Category: Food

28 Years

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Former president of Peanut Corporation of America, Stewart Parnell, was sentenced to 28 years in prison for knowing shipping salmonella contaminated peanuts around the country:

Former peanut company executive Stewart Parnell was hit with a virtual life prison term Monday for his 2014 conviction on crimes related to a salmonella outbreak blamed for killing nine and sickening hundreds.

A federal judge in Georgia sentenced the 61-year-old former head of Peanut Corporation of America to 28 years behind bars, imposing potentially the toughest punishment in U.S. history for a producer in a food-borne illness case.

U.S. District Judge W. Louis Sands also sentenced the former executive’s brother, Michael Parnell, 56, to serve a 20-year prison term. The relative and co-defendant was a broker who provided food manufacturing giant Kellogg’s with peanut paste from his brother’s company.

Mary Wilkerson, 41, a former quality control manager at the now-defunct peanut firm, drew a five-year prison term for her conviction on obstruction in the tragedy.

Sands also ordered both Parnells to surrender, rejecting defense arguments that the two should be allowed to remain free on bond pending appeals. The judge deemed them potential flight risks.

………

The case stemmed from Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention findings that traced a national salmonella outbreak to the Parnell company’s peanut roasting plant in Blakely, Ga. The outbreak sickened 714 people in 46 states and may have contributed to nine deaths, the CDC reported.

The illnesses began in January 2009 and ultimately prompted one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history.

A federal jury convicted Parnell last September on 71 criminal counts, including conspiracy, obstruction of justice and introduction of adulterated food. The verdict came after prosecutors presented evidence that Parnell and the co-defendants knowingly shipped salmonella-tainted peanut butter from the Georgia facility to Kellogg’s and other customers — who in turn used it in products ranging from packaged crackers to pet food.

How about some similar sentences for corrupt bankers?

Doing the Cranky Baker Bit Again

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Doing pre-cook for the SCA cooking competition Trial By Fire, so once again, I am dealing with the vicissitudes of stiff and uncooperative dough.

This time, I am doing both white and wheat, and I’m cranky and tired.

The rules of the competition are that cooking must be done at the competition, but long prep, like a 12 hour proof, or 4 days of marinating gravlax, or of curdling and draining Neufchâtel/cream cheese can be done ahead of time.

That being said, my French pralines (c. 1636) will be done entirely at the event.

The pralines came from the fact that I had much liquid left over from the cheese making, or, as the saying goes, where there is a will, there is a whey.

Bagels Turned Out OK

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Even with the boiling, we did not get a gloss on the Bagels tonight.

It wasn’t quite as chewy as I would have liked on the inside, and the crust was decidedly non-glossy.

I think that both may have been an artifact of my using “White Whole Wheat” flour, because I could not find a white flour without malted barley flour, and Sharon* is violently allergic to both malt and barley.

Also, I found the flavor just a bit too yeasty.

The wife and kids loved them though.

I will repeat that this was literally the first time that I have ever made bread, so I cannot complain.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Now I Know Why Jewish Bakers are So Cranky

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I just began making my first bagels ever.

Actually, it’s my first bread baking ever.

I’m not done, they need to proof for 12-48 hours in the fridge, and then they are boiled (Real bagels are never steamed, f%$3 you Lenders) and baked.

Bagels use high gluten flour, and have a rather low ratio of water to flour, and to make them properly, you roll them into a sausage shape, and then then wrap them around the back of your hand to seal the ends together.

This, along with the fact that I did this without a stand mixer, means that my hands are wicked tired.

I also started some Gravlax, salmon cured in sugar, salt, and spices..

Since, I couldn’t find any Akavit at the liquor store, I added caraway seeds to the salt/sugar/spice mix, and I added ginger because Sharon* likes her Gravlax with ginger, and grains of paradise ……… just because I felt like it.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Pay Them More Money, You Stupid F%$#ing F%$#s!

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It appears that are having a problem finding and keeping experienced cooks:

Behind the swinging doors of restaurant kitchens around the country, things are getting a bit more chaotic. It’s not the sort of thing diners would not have noticed, because it’s happening behind the scenes, out of view. Orders are still coming in, and plates are still coming out. But there’s a growing problem that chefs and restaurateurs are talking about more these days.

