Another day, another food recall: How to keep food safe

another day, another food recall: 

From Legal Insurrection:

Millions of Pounds of Ready-to-Eat Beef, Chicken Recalled Due to Listeria Affected products may have been used in ready-to-eat products that are “on store shelves or in consumers’ refrigerators or freezers,” or available for use by restaurants and other establishments.

 almost every week, we read about similar food recalls  in the USA. Imagine how common such things happen in other countries.

this is an important issue, since a longer shelf life means more food. How do you keep food safe and cheap? One answer is Chemicals that prolong shelf life but keep food cheap enough for ordinary folks (especially here in the poorer areas of the world). RFK Jr points out these cause long term health problems but hey, the cost benefit ratio means well nourished poor people.

Food recalls not only mean less food available to eat, but foods contaminated with common germs are a big health risk.

Germs cause diarrhea. Usually from the 4 F problem (contaminated FOOD (usually from not being stored correctly...the poor here don't have refrigerators), FINGERS, (not washing hands), FECES (fertilizer not washed off of vegetables, also contaminated water from poorly placed latrines) and FLIES (that carry germs on their feet that land on your food).

 So how do you stop bacterial contamination of meats and cheeze and fresh vegetables? Keep it clean, wash your hands, store it properly.

But for countries where food processing plants (not local farmers a mile away) supply your food, one overlooked answer to contamination is radiation to kill germs.

  

Here is an article about it in the journal Foods in 2023 which is actually discussing using radiation to prevent food contamination with pathogenic germs:

 But first they note that this high tech expensive technology should not be the main way to stop food poisoning:

 It is essential to note that irradiation is just one aspect of a comprehensive approach to ensuring the microbial safety of meat. Other interventions, such as good manufacturing practices, hygiene controls, and appropriate storage and handling practices, are also crucial for reducing the risk of contamination

but for food processing plants, radiation is another way that could help: 

Irradiation has been studied extensively for its efficacy in reducing microbial contamination of meat. By exposing the food to ionizing radiation, the latter reduces or eliminates harmful microorganisms that can cause foodborne illness. Previous research showed that irradiation could effectively reduce levels of pathogens such as Salmonella and Escherichia coli as well as levels of spoilage organisms, leading to improved microbial safety and a reduced risk of foodborne illness.

 

 

another technical article discussing not only radiation but UV light Ozone microwaves etc. And how these technologies might help not just with bacteria but with viruses.  

this is a news report summary of using radiation from eight years ago: 

this is a lecture from MIT from 2019,...It is more technical but he is a good teacher that makes it easy to follow his arguments..

 

 at three minutes in, he notes that you often find small bugs in rice. 

We find this is a problem: we grow and sell organic brown rice to upscale supermarkets in Manila and nearby cities. There is no way our small business could afford to radiate the rice to kill the bugs, so we use more traditional ways to keep our rice from spoilage.

When we package the rice, we sift the rice so the small bugs fall through the screen, and then blowtorch it lightly to kill the eggs that didn't detach (and would result in live bugs months later) but not enough to harm the rice.

We also pack it in vacuum bags which extends the shelf life and keeps it dry so it doesn't spoil as quickly. 

But then our rice is organic, i.e. no insecticide, and it is brown rice, meaning it has a limited shelf life so it is eaten before the tiny surviving eggs hatch.

As our city modernizes, we have modern supermarkets now that have the same standards of US supermarkets (and higher prices than the traditional markets AKA Palenkes).

But our cook usually buys fresh food every day at the Palenke down the street. 

What is a Palenke? An open air market with small vendors selling their wares.

This video by a local comedian is about the wonderfulness of the Filipino Palenke.

 

The manipulation of the Catholic synod nonsense

 

I have written before how the so called Synodality push by this pope is is a marxist type way to guide groups from above. This is done to disguise what is going on: so that they can pretend the agenda is grass roots initiative. But any Catholic can tell you that the activists with agendas will be busy filling the seats: Heck, even in Catholic Manila they found a lot of "catholics" at these meetings were actually members of the Freemasons, which is a group Catholics are not allowed to join.

The video has a long discussion of the meetings, but if you fast forward to 20 minutes, they mention a woman who plays the role of the child who points out that the Emperor is naked:

Transcript: I think one of the interesting things that happened this week that we've heard here in Rome is ...   somehow it leaked out, or it was just so notorious that it couldn't be kept in. Is that the thing that has gained the greatest applause by the full, almost 400 group of delegates inside the Synod Hall this week was a woman, a mother , who got up and said, what we really need in the church is some help. We women need some help and how to bring up our children to remain faithful to their religion in the modern. Or if you prefer, post-modern world, that mother standing up and saying, how do I bring up my children got the largest applause of anything that's happened so far in the Synod Hall. So that tells you something about what real women are thinking about. This other stuff. It just seems to me it's ideological verbiage .

 this synodality push has nothing to do with the religion founded by Jesus: the small group discussions remind me of the 1970s encounter groups we were forced to attend in medical school: we were supposed to bare our souls and get solidarity with the others in the group, but in reality it meant the most vocal pushing their agenda on the rest of us.

