E. Coli...A Close Friend

          1 million pounds of ground beef products were recalled on August 6, 2010 because of seven people who fell ill with E. coli contamination. The company Valley Meat Co., of Modesto, sold the contaminated meat to  California, Texas, Oregon, Arizona and internationally, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said. Most of the products were sold frozen and processed from October 2, 2009 to January 12, 2010. The source of the outbreak was determined but one of the seven sickened patients, with a meat sample in their freezer. 

          The USDA was looking for stores where the products were sold to remove them from the shelves. "This is the first recall in our history and we will investigate the matter thoroughly and take any measures deemed necessary to further elevate our safety standards, protect consumers, and ensure confidence in our products," Valley Meat stated. Valley Meat advises consumers to throw out the potentially contaminated meat with the establishment number "EST. 8268" on the label, and throw it out or bring it back to stores for a refund.

          The majority of infected people were in Northern California. Exposures also took place in Marin, Mendocino, Placer, Santa Cruz, Shasta, Siskiyou and Kern counties. Ralph Montano said that none of the patients cases were so severe that they need hospitalization, and all of them recovered. Symptoms include severe stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting and a low fever. If the situation is on a higher level of severity, the infection can lead to kidney failure, brain damage and even death.

Salmonella, the FDA, Jack DeCosta, and Continued Bad Habits

Corporations and factories have been allowed to participate in many unsafe practices and the government hasn’t done a thing to promote food safety habits. Due to this, Wright County Eggs and Hillandale Farms are responsible for the recent outbreak of salmonella in eggs, and have recalled about half a billion eggs in May 2010. Salmonella causes fever, severe vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and can cause fetal infections if it gets into the bloodstream. Their have already been 1,300 cases of salmonella between May and July but only about one in every 38 cases of salmonella are actually reported. So the numbers are actually much higher and approximately in the ten thousands. 

Austin “Jack” DeCoster is Wright County Eggs owner and also has family ties to Hillandale Farms, which also come together because they manufacture and buy their eggs from the same places. He has a long list of animal and environmental abuses, and Secretary Robert Reich, writer of the Christian Science Monitor blog on August 24, commented, “DeCoster agreed to pay a $2 million penalty (the most we could throw at him) for some of the most heinous workplace violations I’d seen. His workers had been forced to live in trailers infested with rats and handle manure and dead chickens with their bare hands. It was an agricultural sweatshop.”

In a Forbes investigation in 2006, a detailed report of the conditions at Ohio Fresh Farms showed similar conditions to those at the Wright County Egg Farms and stated, “In the three years of its existence the company has incurred dozens of enforcement actions from the state, up to seven issued in a single day, for such violations as promoting swarms of flies at ‘extreme levels’ and discarding empty vaccine vials, mixed in with manure in a vacant field.” Investigators also added that they had discovered Salmonella on the site and the factory had one of the worst ammonia emissions, which cause skin and lung irritation. 

Their is an outcome of about 9,000 deaths each because of 81 million cases of food-related illnesses. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for overseeing corporations in the food industry and has 450 inspectors for about 156,000 different sites. These companies are visited by the inspectors about once a year which tells us that instead of protecting consumers, they are contributing to the population in not knowing that our food really isn’t safe. The corporations are enabled to continue business, despite their violations and unsafe practices.

Heres a link to daily food recalls and outbreaks: 

http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/default.htm

Hidden Ingredients

MY NEW PROJECT:
            I did not like my original blog project so I thought of a different topic. My new topic will be based on food recalls and how bad food is effecting people in the United States. I will be finding my information from the past five or ten recent years and post my findings on my blog one a week. I will write about how and why these things happened in certain places and where the food that was recalled came from. The themes of my project are food and health and the morality of big food companies. What I hope to learn about are the foods that I should be eating less of and why these foods make people sick. I already know that these problems are the companies fault but I hope to further learn how they can avoid these problems.

MY OLD PROJECT:
             My weekly blog for class will be based on a research project of how many of our foods contain high fructose corn syrup, soy bean, and modified ingredients. Every few days I will look at one supermarket item in my refrigerator and look at the ingredients they contain. I will keep my eye on the foods that contain one or more of the three ingredients and report on what supermarket food I examined. Most of the foods we thought would never contain these ingredients probably do because of all the many different forms corn can be morphed into.