Good cooks are getting harder to come by. Not the head kitchen honchos, depicted in Food Network reality shows, who fine-tune menus and orchestrate the dinner rush, but the men and women who are fresh out of culinary school and eager.

The shortage of able kitchen hands is affecting chefs in Chicago, where restaurateurs said they are receiving far fewer applications than in past years. “It’s gotten to the point where if good cooks come along, we’ll hire them even if we don’t have a position. Because we will have a position,” Paul Kahan, a local chef, told the Chicago Tribune last week.

It’s also an issue in New York, where skilled cooks are an increasingly rare commodity. “If I had a position open in the kitchen, I might have 12 résumés, call in three or four to [try out] in the kitchen, and make a decision,” Alfred Portale, the chef and owner of Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant Gotham Bar and Grill, told Fortune recently. “Now it’s the other way around; there’s one cook and 12 restaurants.”

Gee, why is it so tough to find good cooks?

Maybe it’s this:

One of the clearest obstacles to hiring a good cook, let alone someone willing to work the kitchen these days, is that living in this country’s biggest cities is increasingly unaffordable. In New York, for instance, where a cook can expect to make between $10 and $12 per hour, and the median rent runs upward of $1,200 a month, living in the city is a near impossibility. As a result, people end up living far from the restaurants where they work. Add to that how late dinner shifts can end, causing people to arrive home well into the night.

Top it all off with the fact that culinary school graduates are often working through significant amounts of debt, and the burden can be insurmountable.

It’s markets, baby.

You cannot find cooks to underpay and abuse because ……… Oh, I don’t know ……… Maybe there are fewer illegal workers out there to depress wages:

And then there’s another subtle but significant change happening across America that doesn’t bode well for the restaurant industry. After years of steady inflows of Mexican immigrants, who have proved both eager and talented cooks, the trend is reversing itself. The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States has leveled off over the past decade (it peaked eight years ago in 2007). By 2012, net migration to Mexico was already zero, or even negative, meaning that more Mexicans were moving out than moving in.

So you want your employees to go heavily into debt at cooking schools, you want to work them mercilessly, and you don’t want to pay them well, and now the guys that you can use the threat of La Migra to keep them in line have gone home.

The pay sucks, and they are treated like crap, so people are not flocking to the profession,

You find the same thing in other fields where this has happened, like, for example, airline pilots.

We have been eating our seed corn in terms of skilled professionals for over a generation, if we are finding it hard to find new guys, the solution is not more gastarbeiters (H1B, L1A, etc.), it is to strengthen worker rights, strengthen union rights, and raise the minimum wage.

Good. Now How About Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon Too?

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In response to his knowingly shipping Salmonella tainted peanut butter, prosecutors are asking for a life sentence for former president and CEO of Peanut Corporation of America:

Stewart Parnell–the former Peanut Corporation of America owner that was convicted last year for knowingly shipping Salmonella-contaminated peanut butter from his Georgia plant–may be sentenced to life in prison if prosecutors have their way. The U.S. Probation Office concluded that the scope of Parnell’s crimes–including conspiracy, obstruction of justice and wire fraud– “results in a life sentence Guidelines range.”

 After a two month trial, Parnell was found guilty of knowingly shipping the contaminated products to food processors across the U.S. This is reportedly the first federal felony conviction of its kind in relation to food safety, making it an unprecedented case.

In 2008 and 2009, the peanut butter outbreak spread throughout 46 states, ultimately leading the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to announce one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history. Nine people died and more than 700 fell ill. Parnell nor any co-defendants were ever charged in relation to any consumer illnesses or deaths resulting from the tainted peanut butter.

 ………

 Parnell–age 61–is scheduled to be sentenced on September 21 by a federal judge in Albany, GA. Although prosecutors are recommending a life sentence, the judge is free to impose a lighter sentence.

 A 17 to 21 year sentence was recommended for brother Michael Parnell. Mary Wilkerson–the plant quality control manager–may get 8 to 10 years in prison based on prosecutors’ recommendation.

Here is a suggestion for the judge: Imagine that Mr. Parnell is a black man caught dealing crack, and that he had 3 priors, all of them non-violent drug offenses.

 That should be good for about 60 years.

Or, perhaps you could imagine that he is a black man accused of selling loose cigarettes in New York City. 

