"Food"

The payoff at the end.

Calling All Recalls

Breaking the government is the point. And punishing people is meant to rally them to the cause.

"See? The government's all fucked up. And there's no fixing it, but you can stop your suffering by supporting us as we replace it with a corporate plutocracy."

OK, so it's not quite as bad as all that - not yet anyway - but I think it's healthy to maintain my very low confidence in this MAGA gang. IMO, it's more than justified, and it's likely to get worse before we have a real chance to make it better.

Lettuce. Blueberries. Eggs. Jalapeños. Why are there so many food-safety scares this summer?

Bill Marler's business is booming — and that's not great for the rest of us.

Marler is a food safety lawyer, defending people who've been sickened by foodborne illness. He has been doing this for 33 years, with such high-profile wins that he's become a towering figure in the food safety world.

This year, he's so slammed with foodborne-illness cases that, for the first time in years, he's expanding his team — hiring another lawyer and a couple of paralegals. "We just have too much shit to do," Marler said.

This summer alone, Americans have been warned about a massive Cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce — 10,930 confirmed illnesses, 454 hospitalizations, and two deaths — plus Salmonella in jalapeños and eggs and E. coli in frozen blueberries. Then there are the recalls: bread that may contain metal fragments, fruit bars that may contain glass, and foods pulled for possible bacterial contamination or undeclared allergens.

By August, the FDA's 2026 public health advisories had covered what felt like everything, from cheese to infant formula.

"As a consumer, you're looking at this like, well, what the hell's safe to eat?" Marler said.

America is having a headline-grabbing food-safety summer. Some of that is perception: We're better at finding outbreaks, and recall counts can be misleading.

But long-standing vulnerabilities in our food system — compounded by cuts to the public health infrastructure designed to catch problems — are also at play. Whether it represents something more significant is harder to say.

"It's real, and it looks bad," Marler said.

Recall counts can be misleading

This summer looks more exceptional than it actually is, said Craig Hedberg, a professor and foodborne-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota.

"Certainly the magnitude of the cyclospora outbreak is unprecedented, but in terms of all of the things that are going on with food, it's not all that unusual," Hedberg said.

Summer is typically a busy season for foodborne illness, he said, and outbreaks involving foods like sprouts, berries, and produce recur year after year. What's truly extraordinary in 2026 is cyclospora — "an order of magnitude bigger than anything we've seen in previous years."

Recall counts can also exaggerate the number of distinct problems. Jennifer McEntire, founder of Food Safety Strategy, a consulting firm that works with industry groups, pointed out that when a single contaminated ingredient is used in many foods, each finished product may trigger its own recall.

"This makes the recall numbers look high, even though the number of 'root causes' may be much lower," McEntire said.

Take California Dairies, which recalled certain bulk batches of powdered milk and buttermilk in April due to potential Salmonella contamination. These products had been sold to wholesale distributors and manufacturers, triggering downstream recalls.

That meant the recall rippled across the sector, with over a dozen products pulled from shelves — from potato chips to ranch seasoning.

We're finding issues we couldn't find before

There's another reason today's food-safety problems may be more visible: We're better at finding them.

"We clearly have better tools and are using them more effectively to identify outbreaks," Hedberg said.

In the last five to 10 years, public health laboratories have increasingly used whole-genome sequencing to link seemingly isolated Salmonella or E. coli cases by their genetic fingerprints.

That means some of what appears to be an increase in foodborne illness is actually better surveillance. "We're finding ones that may have been missed previously," said Melanie Firestone, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, who studies foodborne-disease surveillance.

Those tools, however, aren't as readily available for Cyclospora, in part because the parasite can't be grown in a lab; investigators rely more heavily on finding common exposures among sick people.

Our food system has changed — and one mistake can go a very long way

The food system itself has also transformed. Americans can now buy fresh produce year-round, including fruits and vegetables.

"Foods don't go out of season. We just go to the season where they're being produced, and we bring them in," Hedberg said.

Still, a food system optimized for year-round availability, convenience, long supply chains, and massive distribution networks can also amplify failures.

Marler points to the massive 2006 E. coli outbreak linked to bagged spinach, a crisis so consequential that he said the leafy-greens industry came to refer to it as its "9/11."

Investigators traced the spinach to a single 20-acre farm that had a wild-pig invasion. Not every crop was infected, but harvesting and processing allowed it to spread. The bags were then shipped around the country, turning what Marler argued might once have been scattered illnesses into a national outbreak.