Our class has recently watched a movie called “Food Inc.”, and in the movie it mentioned that the supermarket is basically fooling us. All the foods that we think are so different from each other are actually very similar because they contain at least one out of those three ingredients. Corn and soy beans have recently been modified for mass production and used for many things. This includes feeding cows, pigs, chickens and even fish corn because it is so cheap. Corn has become revolutionized in America. 

            The themes of my project are basically food and health. What I hope to learn from this project is about my food and exactly what is in it. We are fooled by all these big companies that we think produce all this diverse and good tasting food, but we are really just eating the same thing over and over and not receiving the right nutritional values . The kinds of thoughts I hope to inspire my readers with are to also do the same thing that I am doing for my project. I am hoping that they will do investigating in what they eat too like checking labels and researching certain companies and how they produce their food. It will be very educational to myself and all of my readers and knowledge is power. 

Problem-Posing Assignment

           The problem in Chapter 3 is the amount of violence coming from the young and the poor, working in the fast food industry in Eric Schlossers book “Fast Food Nation.” Many of the robberies and theft that go on in fast food restaurants are from current or former employees. These young employees are angered by the minimum wage they receive and how they are treated unfairly, without respect or value. The effects of this are employee outbursts and commitment of armed robbery early in the mornings or late at night. They can steal money from the restaurant because they are so angry with there jobs. This effects and endangers both employees and customers. For example, on page 84, Eric Schlosser explains a situation at a McDonald’s in Moorpark, California where the restaurant was being robbed. The day shift manager recognized the night shift manager under his mask. An example of a political issue that has risen caused by violence in the workplace is that of The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). This act could help promote safety guidelines during the night shift at fast food restaurants  and because of the high levels of workplace fatalities in women. The National Restaurant Association and one hundred congressmen opposed the act because they were bribed with money. In January 1999, The National Council of Chain Restaurants lobbied against OSHA and formed an organization called the “Alliance for Workplace Safety.” 

          “No other American industry is robbed so frequently by its own employees”, Joseph A. Kinney notes, the president of the National Safe Workplace Institute. He also adds that we shouldn’t be wasting time installing cameras and such but we should improve the job experience for workers. This relates to violence in fast food restaurants because its showing how an employer himself is telling restaurants that they need to do a better job in satisfying there employees. Americas fast food industry workers are looked at as no more than slaves who worked in the fields. It is the same principle except in modern times. That is what the fast food industry in America is all about. Paying workers as little as possible and making the most profit possible. 

          My personal experience goes back about three years ago. It isn’t as violent as an armed robbery, but I can relate to the subject. I worked in a coffee shop and closed around eleven o clock. It was about ten and I was cleaning up the espresso machines when an old African American man with an unshaved face and a limp walked in. His clothes made it noticeable that he wasn’t the richest man in the world. I noticed my tip jar a few minutes before and saw a dollar crammed inside with a red, circular stamp plastered on it. The man walked up to the register and asked for a cup of coffee, so I turned around and went in the same step by step process to fill up the little cup. I turned around and asked for a dollar and fifty cents. The man handed me the same dollar that was in my tip jar, and I noticed my almost now empty jar. I told him that I knew he had taken the money from the cup and he started mumbling and cursing as he walked out of the store. I had called the police and when they came we watched the video of him taking the money while I had my back turned to make his coffee. I felt angry and upset to know the money I had worked hard for had been taken. 

          Solutions that have been tried and failed were everything from security cameras, burglar alarms, panic buttons, drop-safes and additional lighting on the premises. Even the most thoroughly guarded fast food restaurants are still vulnerable. For example, in April 2000 a Burger King located on the grounds of the Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska was robbed by two men in ski masks and armed with shotguns. The equipment did not the effect the robbery one bit and they got away with over $7,000. My personal experience is from my account that I have mentioned before. In my case, the solution worked and didn’t worked. I still got my money taken but the cameras helped to identify the thief. 

           If I was given unlimited resources and connections, I would hire a security guard to protect the place when it closed and another when it opened in the morning and I would work with the police force. These fast food franchises have so much money that they can use to hire security guards and it will save the workers lives, and prevent any money from being stolen from the restaurants. This would lower the violence rate in the fast food industry and workers would feel much safer and probably appreciate their bosses more. I would also pose a solution towards the managers or franchisee holders. I would tell them to take the money out of the registers and safes and keep them somewhere out of the fast food restaurants several times a day to  prevent robberies in which they take more money.