That carries the death penalty these days.

Keurig Kapitulates Koncerning K-Cup Kontrols

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Keurig, the coffee maker company, recently introduced version 2 of their coffee maker.

Among the various “upgrades” was the introduction of digital rights management systems that prevented the use of 3rd party cups and refillable cups.

Sales have cratered, and now have backtracked on their policies:

It’s been called the “razor blade business model.” A company sells a product like a battery-operated razor blade handle at a relatively low price in order to sell a complementary consumable product later, like the astoundingly costly Gillette Power Fusion Proglide cartridge, $18 for four blades, which then get thrown away.

But it could also be called the Keurig “K-Cup” business model. Once a consumer buys the coffee machine, the coffee drinker may spend as much as $50 to $60 per pound on the coffee contained in the K-Cups, considerably more than the cost of even Starbucks’s breakfast blend, which goes for about $11.95 per pound.

Some years back, thousands of Keurig single-serve machine fans found a cheaper alternative, however — refillable, non-disposable K-cups, little plastic coffee grounds holders, which the company graciously sold under the brand of “My K-Cup.”

Not only was it cheaper, but the coffee drinker had more choice, as “My K-Cup” could be filled with any brand of coffee off the shelf.

But in August 2014, when Keurig introduced its “2.0” line of coffeemakers, it stopped making “My K-Cup” for it and made the machine incompatible with any K-cups already in existence, as well as with any unlicensed disposable K-cups made by other companies.

It was $50 a pound and a trail of waste — or nothing.

That was two provocations, but two too much. The reaction was fast and furious, on sites such as Amazon, as well as on Keurig’s own social media sites.

………

Keurig’s explanation was a model of what not to tell angry consumers. The company said the change was for the consumer’s own good.

………

Clever competitors moved quickly to fill the void, with ways to, in effect, hack into the Keurig technology. The Rogers Family Company’s “Freedom Clip” was sold patriotically as “Our Gift To You and Everyone …. Freedom Of Choice!”

………

Worse for Keurig, as executives acknowledged Wednesday during its quarterly earnings briefing, sales of Keurig machines tanked and they began to accumulate on the shelves across the country. Sales of brewers and accessories declined by 23 percent, the company reported. Its stock price fell 10 percent in after hours trading.

With that, Keurig’s CEO did what he had to do. He capitulated Wednesday in a call with market analysts.

“We heard loud and clear from consumers,” said Brian Kelley, “who really wanted the My K-Cup back. We want consumers to be able to bring any brand and bringing the My Cup back allows that.

I am kind of surprised that they didn’t stick to their guns, and file DMCA cease and desist actions against their competitors.

That does seem to be the normal way of doing business in America:  Piss off your customers, and boost your profits through rent seeking behavior.

It’s a lot easier than making a better/cheaper product.  Just look at how your local phone and cable companies treat you.

It’s 4/20

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What is/was your favorite munchie food?

I no longer indulge in “Demon Weed”, but when I did, I favored ice cream sandwiches and Fig Newtons™.

Of course, I stopped toking before I became even vaguely aware of Ben and Jerry’s™, and the explosion of gourmet snacks was almost a decade away.

Worst ……… Recipe ……… Ever!!!!

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Placenta Chocolate Truffles.

No, this is not The Onion, nor is it the Duffel Blog, nor The Daily Mash, nor The Daily Currant.

It is also not Fox News:

LONDON, UK — Yes, some people blend their placentas after birth and drink them in smoothies. Yes, some dehydrate the organ that connects a fetus to a mother’s uterus, grind it up into powder and consume it in everything from pills to cookies.

This is a thing. It is enough of a thing that it has its own word, placentophagy, which is the act of eating the placenta after birth.

Whether this should be a legal thing — or, more specifically, whether specialists should be allowed to prepare placenta-based foods for others, for a fee — is currently the subject of passionate debate here in the United Kingdom.

Last week, health officials in Swindon, England, served a woman named Kathryn Beale with a notice that her business preparing capsules of dried placenta for newly delivered mothers posed “serious risk to human health.”

Beale challenged the notice in court, and won the right to continue business while local health officials prepare a formal inspection.