Ultimately, when something does go wrong, the modern food system can make it go spectacularly wrong.

"The reality is that with a lot of our fresh produce, once contamination occurs, we have limited ability to decontaminate the produce items," Hedberg said.

Parts of our safety net weakened

One explanation for the increased number of headlines about food safety has loomed particularly large this summer: the Trump administration's DOGE cuts.

In 2025, the administration cut thousands of jobs across federal health agencies and billions of dollars in grants to state and local health departments.

Those cuts landed on a public-health system that was already stretched. "Our public health systems have been chronically underfunded for a long time, and we're seeing that worsen," Firestone said.

In a statement, the FDA said that "frontline FDA investigators are critical to the FDA's mission and were exempt from past workforce reductions."

The agency said that while there are more foodborne illness clusters in 2026 than in previous years, it is "constantly working to improve laboratory detection of foodborne illness," such as Cyclospora. "Still, Cyclospora remains a challenging agent and epidemiology, and traceback are key elements of an outbreak investigation."

Food safety cuts predate the Trump administration. In 2012, under the Obama administration, the USDA's Microbiological Data Program ended after its funding was eliminated. The program had sampled and tested selected fruits and vegetables for foodborne pathogens, reporting its findings to federal and state public health agencies — proactive surveillance, rather than waiting for reports of infections to crop up.

Some food-safety hazards, Hedberg said, are well understood and "just require constant attention on the part of producers to be able to prevent."

So, should I be scared of my groceries?

Hedberg doesn't think this summer should change the way Americans eat. "Most of the food moving through the system is free of contamination," he said.

Fresh produce remains an important part of a healthy diet, and he cautioned against allowing a single enormous outbreak to distort our sense of risk.

That doesn't mean accepting outbreaks as inevitable.

Thirty years ago, hamburgers kept Marler incredibly busy: more than 90% of his E. coli cases involved them. Today, he said, it's practically zero. "That's because of government intervention and industry stepping up."

After the deadly 1993 Jack in the Box outbreak, regulators and the meat industry introduced new rules, testing, and other safeguards that made hamburger substantially safer.

So, is this summer unusually riskier? The Cyclospora outbreak is. Beyond that, many of the problems are familiar ones. And the hamburger example shows that which foods pose the biggest risks can change substantially over time.

Hawk

It won't be long before they can just give us a list of foods they haven't fucked up yet.

From the FDA website:

Food

The Voice Of Evolution

Why Am I Not Surprised?

Propaganda works. Advertising works. And if you couple the saturation ad blitz with food products that are engineered to be addictive substances rather than actual food - well you can guess what happens. People can't get enough of the artificial shit you're peddling, and the shareholders can't get enough of those oh-so-very sweet quarterly dividends.

Many of today’s unhealthy foods were brought to you by Big Tobacco

A new study suggests that tobacco companies, who were skilled at marketing cigarettes, used similar strategies to hook people on processed foods.

For decades, tobacco companies hooked people on cigarettes by making their products more addictive. Now, a new study suggests that tobacco companies may have used a similar strategy to hook people on processed foods.

In the 1980s, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired the major food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco, allowing tobacco firms to dominate America’s food supply and reap billions in sales from popular brands such as Oreo cookies, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Lunchables.

By the 2000s, the tobacco giants spun off their food companies and largely exited the food industry — but not before leaving a lasting legacy on the foods that we eat.

The new research, published in the journal Addiction, focuses on the rise of “hyper-palatable” foods, which contain potent combinations of fat, sodium, sugar and other additives that can drive people to crave and overeat them. The Addiction study found that in the decades when the tobacco giants owned the world’s leading food companies, the foods that they sold were far more likely to be hyper-palatable than similar foods not owned by tobacco companies.

In the past 30 years, hyper-palatable foods have spread rapidly into the food supply, coinciding with a surge in obesity and diet-related diseases. In America, the steepest increase in the prevalence of hyper-palatable foods occurred between 1988 and 2001 — the era when Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds owned the world’s leading food companies.

Even though the tobacco companies no longer own these food brands, researchers say the findings matter because many of the ultra-processed foods that we eat today were engineered by an industry that wrote the playbook on products that are highly-palatable, addictive and appealing to children.

