Search Results Tag: food recalls

600+ SF Restaurants impacted by recall of spices

April 10, 2009 at 12:40 pm Filed in:food&drink No Comments

In San Francisco, there are over 600 restaurants and retailers (622, according to a spreadsheet released by the California DPH.) affected by the recent recall of spices packaged by the Union International Food Company under the labels Lian How and Uncle Chen. The list includes a bunch of liquor stores and groceries where consumers may have unwittingly purchased the potentially contaminated products… but hundreds of restaurants are included in the list as well.

The establishments include a large number of smaller Asian restaurants and corner stores, but also include some well-known SF establishments ranging from the low-cost dives where you’d likely expect to get food poisoning anyway, to like Burma Super Star and Mandalay, Boogaloo’s, Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack, Bissap Baobab, the King of Thai chain, Peasant Pies, Osha, Seller’s Markets, to places that are a little more ‘up there’ Espetus Churrascaria and Tryptich. Even bars like Delerium are affected. [See the full list after the cut.]

In a quick glance at the restaurants, I didn’t notice any of the restaurants which label themselves as ‘sustainable’ sticking out as being on the list… but that doesn’t mean that I think this is a “sustainable vs. industrial” food production issue, as it might appear. And I’m not laying any fault on the restaurants themselves…. not really.

What it really communicates to me is the bizarre disconnect between us and where our food comes from – especially when we’re dining out in restaurants. When I was still a vegetarian (at least when in Florida and the Midwest), not only was it impossible to find out where my food came from – most of the time, I couldn’t even find out if there was chicken in it or not. The wait staff usually doesn’t know… and in many places, there’s a communication gap between the servers and the kitchen. Although in San Francisco, it’s a little different… you’re usually able to find out if there’s meat in a meal… but if you have other dietary restrictions, restaurants are still not always accommodating – they’re unwilling to let you know what’s in a dish to protect their recipe, they simply don’t know, or they unintentionally (or, perhaps, sometimes intentionally) disseminate misinformation.

Note: the next page takes a while to load with all the restaurant data.
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Food recalls running rampant – can we know what we’re eating?

April 9, 2009 at 4:06 pm Filed in:Cooking | food&drink No Comments

So far this year, a number of separate food recalls have been issued due to salmonella contamination from a handful of manufacturers – including thousands of products from hundreds of different labels, products that include Peanuts, Pistachios, Egg rolls, Pepper, a slew of other spices… even organic eggs have felt the crunch. And the food has made its way not only into the products we purchase from the grocer, but into restaurants and even school cafeterias as well.

But most of the time, we don’t even know what’s in our food, let alone where it came from… so when there’s a peanut recall, even if we toss any peanut butter we have in our cupboards, we might not think to look at the labels on our salad dressing, frozen pad thai, or even our pet food.

I suppose this is, in large part, a consequence of our convenience-based society, the ridiculously large scale that food is produced on today… but at this point, it is a wholly unnecessary one. Today, the technology at our disposal that could allow us to know where our food comes from – be it the myriad ingredients from sources currently unbeknownst to us, or purchased from the weekend farmer’s market. The main roadblock preventing this today is not that it is impossible to create a way to track our food back to the farm, or even that it would be too costly to implement a real-time tracking system accessible to consumers.

What I fear will prevent this from becoming reality is the very real fact that the manufacturers’ ability to keep us ignorant of where our food is sourced from helps them to maintain their profit line. Were we to know how our food is sourced, the degree of homogenization, and the risk at which that places us and the integrity of our food supply, demands would be made for changes that would be a real cost to the large-scale food producers of the nation. And so long as it is simply optional for food manufacturers to provide this information to the consumer, it won’t be done on a large enough scale to truly be useful… for it appears that trade secrets are more likely to be a concern than consumer safety. Still, there’s no reason we shouldn’t get started.

But I’ll get into that another day, I suppose.

More about the recalls:

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