The case comes months after the European Food Safety Authority ruled placenta-based products a “novel food,” meaning that vendors have to produce extensive and expensive documentation to sell them legally in the European Union.

Countries can individually exempt foods from the ruling. Placenta advocates have asked Britain to do this.

The businesses of Beale and dozens of other placenta specialists around the UK are in limbo while the country’s Food Standards Agency figures out where in the regulatory framework placenta products belong.

………

Babies emerge from their mothers’ bodies in a dramatic moment of tears and emotion. Placentas follow a few minutes later in a gloopy, unheralded mess.

In the old days, it was called “afterbirth”>

For a long time, placentas were just part of the bloody detritus of birth, with the vast majority sentenced to hospital incinerators. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, around the time of rising interest in the United States in midwife-led, medication-free childbirth, a group of US midwives began advocating the consumption of placenta as a defense against postpartum depression, iron deficiency and a host of other concerns for mothers.

People do a lot with placentas these days. The internet abounds with Pinterest-ready, do-it-yourself recipes for placenta prints, placenta tonics, placenta balms and placenta chocolate truffles.

(emphasis mine)

Un-dirtyword-believable.

Even in the context of British cuisine, this is f%$#ing extreme.

Damn! Out of Stock!

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Brilliant!

I’ve found the ultimate Passover Seder accessory, the 10 Plagues in all  their disturbing chocolate glory.

Clockwise from upper left:

  1. Blood
  2. Frogs
  3. Lice
  4. Wild Beasts
  5. Livestock Disease
  6. Boils (with a little white chocolate pustule for authenticity)
  7. Hail
  8. Locusts
  9. Darkness
  10. Death of the 1st born

All with a dark chocolate bar (it’s pareve) in the middle.

I just discovered it, and they are out of stock.

Damn!

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Life Imitates Megas XLR

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The Bit at 7m 10s is Very Similar to the Pizza

There is a bit in the Megas XLR episode “Space Booty” where Coop, when confronted with a food synthesizer, orders a “Philly Cheesesteak, wrapped in bacon, and deep fry it.”  (It should be queued up on the embedded video)

That was all that I could think of when I read about Little Caesars’ bacon-wrapped deep dish pizza:

Guys, I love junk food. My Salon “brand” is to judge fast food conglomerates for poisoning millions of people until they die from heart disease and stuff, and yeah, I’m still of the mind that these companies are basically evil. But also it’s nearly 4 p.m. and I want a snack so much. And that’s why I’m having trouble mustering the requisite outrage for Little Caesars’ Bacon-Wrapped Crust Deep! Deep! Dish Pizza. Double the depth of a normal Deep! dish, we’re guessing.

The afternoon snack village banquet is wrapped in three-and-a-half feet of bacon and caramelized cheese edges and will cost $12 once it goes on sale on Monday, February 23. One slice will cost you 450 calories, 23 grams of fat, 830 milligrams of sodium and 40 milligrams of cholesterol.

Much like Coop did with the Philly Cheesesteaks, you could wring this pie out and fill a crank case. (15m 25s in the vid)

In any case, watch the whole episode, or for that matter any episode of Megas XLR, it’s a great show, and is probably even funnier to someone who, unlike me actually was into giant robot anime.

BTW, unless you posses the genetic makeup that gives you a surfeit of the good (ultra-HDL) cholesterol, I would suggest that you eat the pizza and follow it with a handful of statins.

Have a Recipe

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I give you 3 minute microwave meringues:

Note that Icing Sugar = Confectioners Sugar = Powdered Sugar, which is not a part of the largely allergic to corn Saroff family, as everyone in the house but the cats and me are allergic to corn, but you could use glazing sugar, which is corn free, or make powdered sugar in a blender, which seems to work better than a food processor.

It’s dead simple: Egg whites and powdered sugar which is then nuked until done.

My Nose Hair Was Vibrating Like a Hummingbird with Epilepsy

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An odd thing happened today.

Some people came by to hand out cans of Red Bull as part of a promotion.

It’s not my bag, but I was really tired, and it was free.

First, it tastes f%$#ing awful, worse than Schlitz Dark.

Second, it is not the good kind of boost.

It makes Mountain Dew look like Château Lafite Rothschild.

Not good.

Not quite as bad as Moxie or Baijiu,  but man, it’s close.