The modern Francis church is moving to establish a new church, but it more resembles the shenanigans of the renaissance Popes. whose agenda was power. So they worked with other world leaders and sent their minions, usually Jesuits, to manipulate politics. How bad was it? Well, it was so bad that the Catholic monarchs pressured the church to disband the Jesuit order.

And if these so called reformers, who follow the spirit of the woke/ NWO mindset take over, and will give the puppet masters another way to silence political dissadents (example: The fall of the iron curtain from believers demonstrating for freedom against tyranny).

If the Catholic church "reforms", it will be a big win for the elites who are planning to run the world.

it means they will run all the schools and hospitals will push the secular religion. So Catholic hospitals will allow abortion and euthanasia, and the Catholic schools and universities will push their agenda.  Not to mention diverting all that money into the pockets of the corrupt.

This is merely the secular harm that will be done if Francis gets his way.

from a religious point of view, the real sorrow is the loss of souls: Because people will reject a false religion of woke, and the most pious will be left without support for their souls.

It's not just Tolkien and Star wars and Marvel

 The US movie studios are planning a remake of Crash Landing on You, the very romantic K Drama hit about a rich and very modern Korean entrepeneur who crashes while skydiving into North Korea and is rescued by a NKsoldier.

Now why does that need a remake?

the ReviewGeek is not impressed.

We already know the the property will need to adhere to strict DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) rules and that will immediately throw into question how these are going to be added in....

 Translating (Crash Landing on You,)... to an American audience, and injecting modern day politics and social messaging, without losing the heart of the story? Good luck....

The film Parasite was pretty well ruined by Hollywood, since it doesn't make a lot of sense to Yanks, who have less class snobbery... but a common K drama theme is the clash of poor and rich families.

and even Pachinko was ruined by adding a modern day story about the problems of an American of Korean ancestry to the story. Season two is now here and remains confusing with flash forwards and flash backs, but I do wish at the end of the series, someone will make a fan cut of the series removing all that secondary story and simply telling the story of the Koreans in Japan from start to finish.

----------------------UPDATE

Geek reports that the plan is to rewrite it in outer space.

Hmmm... I am old enough to remember when this was done in Enemy Mine, where the alien is bisexual and later his/her child ends up adopted by the human...

Hurricane coming to Florida

This explains why President Biden remains popular.

,,,

I am also watching the ongoing news conferenced by the Governor of Florida, since I have family there.

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The problem is that this is stopping people from going home, since the second storm is hitting.

Sigh. This is a super sized hurricane, and yes several of these have hit Asia this year (but luckily for us, we were on the edge and mainly had flooding and destruction of the almost ready to harvest crops)...

We flew over Hurricane Milton about 90 minutes ago. Here is the view out the Dragon Endeavour window. Expect lots of images from this window as this is where I’m sleeping while we wait to undock and return to Earth.

Timelapse coming in a separate post.

1/6400 sec, f8, ISO 500 pic.twitter.com/zkhJdTlag7

— Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) October 8, 2024

I was hoping to follow it on Twitter, but too many political bitching back and forth from both sides of the aisle.

and as I noted in an earlier post: The confusion in the mountains is because the flooding was not expected. FEMA is the scapegoat here, but this type of confusion happens after all disasters, where the pencil pushing bureaucrats are slower at helping than the locals, i.e. church groups, relatives, National Guard, first responders, people who have skills and know they will be needed... etc.

celebrate music

 

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as students, we used to watch him when he was in charge of the Boston Pops And at Tanglewood.

 

Family news

 So the typhoons passed and we are only getting evening thunderstorms of the monsoons. So no problem here, but I worry about my son in Florida. He said his town is outside the wind area but they worry about the rain might flood them. 

The rice, which was planted late because they were dredging the irrigation ditch, is almost ripe and the first harvest of our fields will be Thursday if we can rent the harvester/thresher machine.

Joy has been busy teaching: mostly business lectures for farmers but she also attends church meetings and gives lectures there. Not my church: I am Catholic but my weakness since I had dengue two years ago means I rarely can get to mass when it's hot.

The white Mamadog had two puppies a month ago: They were premature and small but lived and now their eyes are opening, so we may have to move them out of the closet when they start to wander.

There is a new half grown puppy in the street: Half starved and try to bite you if you go near. We put out food and water but because of the risk of rabies there is no way we would adopt it. 

The maid said the city has a free rabies shot clinic in the poorer area of our barangay (neighborhood) tomorrow so she will be late. It is for dogs and cats. We no longer have cats since all the cats in the neighborhood died off two years ago, and no new feral cats want to adopt us because we have watchdogs. We need a cat, since mice and rats invade and then we have to put out traps or for rats poisoned food. Yuck. 

Lecture of the week

 

most religious stuff on youtube is superficial,  but this is the Chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, who has since converted to Catholicism.

Shipping routes: can a Thailand canal help?

 China is trying to block the shipping via the West Philippine Sea.

