Pot Luck: Pullman Takes Back Pollan, Marler Money Matters

Hee hee... (4.00 / 3)

Is this just a recent trend?  Or is that the media has just all of a sudden started reporting on these incidents?

Another idiot calls 911 for a fast-food related "emergency" -

But Raibin Raof Osman isn't most people. The 20-year-old Aloha man had a sleep-over at the Washington County Jail on Memorial Day after calling 9-1-1 to complain that McDonald's left out a box of orange juice from his drive-thru order.

Osman was booked Monday night on accusations of improper use of 9-1-1. He bailed out Tuesday. The offense is a Class B misdemeanor punishable in Oregon by up to six months in jail and a fine of $2,500.

[...]

When sheriff's deputies arrived at the McDonald's, Osman was unwilling to listen to deputies explain that 9-1-1 wasn't in the business of straightening out fast food orders, said Sgt. David Thompson, spokesman for the Washington County Sheriff's Office.

Fwiw - I agree with the fine, but the potential jail time is absolutely ridiculous.  After all, eating at McDonald's is punishment enough.  Heh...

Coming soon to a Philadelphia near you!

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by: JayinPortland @ Thu May 28, 2009 at 02:20:31 AM UTC

I think this pinhead (4.00 / 4)

should have to do 80 hours community service working in a 911 call center doing cleaning, etc. just so he can hear what actual, valid, 911 calls are like and what 911 is for.

IDIOT!

Regarding locavores as elitists - explain to me how supporting local business is elitist....

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by: Joanne Rigutto @ Fri May 29, 2009 at 00:36:07 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Up here in these parts (4.00 / 4)

we like to accuse Cougs (that's Washington State students and alums) of not being the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, if you get my drift. That goes for Cougs too. One of my friends was fond of saying, "It's a Cougar thing. Neither of us would understand."

But WSU is after all an agricultural school and Washington is an agricultural state, so I'm glad to see the program reinstated.

BTW I got something kind of odd from the library today -- they checked me out an MP3 player with a copy of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" already loaded onto it. I'd rather have a copy I can tote around on my own MP3 player -- one less thing to carry around. But, whatever.

I have succumbed to the Twitter craze. @Omir55

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by: Omir the Storyteller @ Thu May 28, 2009 at 03:23:32 AM UTC

Then there's Couger Gold (4.00 / 4)

Their food science people came up with this really good canned cheese.  (not aerosol or anything, but a real cheddar relative.)  Shows up mail order like a tuna can on steroids.  Haven't had any for a while.  Hmmmm...must go to http://www.wsu.edu/creamery/.  

Souvenir taste from my Northwest days.

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by: michaelindc @ Fri May 29, 2009 at 03:37:17 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

I love, love, love Cougar Gold (4.00 / 2)

though I don't think I've had the canned version. I stayed at a B&B many years ago on the Olympic Peninsula (Port Townsend, IIRC) and it was part of their amazing breakfast spread.

Seriously yummy stuff.

I wish I knew half what the flock of them know
Of where all the berries and other things grow,
Cranberries in bogs and raspberries on top
Of the boulder-strewn mountain, and when they will crop.
--"Blueberries" by Robert Frost

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by: wide eyed lib @ Fri May 29, 2009 at 17:38:26 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

"Harvard of the Palouse" (4.00 / 3)

I am honored to help WSU out.  It is a great school.  Go Cougs.

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by: bmarler @ Thu May 28, 2009 at 05:36:34 AM UTC

Great job bill!! n/t (4.00 / 2)

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by: Curtis Abbey @ Fri May 29, 2009 at 05:10:13 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

The Gluttonous Vegan's Guide to Pa`ia, Maui, Hawai`i (4.00 / 3)

http://gluttonousvegan.blogspo...

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by: raatz @ Thu May 28, 2009 at 07:49:52 AM UTC

Heads Up - Salmonella (4.00 / 2)

From Alternet...

