Everybody Knows You’re a Dog

[ed. Evercookie = malware]

Remember 1993? The World Wide Web had already been invented and nobody knew about it. The NCSA Mosaic browser had just appeared in a limited alpha release, but the text-based Gopher service was the closest thing most people had to an interactive user interface to dive into information on the Internet. The commercial use of the Net was still extremely limited in America, as the National Science Foundation’s NSFNet backbone ostensibly prohibited anything but academic use. In other countries, the Internet existed barely, if at all.

Into that void, New Yorker cartoonist Peter Steiner dropped what is now the most popular and well-known panel ever produced for the magazine: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

In 1993, the Internet was still a great mystery to most people, if they’d even heard of it. America Online (AOL) was the way most people got “online,” and email was the primary use of the Internet — and for people who weren’t connected to an academic institution or using one of the early Internet service providers (ISPs), this happened via gateways from AOL and other walled gardens.

Steiner’s single panel manages to convey the Internet’s newness and the personal purpose to which most people then put it, as well as its fundamental anonymity. The tools to track someone down or even demand a “real” name were nonexistent. One could be a dog (cats came later), and no one would be able to tell the difference. It was a time that now seems remarkably innocent. (...)

When the “dog” cartoon first appeared, pseudonymity on the Internet was a given, and anonymity wasn’t difficult. With the onset of commercial uses of the network and the appearance of widely available graphical Web browsers later in 1993, general anonymity became even easier because one could pay an ISP for access, but the ISP didn’t give two figs what you did online — nor, in those days, could it possibly have had the routers or storage to track behavior if it had wanted to.

One could post comments all over with little or no connection to one’s identity or location. The Web is inherently stateless — there’s no idea of a continuous session built in — which made it hard in its early days to allow for the association of a browser with an identity. The later addition of Web cookies allowed servers to push a unique code and other information to browsers, which browsers would send back with each request. This strings connections like pearls on a necklace and allows continuity, which allows an account and a login.

Such tracking doesn’t necessarily destroy anonymity, but it does reduce it. When a Web site or outside authority has only an IP address and other browser information by which to identify a user uniquely, the task becomes harder, as many networks share a single numeric address on the public-facing Internet and use private addresses internally. And the public addresses can change over time.

Marketers, of course, want to erase anonymity and even pseudonymity, because the less knowable an individual is, the less value that person has to advertisers. The more accurately they track you, the more lucrative it is to sell ads that cater to you or shop your data to other parties that combine online details with real-world purchasing behavior and credit records.

Over the years, Adobe Flash-based cookies and other breadcrumbs that allow tracking over many sites (or that bypass users’ ability to defeat such tracking) have been baked into plug-ins and browsers, often as unintentional byproducts. The “evercookie” proof-of-concept revealed that it was nearly impossible to kill all the stateful tracking elements for a site that wanted to keep you in its sights.

by Glenn Fleishman, Boing Boing | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia

Je Regrette: Why Regret is Essential to the Good Life

There’s a particular disdain for regret in US culture. It’s regarded as self-indulgent and irrational — a ‘useless’ feeling. We prefer utilitarian emotions, those we can use as vehicles for transformation, and closure. ‘Dwelling’, we tend to agree, gets you nowhere. It just leads you around in circles.

Regret is so counter to the pioneer spirit — with its belief in blinkered perseverance, and dogged forward motion — it’s practically un-American. In the US, you keep your squint firmly planted on the horizon and put one foot in front of the other. There’s something suspiciously female, possibly French, about any morbid interiority.

Best, then, to treat the past like an overflowing closet: just shut the door and walk away. ‘What’s done is done,’ we say. ‘It is what it is.’ ‘There’s no use crying over spilt milk.’ (...)

In a culture that believes winning is everything, that sees success as a totalising, absolute system, happiness and even basic worth are determined by winning. It’s not surprising, then, that people feel they need to deny regret — deny failure — in order to stay in the game. Though we each have a personal framework for looking at regret, Landman argues, the culture privileges a pragmatic, rationalist attitude toward regret that doesn’t allow for emotion or counterfactual ideation, and then combines with it a heroic framework which equates anything that lands short of the platonic ideal with failure. In such an environment, the denial of failure takes on magical powers. It becomes inoculation against failure itself. To express regret is nothing short of dangerous. It threatens to collapse the whole system.