But there is another danger spot if China gets aggressive:

Malaca Strait — and Kra Isthmus, Thailand — Wildly important:https://t.co/Gdv4AsOldM

— Michael Yon: Callsign BIG HONEY 6 (@Michael_Yon) October 6, 2024

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The trouble with bureaucracy in disasters::Regulations over reality

I have been through six typhoons since I moved to the Philippines, but only once did we get cut off from electricity, water, internet, and local help for more than a day or two.
  

We lived off of local food and generators for a week; our pump, which we had stopped using because the water level had fallen, was restarted and voila, it worked so we had water.  

So the disaster in the mountains of the Southern USA is worse than what we went through: Because in the USA, the need for backup generators is rare: but here, brownouts are common, so most middle class folk have one.

When disasters strike in the USA, usually local first responders have a plan intact. The local National Guard often has water supplies and the ability to purify water, and often the fire departments are volunteer based and have equipment to help rescue folk; the church groups have food banks and often help distribute supplies and even house those whose homes are destroyed. 

Relatives and friends arrive with pickup trucks full of supplies, the local boaters come in to rescue those in flooded areas, etc. because the outside help often can't get in because of blocked roads.

This is chaotic, and the bad part of this is often supplies are not distributed to where they are needed: Too much aid goes to one area, and no aid to another.

This is the background of FEMA stopping private aid going to the hurricane/flood victims: Their plan is to collect those supplies to make sure that it goes where it is needed, and then distribute it, including making sure all the paperwork is done correctly.

Because to a bureaucrat, the rules and paperwork are the priority: Things have to be done properly.

But as the saying goes: When you are up to your tush in alligators, there is no time to have a meeting on how to drain the swamp.

The bad part about this is that doing paper work to arrange who needs help, and who should get it first, takes time: Sometimes days. 

And in a disaster, time is lives. 

And that is what is going on in all those hysterical stories about FEMA blocking private folks trying to rescue their friends and relatives. Because paperwork and following regulations is more important than reality.

I see we’ve reached the stage of civilizational decline where the sclerotic federal bureaucracy is hamstringing the tech billionaire’s effort to run private disaster relief in the face of government inaction while trapped civilians run out of food and water… https://t.co/9QSXZBIavy

— John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) October 4, 2024

Thailand school bus accident

 Ruby is teaching in Thailand and reports that the entire country is upset about a school bus accident, where 23 children burned to death.

the bus used hydrogen fuel, which are becoming more popular in much of Asia, and seen as a good alternative to electric buses: both are used because global warming of course...but the deaths seem to be in the back of the bus...( because the escape door in the back wasn't opened ?)

BBC Report.says that most of the gas cylinders were in the back but a few were illegally added to the front of the bus. The BBC article explains how changes had been made to the old bus chassis, and that this is common, and often does not meet the same standards found in newer buses.

The investigation found that a pipe coming from one of those in the front broke in the impact, leaking gas which ignited the fire. The trapped passengers appear to have been unable to open the rear emergency exit too, although it is not clear yet why.

Overseas adoptees: Seeking their birth parents

 This article is an AP story from a Japanese Newspaper about children adopted from Korea who now are adults and seeking their birth parents. 

These adoptees are among the 200,000 sent from South Korea to Western nations as children. Many have grown up, searched for their origin story and discovered that their adoption paperwork was inaccurate or fabricated. They have only breadcrumbs to go on: grainy baby photos, names of orphanages and adoption agencies, the towns where they were said to have been abandoned. They don’t speak the language. They’re unfamiliar with the culture. Some never learn their truth.“I want my mother to know I’m OK and that her sacrifice was not in vain,” says Kenneth Barthel, adopted in 1979 at 6 years old to Hawaii....

This is a common theme in K dramas, by the way, but very few US movies or films discuss it properly: often the story is happy happy shiny fantasy, and some are horror movies (the myth of the Bad Seed, i.e. the evil parents legacy to the child)..

In the US, adoptions are common: In my family it includes several cousins, mostly in country adoption but also, like my sons, older children from South America.

My sons were two of a family of six siblings whose parents died, and they remember their parents. I got two of the older boys. Their uncle abused them, so his wife arranged for her friend to take them to the orphanage and say she knew their parents had died and that they had no family. Luckily the uncle didn't bother to answer the ads looking for their family, nor did their siblings, at least one of whom was adopted in the same city and old enough to read the paper. The younger ones were taken in by friends or family: the youngest, a baby, was lost, but last year his cousin discovered the family living in Cali, about 100 miles from their town, so my son flew down to meet her. He also searched genetic databses and found a cousin, born blind, who had been adopted by a family in Minnesota, and met her also.

In the USA, it is almost impossible to adopt a baby: Most are kept by mom ,or aborted. Most of these children, if mom can't care for them ,are cared for by the grandparents until Mom is old enough to care for him or her, or if she descends into drug addiction, often the family will rescue the child who ends up being raised by grandparents or other family members.

Alas this means that often mom is an addict, and it takes years to legally free the child to be adopted, and by then, often the child has scars and attachment problems.

The rule that says to try to place children with parents of the same race. This is good, since after the TV show Different Strokes, there was a lot of upper class white people who wanted a black child, often to show they were liberal. American Indians have the same problem: And then the child, just like adopting older children from overseas, has to adjust to a different culture.