thinks I’m going to get up and tell him to please take my seat as a Good Do-Bee award so that I can wait some more. I give him a brief primer on how doors and lines work and that makes him unhappy. A woman in line behind me looks like a frightened rabbit and apparently thinks we’re going to uncork our concealed handguns right there in the dealership.
My service guy looks like he knows it’s going to be another crappy day. He takes my paperwork and goes outside. The goofball who was out sitting in his car waiting for an invitation to get in line just continues standing there, still looking at me, but out of the corner of his eye. I haven’t had any coffee yet and feel like picking a fight. I tell him he could’ve come inside like the rest of us, and sorry, but he’s not cutting in line now. “It’s not a matter of cutting in line,” he says, and then whines some more about how long he’s been sitting outside and how the dealership wasn’t even open yet when he got there. The lady behind me is actually starting to shake. Everything that immediately comes to mind to say to the guy includes swear words, and in the span of a couple of seconds my mind rejects all of them because I think if I utter them the lady behind me will have a stroke. So I revert to the brilliant come-back my 6- and 8-year-old hurl at each other a dozen times each day.
“Whatever.”
He stomps off and goes back outside. As the door closes I can hear him whining to another service guy about how he and a whole bunch of other people have been waiting like good boys and girls outside in their cars, and they aren’t being taken care of properly like the important people they are.
My service guy comes back inside and wants me to look at something. We go out to my car, and he bends down inside the driver’s area and shines a flashlight on the accelerator pedal. My car doesn’t have the pedal-to-the-metal recall problem, he says. It just has the pedal that mysteriously grows longer and embeds itself in the floor mat. That, my service guy tells me, will take three or four hours to fix.
Tammy told me both problems together would be fixed in an hour and 15 minutes, but what does she know?
I took the floor mat out a couple of months ago, even though there was at least a full 2 inches between it and the accelerator. I am not waiting four hours without coffee for these guys to grind off the bottom of the pedal. I tell the service guy to pull the pickup truck over in front of me, and I drive between the rows of cars lined up for the Great Recall and make my escape.
The sun still isn’t up, but I’m driving around in the dark outside a car dealership. There’s an HEB grocery store just up the street, and we’re out of grub, so I find myself shopping at 7 a.m. As I do, I think about how, when I pushed down the accelerator on my cars from years past, the pedal was physically attached to the engine, and there was an actual physical relationship between the amount of pressure you put on the pedal and the speed at which the car accelerated.
But now pushing the pedal is supposed to activate a computer sensor, or something approximately like that, which in turn interacts with the car’s on-board computer system and prompts the car to go faster. So when Toyota first comes out with this idea that the accelerator pedal grows all long and gangly and gets tangled in the floor mat, I think, this is bullshit. And then, when Toyota says, no, now we need to put a metal rod in your accelerator assembly to keep the plastic part from wearing down, I think, OK, no one bought the floor mat thing, so now they’re making up more expensive bullshit to do, but it’s still probably bullshit.
Because the acceleration is more logically controlled by a flawed on-board computer and/or some flawed car computer software (but please lets not tell her OK? She’s flighty enough as it is). Fixing that probably would cost Toyota 20 times more than the “solutions” the company’s come up with so far.
Whatever.
The Toyota service guy says I am absolved from worry (no floor mats, please), and if he’s wrong, all of you are my witnesses that the company steered me in this direction. Lawsuits and good times all around.
→ B.Dunn, Feb 06, 2010, 12 30 pm
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Toyota Recall: All You Really Need To Know
(Be Afraid • Business)
Toyota Chief Executive Officer Akio Toyoda, quoted in the New York Times: “We’re extremely sorry to have made customers uneasy. We plan to establish the facts and give an explanation that will restore confidence as soon as possible. Truly, we think of our customers as a priority and we guarantee their safety,” Mr. Toyoda said. He was seen driving off in a black Audi…
→ B.Dunn, Jan 29, 2010, 07 07 pm
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