Bad Bad Batz

My version of CDC’s Food Safety Report Card

Oh boy. Screw those microbe plushies. I need some microbe cross-stitch.

This and more by Alicia Watkins!

the WAREHOUSE

I definitely wish food poisoning involved hallucinating about space bunnies instead of gushing liquid out of your face and ass.

Moreover, I wish this mayo myth would go away. It’s the food safety equivalent of the boiled frog metaphor. While homemade mayonnaise can be very risky business, jarred mayonnaise isn’t. It doesn’t even need to be refrigerated after opening. Well, to clarify, you should definitely refrigerate it unless you like it really funky and chunky, but it has nothing to do with making you sick.

But wait, it gets better. Commercial mayo is actually protective. It kills bacteria. It is made from pasteurized eggs and has been formulated with enough vinegar, salt, and preservatives to make it a poor environment for pathogens. As proven by science, SCIENCE!

What this means is that when you take foods that are actually pretty high-risk, like chicken or ham or potatoes, and mix them with commercial mayo, you might actually be making those foods safer. When people get sick from deli-type salads nowadays it is usually either because it was made with homemade mayo or because one of the other ingredients was contaminated.

Turns out.

conscientia-vita:

Use plastic bottles to completely and safely seal food bags.

This is one of those things where part of me is like “Uh, are twist ties causing that much landfill waste?,” but a bigger part of me wants to run downstairs and DO THIS RIGHT NOW.

There is an even bigger part of me, however, that knows that if I did it, my wife would give me one of those looks, you know, one of those looks that says not only, “You are the biggest fucking idiot I’ve ever met,” but also, “You are turning into your father, you know that guy that trims his bread bags so that he doesn’t have this large tail of plastic as the loaf gets smaller and who folds his stash of plastic grocery bags into neat little triangles.”

So.

Interesting fact: although only 90% of Americans are opposed to “pink slime” in their burgers, it turns out over 99.9% think that this book cover art is the worst cultural artifact in all of human history.

It’s just. I mean. Wow.

Comic sans? Font shadow? Inconsistent capitalization? Silhouette businessman clipart? Photoshop butchery of Hosukai’s glorious Great Wave woodblock print to include pink conical stalactite fangs? Specifying that it was, in fact, authored by an “author?” The backslash?

But I’m sure the content inside is wonderful, all FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY PAGES of it.

(via Food Safety News)

Apparently, one of the health problems is poor spelling.

I would argue, also, contagious fear-mongering, but hey, I can’t prove that nearly as indisputably.

(ABC News)

via ilovecharts

This is exactly why I stopped following I Love Charts.

1. No attribution. I happen to know these charts. They are from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). They are NOT from the CDC. They are based on CDC data, but they are CSPI charts.

2. No context. These charts date from 1999, specifically from a pre-Thanksgiving food safety press conference.

3. Wrong or misleading information. In 1999, CDC published the “Mead” estimates” of foodborne illnesses in the United States. This landmark article estimates that there were 76 million cases of foodborne illness annually, along with 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths. Of these, the paper estimated that Camplyobacter caused 2.0 million cases, 10,500 hospitalizations, and 99 deaths, while Salmonella caused 1.3 million cases, 15,600 hospitalizations, and 553 deaths. So, tell me, how does 76 million/2 million = 47%. It doesn’t. It equals something like 2% of overall food poisonings.
   
   Here’s the math behind the chart: Of the 76 million overall cases, 13.8 million (18%) are due to 28 specified foodborne pathogens. Of these 13.8 million due to specified pathogens, 9.2 million (67%) are from foodborne viruses (e.g. Norovirus, Hepatitis A), 400,000 (3%) are from parasites (e.g. Toxoplasma, Giardia), and 4.2 million (30%) are from bacteria. Therefore, Campylobacter causes 47% of 30% of 18% of all foodborne illnesses. By ignoring specified viruses and parasites, and by ignoring the 60 million illnesses due to unspecified agents, the chart is a classic example of using careful cherry picking to present a woefully misleading picture.
   
   This is a lesser point, but not all Salmonella and Campylobacter illnesses are caused by poultry, as suggested by the “fowl” in the headline. In my own analysis, found in this report and soon in an article that’s in press, we found that only about 21% of foodborne Salmonella outbreaks and 19% of foodborne Campylobacter outbreaks (1999-2008) are traced back to poultry. Admittedly, these numbers are likely low: our survey of 45 experts found that they believed 70% of foodborne Campylobacter and 35% of Salmonella illnesses to be due to poultry.

I do not dispute the overall point that Caroline was making, that Salmonella and Campylobacter in poultry are important. In fact, I strongly agree with it. In our own analysis, based not on CDC’s 1999 estimates but on their 2011 estimates, we found Salmonella and Campylobacter to cause over $5 billion in public health damages annually, and we found poultry to be the food to cause the most disease burden (not most number of illnesses, but of the greatest impact when you consider deaths, hospitalizations, chronic illness, and mild and moderate cases).

But I still find these pie charts woefully misleading, and presented here, without attribution or context, they are irredeemable.

It’s one thing to present a cutesy chart like “Location of your waiter.” LOL LMFAO ROTFL, whatever. But even silly things should be attributed, and this isn’t an isolated incident. Half the time, the link on ILC is just to some other Tumblr who ripped it off someone else. Here’s a post from yesterday that includes a web address in the image itself, yet still, there’s no link out. That is so lame.

And yes, the fact that ILC is selling ads and promoting a book of this junk matters. This isn’t a teenager reblogging Twilight gifs. This is grown men with a very popular project on their hands. This shit is indefensible.

Furthermore, yes, when the chart being unceremoniously thrown on the pile pertains to a real issue or something of national policy importance, attribution and context are doubly important. In this case, a Google reverse image lookup identifies the source. If you are too lazy to even do that, I don’t know what to say.

I do not expect these guys to defend every chart, or to have some sort of arduous process for screening submissions, but by putting stuff like this up, without even a minimal effort to link out or provide context, they are making the world worse. They are, fittingly, parasites.

Seriously, fuck this noise.

He. Is. EVERYWHERE!

Seriously, I have no idea how he does it all.