In starting to lay out the possible uses of regret, Landman quotes William Faulkner. ‘The past,’ he wrote in 1950, ‘is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Great novels, Landman points out, are often about regret: about the life-changing consequences of a single bad decision (say, marrying the wrong person, not marrying the right one, or having let love pass you by altogether) over a long period of time. Sigmund Freud believed that thoughts, feelings, wishes, etc, are never entirely eradicated, but if repressed ‘[ramify] like a fungus in the dark and [take] on extreme forms of expression’. The denial of regret, in other words, will not block the fall of the dominoes. It will just allow you to close your eyes and clap your hands over your ears as they fall, down to the very last one.

Not surprisingly, it turns out that people’s greatest regrets revolve around education, work, and marriage, because the decisions we make around these issues have long-term, ever-expanding repercussions. The point of regret is not to try to change the past, but to shed light on the present. This is traditionally the realm of the humanities. What novels tell us is that regret is instructive. And the first thing regret tells us (much like its physical counterpart — pain) is that something in the present is wrong.

by Carina Chocano, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Anna Pogossova/Gallery Stock

Bruce Cockburn

Lady in Black by * cikolatali-waffle
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Vapor Trail

The fall day is cloudless, calm and temperate. I’ve just finished a great meal on the patio of a popular café not far from the Plaza. An espresso is en route, and now, there’s only one thing left to do to complete the perfection of my dining experience: scratch a decades-old nicotine itch.

I take a familiar puff, a deep inhale, and there’s a warm collision at the back of my throat. I exhale: a dense but quickly dissipating cloud. It gets better as I repeat the ritual and pair it with the just-delivered caffeine concentrate.

But suddenly I’m aware that this whole thing might not be as satisfying for my waiter and the restaurant’s other patrons as it is for me. No one says a word. The looks I’m catching, though, as I billow out another nebula, range from disgust to curiosity.

That’s not smoke coming out of my mouth; it’s water-vapor. Nothing’s on fire. There’s been no combustion. Still, confusion reigns. So I find a quiet patch of shaded grass beyond the confines of the patio to enjoy what’s left of the afternoon–and my electronic cigarette.

The diners and staff at the restaurant are far from alone in their befuddlement, curiosity and inherent distrust about “e-cigarettes.” They have been around a decade but are only recently becoming ubiquitous in urban society. Studies and surveys show that millions of people are using e-cigarettes, and the number is steadily climbing. Financial analysts predict that, by year’s end, e-cigarettes will comprise an industry that has doubled in size since 2012 to become worth more than a billion dollars. Some even say the rise of the e-cig has contributed to a slight decline in cigarette sales.

The market’s explosive growth, its lack of regulation, an increase in use among children, pressing medical questions about health effects and the products’ association with one of America’s true social pariahs has placed e-cigarettes at the center of a vigorous national public health debate. That debate has found footholds at the state and local levels, too.

Essentially, e-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that heat a solution of vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol and artificial flavoring, converting the mixture into vapor the user inhales. The act has birthed a new verb into the parlance: vaping. The overwhelming majority of vapers, me included, buy e-cig juice that’s infused with the highly addictive drug nicotine at a level chosen by the purchaser.

by Jeff Proctor, SF Reporter |  Read more:

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Greg Marquez - Winter Alley, 2013
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Peter Blake, The Meeting, 1981.
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Claude Joseph Vernet, The Shipwreck (1772)
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The Space Needle, Seattle, WA
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The Octopus That Almost Ate Seattle

In the months leading up to the hunt, Dylan Mayer trained twice a week in his parents’ swimming pool, asking friends to attack him, splay their arms and grab him, drag him to the surface and shove him below it, pull off his mask, snatch his regulator, time his recovery. By last Halloween, he was ready, and as the light began to fade that afternoon, the broad-shouldered 19-year-old jumped into a red Ford pickup truck with his buddy and drove some 40 minutes from Maple Valley, Wash., to West Seattle. They arrived at Alki Beach around 4 p.m., put on their wet suits and ambled into Cove 2. Then they slipped into Elliott Bay, the Space Needle punctuating the city line in the distance like an inverted exclamation point.