Deadly Salmonella: Frozen Food's Newest Ingredient

By Jim Hightower, AlterNet. Posted May 28, 2009.

Contamination has become so widespread that major frozen food purveyors admit they can no longer ensure the safety of their products.

Out in Arizona, an old tombstone bears an epitaph for a young gunslinger: "I was expecting this/But not so soon."

Gunslinging, of course, is a high-risk business. But today, some of us can expect to have the following marker on our graves: "Here lies a guy/Killed by a pot pie."

America's pot-pie threat lurks in an ingredient that today's producers of frozen foods don't list on their packages: salmonella. In just one salmonella outbreak in 2007, the Banquet brand of pies sickened an estimated 15,000 people in 41 states.

The true culprit in such poisonings, however, is not the little deadly bug, but the twin killers of corporate globalization and greed. Giant food corporations, scavenging the globe in a constant search for ever-cheaper ingredients to put in their processed edibles, are resorting to low-wage, high-pollution nations that have practically no food-safety laws, much less any safety enforcement.

Consider the case of ConAgra Foods, a massive conglomerate that sells 100 million pot pies a year under its Banquet label. Each pie contains 25 ingredients sourced from all over the world -- often from subcontractors who don't report their sources. Until the 2007 salmonella contamination of its pies, ConAgra did not even require suppliers to test for pathogens, nor did it do its own tests. Since poisoning one's customers turned out to be a bad strategy for earning repeat business, the conglomerate now runs spot checks -- but even when it detects contamination in a pie, it has not been able to determine which ingredient is the bad one.

In fact, as The New York Times recently reported in an extensive expose, food giants concede that their supply chains are so far-flung that they "do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening items for microbes." Meanwhile, the industry's lobbying front, the Grocery Manufacturers of America, has aggressively fought federal efforts to require a tracking system. "This information is not reasonably needed," the GMA curtly responded when such a rule was proposed.

ALARMING CONSUMER ALERT: Today, contamination has become so widespread that major frozen food purveyors admit they can no longer ensure the safety of their products!

Perhaps you're thinking that, surely, this self-indictment of the reckless globalization process has prompted corporations to change their systems and suppliers in order to ensure you and me that their foods are safe to eat. Ha! What a silly dreamer you are.

That could squeeze their profits, so instead they've come up with a much more corporate-friendly solution: They're shifting their contamination problem to you and me!

You'll notice that frozen food packages now contain precise, almost frantic instructions (complete with illustrations) on "kill steps" that we must take to keep their products from poisoning us. Banquet, for example, has a four-step diagram on the back of its pot-pie packages, directing consumers to make sure that the pie is heated to an internal temperature of exactly 165 degrees "as measured by a food thermometer in several spots."

Do such directives actually make frozen foods safe? An official with the Blackstone Group, the Wall Street equity firm that owns Swanson and Hungry Man brands, curtly states that the level of risk to consumers depends on "how badly they followed our directions."

His snotty attitude aside, following corporate cooking instructions to a "T" doesn't do the trick. The New York Times tested the directions on various brands of pot pies -- and all failed to achieve the magic level of 165 degrees. "Some spots in the pie heated to only 140 degrees even as parts of the crust were burnt," wrote reporter Michael Moss.

This is absurd. Frozen foods are supposed to be a consumer convenience, not a risky science experiment. Instead of thrusting faulty instructions at us on how to avoid "death by pie," how about just requiring conglomerates that profit from these products to accept their responsibility to put safe ingredients in their pies?

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

And as one commenter there asks...

RE: Boycott
Posted by: Sister_Lauren on May 28, 2009 10:51 AM  

If we don't even know if our food is bacterially clean, how can we be sure we aren't eating all kinds of heavy metals and other organic or inorganic poisons?

Good question indeed.

Yankee Frugality: use it up, wear it out, make it last, or do without.

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by: Anonymous Bosch @ Fri May 29, 2009 at 02:24:31 AM UTC