“We found that tobacco companies selectively disseminated hyper-palatable foods into the food supply,” said Tera Fazzino, the lead author of the new study and an assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Kansas. “It’s important for people to understand where these foods came from and who was responsible for putting them into our food system in a way that saturates the environment.”

How cigarette makers sold food

For their study, Fazzino and her colleagues pored over documents contained in the University of California at San Francisco’s Industry Documents Library, which contains millions of internal tobacco industry documents that shed light on how the companies designed their products to be addictive and the strategies they used to market them.

Fazzino and her colleagues identified 105 foods that were among the best-selling products for brands owned by either Philip Morris or R.J. Reynolds between 1988 and 2001. At the time, R.J. Reynolds owned Nabisco, whose popular brands included Oreo cookies, Teddy Grahams, Ritz crackers and SnackWell’s fat-free Devils Food cookies.

Philip Morris once owned the world’s largest food company, Kraft-General Foods, which sold popular brands like Kraft Mac & Cheese, Jello-O, Kool-Aid and Oscar Mayer hot dogs.

The researchers compared the nutritional makeup of these foods to 587 similar products sold by competing brands that were not owned by tobacco companies.

They found that tobacco-owned foods were 80 percent more likely to contain potent combinations of carbs and sodium that made them hyper-palatable. Tobacco-owned brands were also 29 percent more likely to contain similarly potent combinations of fat and sodium.

Foods that find your ‘bliss’ point

The findings suggest that tobacco companies engineered processed foods to hit what is known as our “bliss” point and elicit cravings, said Ashley Gearhardt, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies food addiction.

She said that hyper-palatable foods have a lot in common with addictive substances. They contain ingredients from naturally occurring plants and foods that have been purified, concentrated and transformed into products that are quickly absorbed into our bloodstreams, which amplifies their ability to light up reward centers in our brains.

“Every addictive substance is something that we take from nature and we alter it, process it and refine it in a way that makes it more rewarding — and that is very clearly what happened with these hyper-palatable food substances,” said Gearhardt, who was not involved in the new study. “We treat these foods like they come from nature. Instead, they’re foods that come from big tobacco.”

Philip Morris, which changed its name to Altria, declined to comment. R.J. Reynolds, Kraft and Mondelez, which owns Nabisco, did not respond to requests for comment.

Experts in the flavor business

Tobacco companies got into the food business 60 years ago to diversify their product portfolios. These firms had extensive libraries of colors, flavors and additives that they developed for cigarettes, and executives realized they could use these ingredients to make a variety of processed foods.

In the 1960s, R.J. Reynolds launched a project to develop sugary drinks, which involved market research on children. In an internal memo that year, the company’s manager of biochemical research wrote to an RJR executive that the firm was not “merely” a tobacco company: “In a broader and much less restricting sense,” he wrote, “R.J. Reynolds is in the flavor business.”

The research manager noted that many of the flavors the company had developed for cigarettes “would be useful in food, beverage and other products,” leading to “large financial returns.”

Turning Hawaiian Punch into a kids’ drink

The following year, RJR bought the maker of Hawaiian Punch, which at the time was a cocktail mixer that was available in only two flavors. After conducting dozens of market research studies in children and housewives, RJR expanded Hawaiian Punch to at least 16 flavors, including many preferred by kids. The company was among the first to introduce a nationally distributed “juice box,” which became an instant hit.

“They took something that was an adult cocktail mixer and a year later they had turned it into a children’s beverage,” said Laura Schmidt, a professor of health policy at the UCSF School of Medicine who has published studies examining the tobacco industry’s involvement in food companies.

RJR used a cartoon mascot, Punchy, to market Hawaiian Punch to children. For decades, Punchy appeared in TV commercials, Sunday comics, schoolbook covers, toys and magazines, helping to generate tens of millions of dollars in sales and becoming what RJR called “The best salesman the beverage has ever had.”

The rise of Teddy Grahams

Its success with Hawaiian Punch led RJR to expand into other foods, including puddings and maple syrup. Then in 1985 the tobacco giant acquired Nabisco, which catapulted the company into a dominant player in the food industry. The conglomerate went on to launch many successful new processed foods, including Teddy Grahams, a bite-sized children’s snack that soon became the third best-selling cookie behind only Chips Ahoy and Oreo, both also produced by Nabisco.

