food safety
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Fast food chains give up ‘pink slime’ meat product
McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Burger King just stopped using a product popularly known as "pink slime" in their burger meat. The "slime" comes from the tiny bits of beef in leftover fatty trimming. Those bits are doused with ammonia in order to kill E. coli and are then made into human food. Or “human” “food.” […]
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Your mom was right: Don’t eat raw cookie dough
I know, I know, it's so good. But a study of a 2009 E. coli outbreak, led by CDC researchers and state health officials, has traced the contamination back to prepackaged raw cookie dough. Turns out ready-to-bake is not the same as ready-to-not-bake-and-get-right-to-the-eating. Ugh, god, what are we supposed to scarf when we get dumped […]
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What do you know about GMOs? [Infographic]
October is National Non-GMO Month. Brush up on your GMO knowledge with this handy infographic.
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Cantaloupe food poisoning outbreak is now the deadliest in 12 years
Don't tell Michele Bachmann, but it turns out that when food isn't adequately regulated, you can get giant deadly food poisoning outbreaks. Most recently, a crop of listeria-tainted cantaloupe has now killed 13 people officially, and possibly as many as 16 -- shooting right past the salmonella episode three years ago that killed nine. This is the most deaths from contaminated food since a 1998 listeria outbreak that killed 21.
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Michele Bachmann thinks food regulation is 'overkill'
Let nobody say Michele Bachmann isn't consistent, at least in this one particular sense. The woman just doesn't like regulation. Even the kind that's meant to keep you from chowing down on E. coli casserole.
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Not your grandma's milk
Buying a gallon of milk at the grocery store practically guarantees that you'll get a mixture of substances from all over the country -- and possibly the world.
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Food safety breakthrough: USDA declares 'Big Six' E. coli strains illegal
Until today, six strains of the pathogen -- known to cause almost 40,000 illnesses, 1,100 hospitalizations, and 30 deaths annually -- were legal in meat.
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European farmers spend millions on knock-off pesticides
Buying a knock-off Louis Vuitton bag is one thing, but in Europe, farmers are buying knock-off pesticides. Counterfeit pesticides have become a multimillion industry over there, and if that sounds like bad news, it is: According to the Wall Street Journal, these knock-offs contain a solvent that the European Union banned because it's a huge problem for pregnant women.
The WSJ's article also makes the E.U.'s efforts to deal with the problem sound like a giant clusterf*ck. There are loopholes in counterfeiting laws that mean customs can't seize the fake pesticides. The company that's been ripped off has to deal with the goods and try to recoup costs from counterfeiters, who are obviously the sort of people who'll say, "Whoops, you found me! Here are the millions of euros I made selling nasty, dangerous goods under your name!" (Or, as the WSJ puts it: "[P]ractically this can prove complicated and even impossible, as many of these companies are beyond EU jurisdiction or completely bogus.")
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Honey laundering: tainted and counterfeit Chinese honey floods into the U.S.
A third of the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals, according to a blockbuster story in Food Safety News.