RJR Nabisco marketed Teddy Grahams as “a delicious yet wholesome snack because they’re made with graham flour and other wholesome ingredients.” Yet critics pointed out that the product was predominantly made from white flour and contained just two grams of graham flour in a one-ounce serving. The snack was so popular that Nabisco created an adult version of it, Honey Maid Honeycomb Graham Snacks. “Nabisco reasoned that the sweet taste and relatively healthful image could also hook adults,” according to a 1990 New York Times article about the launch of the new snack.

A couple years later, as the low-fat craze was underway, Nabisco introduced its wildly popular SnackWell’s cookies, which sold out in stores across the country, reaching sales of almost a half-billion dollars in only three years. SnackWell’s low-fat and fat-free cookies appealed to weight-conscious consumers. But the snacks contained plenty of sugar and calories, and critics pointed out that people would often binge on them because they believed they weren’t fattening — a phenomenon known as the SnackWell effect.

Marketing Kool-Aid and Lunchables

Nabisco was bought in 2000 by Philip Morris, which was already a dominant player in the food industry thanks to its acquisitions of Kraft and General Foods in the 1980s. Schmidt at UCSF said that when Philip Morris bought General Foods in 1985, it installed tobacco executives at the food company and launched initiatives to market sugary drinks and processed foods to children and minorities.

To broaden the reach of its cigarettes, Philip Morris used a marketing strategy called “line extensions”: Marlboro cigarettes were marketed to men, Virginia Slims targeted women and menthol cigarettes were heavily advertised to Black consumers.

The company applied the same tactic to processed foods, Schmidt said. It added new flavors and formulas to many of its existing products, giving consumers an endless variety of hyper-palatable foods to buy.

Between 1986 and 2004, Philip Morris developed a dozen new products of liquid and frozen Kool-Aid and introduced around 36 child-tested flavors, including Kickin’ Kiwi Lime and Great Bluedini, which had its own cartoon mascot.

One of its best-selling products, Lunchables, was introduced in 1988 by Oscar Mayer. Designed to look like a TV dinner and marketed to busy moms and their children, the iconic, prepackaged meal of bologna, crackers and processed cheese contained so much sodium and saturated fat that some doctors called it a “blood pressure bomb.” One Philip Morris executive joked about references that the healthiest item in a package of Lunchables was the napkin.

According to “Salt Sugar Fat,” the best-selling book by investigative journalist Michael Moss, Lunchables had sales of $218 million in its first 12 months on the market. This prompted Oscar Mayer to introduce line extensions such as Lunchables with Snickers bars, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Kool-Aid and Capri Sun.

By the early 2000s, Philip Morris was mired in tobacco lawsuits. Moss said the company’s leadership warned its food-side executives that they could face a similar risk of litigation over the health effects of processed foods. One senior Kraft executive named Michael Mudd, Moss said, reviewed the company’s records and products and told a Philip Morris lawyer he was worried that some of its cookies and processed foods could drive people to eat compulsively.

The tobacco companies are no longer in the food business — but the impact they had on the food supply was substantial.

Fazzino’s new study found that by 2018, the differences in previously tobacco-owned foods and other foods had mostly disappeared. It’s not that foods got healthier, Fazzino said, but that other companies saw what worked and many products likely were reformulated to make them just as hyper-palatable as those sold by their competitors.

And not all that frou-frou organic shit is great for you either.

Common Foods That Can Be Toxic

Cherry Pits

The hard stone in the center of cherries is full of prussic acid, also known as cyanide, which is poisonous. But there’s no need to freak out if you accidentally swallow one -- intact pits just pass through your system and out the other end. Avoid crunching or crushing pits as you nosh on your cherries.

Apple Seeds

Apple seeds also have cyanide, so throwing back a handful as a snack isn’t smart. Luckily, apple seeds have a protective coating that keeps the cyanide from entering your system if you accidentally eat them. But it’s good to be cautious. Even in small doses, cyanide can cause rapid breathing, seizures, and possibly death.

Elderberries

You may take elderberry as a syrup or supplement to boost your immune system and treat cold or flu symptoms or constipation. But eating unripe berries, bark, or leaves of elderberry may leave you feeling worse instead of better. They have both lectin and cyanide, two chemicals that can cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

Nutmeg

Nutmeg adds a nice, nutty flavor when you add it in small amounts to baked goods. But eaten by the spoonful, it can cause big problems to your system. Even as little as 2 teaspoons can be toxic to your body because of myristicin, an oil that can cause hallucinations, drowsiness, dizziness, confusion, and seizures.

Green Potatoes

The leaves, sprouts, and underground stems (tubers) of potatoes contain a toxic substance called glycoalkaloid. Glycoalkaloids make a potato look green when it’s exposed to light, gets damaged, or ages. Eating potatoes with a high glycoalkaloid content can cause nausea, diarrhea, confusion, headaches, and death.

Raw Kidney Beans

Of all the bean varieties, raw red kidney beans have the highest concentration of lectins. Lectins are a toxin that can give you a bad stomachache, make you vomit, or give you diarrhea. It only takes 4-5 raw kidney beans to cause these side effects, which is why it’s best to boil your beans before eating.

Rhubarb Leaves

Eating the stalk is OK, but leave out the leaf. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid, which binds to calcium and makes it harder for your body to absorb it­­. In turn, your bones can’t grow the way they should, and you’re at risk for kidney stones, blood clotting problems, vomiting, diarrhea, and coma.

Bitter Almonds

Both types of almonds -- bitter and sweet -- have amygdalin, a chemical compound that can turn into cyanide, but bitter almonds have the highest levels by far. Sweet almonds are safe to snack on, but eating untreated bitter almonds can cause cramps, nausea, and diarrhea.

Star Fruit

If you have kidney disease, it’s best to leave star fruit out of your diet. Normal kidneys can filter out the toxins in this sweet fruit, but for a system that can’t, the toxin sticks around and can cause mental confusion, seizures, and death.

Mushrooms

They may be great on pizza, but beware of certain mushrooms in the wild. Two types are particularly harmful -- the death cap (Amanita phalloides), and the destroying angel (Amanita virosa). Eating these wild mushrooms can cause abdominal pain, diarrhea and vomiting, dehydration, intense thirst, liver failure, coma, and death.

Raw Cashews

The cashews you get in stores with a raw label aren’t exactly that. Before they hit shelves, they’re steamed to remove a toxin called urushiol in their shells. Urushiol is the same toxin you find in poison ivy. Eating pre-steamed cashews can cause an allergic reaction and can be fatal if your allergies are severe.

Mangoes

Just like raw cashews, the skin, bark, and leaves of mangoes contain urushiol, the toxin in poison ivy. If you’re allergic to poison ivy, especially if that allergy is a bad one, biting into a mango can cause a severe reaction with swelling, rash, and even problems breathing.

The Good Old Days

Because nobody ever went broke underestimating the American consumer.

Turkey Salad w/ Olives & Celery in Lime Jello

🤢

Pineapple and cottage cheese in lime Jello was a pretty regular thing at my house.

Sometimes, it was shredded carrots and raisins with a cole slaw dressing - in lime Jello.

Seems like whatever my mom had, she'd throw it in with lime Jello, and boom - side dish. Made her feel creative or some-fuckin'-thing.

Today's Irony

The people who run a KFC franchise somewhere in Utah sat down together in the break room or huddled up in the boss's office or whatever, and they came up with a brilliant idea:

From Selfish Giving:

I just can’t understand what Kentucky Fried Chicken is thinking with its latest cause marketing program. This picture says it all. Buy a HALF-GALLON of soda – with 800 calories from 56 spoonfuls of sugar – for $2.99 and a buck goes to Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

First, what's the profit margin on a Mega Jug gotta be in order to allow a business to justify giving away 1/3 of the sales price?

Answer: on average, the cost of a soft drink at a fast food joint is somewhere between 13¢ and 20¢.  So if you take the high end - and even if you double it - the franchise is still way ahead.  Nuthin' wrong widdat - just sayin'.  They built their Feel-Good Campaign around the (prob'ly) biggest margin item on the menu, so let's not get too misty-eyed over their 'sacrifice'.

Second, this is one of the big reasons I don't fit in with most companies anymore.  My Stoopid-Shit-Tolerance-Threshold has gotten too low.

hat tip = facebook friend RS

Y'are What Ya Eat

...so knowing what you're shoveling into your gob every day is kinda the key to the whole "Know thyself" / "To thine own self be true" thing, ain't it?

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One of the things we have to get done is to take the FDA back from the Big Ag and Big Pharma mega-corporations that own it now.

Today's Great Idea

pure fucking genius

Good and Cheap

Two words that don't often bump into each other in the real world - but there's a wine we've recently discovered that puts things together in a pretty good way.

Bandit Wine.  Give it a try.