Under the dark water, the teenagers looked around with the help of a diving light. At 45 feet, they passed a sunken ship, the Honey Bear, and at 85 feet, beneath the buoy line, they saw further evidence of the former marina — steel beams, pilings and sunken watercrafts. Marine life thrived in this haven of junk, and for this reason, Cove 2 was a popular dive site. According to the permit he had just purchased at Walmart, Mayer was allowed to catch this sea life and cook it, which is exactly what he set out to do. He wasn’t much of a chef, but he had experience foraging for his dinner. Mayer had attended a high school known for its Future Farmers of America program; he also knew how to slaughter cows and castrate bulls. Now he was going to community college, where he was asked to draw something from nature. He figured that he might as well eat it too. And as he scanned the bay, he could already imagine searing the marine morsels on high heat and popping them, rare and unctuous, into his mouth. He soon spotted his prey. “That’s a big [expletive] octopus,” he scribbled on his underwater slate.

The giant Pacific octopus was curled inside a rock piling, both its color and texture altered by camouflage. Mayer judged it to be his size, about six feet, and wondered if he could take it on alone. He lunged at the octopus, grabbing one of its eight arms. It slipped slimily between his fingers, its suckers feeling and tasting his hand. He reached for it again, and again it retreated. Able to squeeze its body through a space as small as a lemon, the octopus was unlikely to succumb to his grip. He poked it with his finger and watched it turn brighter shades of red, until finally, it sprang forward and revealed itself to be a nine-foot wheel charging through the water.

The octopus grabbed Mayer where it could, encircling his thigh, spiraling his torso, its some 1,600 suckers — varying in size from a peppercorn to a pepper mill — latching onto his wet suit and face. It pulled Mayer’s regulator out of his mouth. His adrenaline rising, he punched the creature, and began a wrestling match that would last 25 minutes.

Eventually, he managed to pull the animal to the surface, where a number of divers couldn’t help noticing a teenager punching an 80-pound octopus. As they approached, Mayer freaked out. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, sucker marks ringing his face. “Maybe we shouldn’t have done this.” But it was too late. He dragged his kill ashore, where a few bystanders, in disbelief, took his picture and threatened to report him. Lugging the octopus to the red truck, Mayer cited his permit. But the divers kept taking pictures. That night, as Mayer butchered the octopus for dinner, they posted the photos online.

In a city finely attuned to both the ethics of food sourcing and poster-worthy animal causes (the spotted owl, the killer whale and marbled murrelet among them), Mayer’s exploits became an instant cause célèbre. On Nov. 1 and 2, Seattle’s competing news stations reported the octopus hunt. The next day, The Seattle Times ran the story on the front page. On Web forums, Seattleites tracked down the teenager’s name and address through the clues in the photos: the truck’s license plate, the high school named on Mayer’s sweatshirt and the inspection sticker affixed to his tank. “I hope this sick [expletive] gets tangled in a gill net next time he dives and thus removes a potential budding sociopath before it graduates from invertebrates to mammals,” read one typical comment, which received 52 “thumbs-ups.” Around the same time, Scott Lundy, one of the men who had confronted Mayer in Cove 2, issued a “Save the G.P.O.” petition to ban octopus harvesting from the beach and examine the practice statewide. By the next day, he had collected 1,105 signatures.

Across Elliott Bay, at the same time, a much subtler food sourcer was at work. Chef Matthew Dillon was building his highly anticipated new restaurant, Bar Sajor (pronounced “sigh-your”) in Pioneer Square. After the success of his first, Sitka & Spruce, Dillon, 39, earned an unsought reputation as the consummate locavore in a city filled with them. He cultivated rare herbs and foraged for mushrooms in the foothills of the Cascades; whereas many Brooklyn restaurants are only now coming around to wood sorrel and perilla, Dillon has been cooking with them since 1995. At Bar Sajor, there would be a rotisserie and a wood-fire oven, but no gas range; Dillon would make his own yogurt and vinegars, ferment his own vegetables and change his menu every day depending on what looked fresh and interesting — including, as it happened, giant Pacific octopus.

So as the “Save the G.P.O.” campaign raged this spring, the city raved about Dillon’s octopus salad. In The Stranger, the influential alt-weekly magazine, Bethany Jean Clement described it as having “a restrained oceangoing flavor, a bouncy but tender texture — sometimes a little chewy but never rubbery,” plated that day with “a thick walnut sauce, dill for freshness, and an oozing egg yolk for vivid creaminess and color.” The Seattle Times also heaped praise. “Bar Sajor Is Matt Dillon’s Finest Yet,” ran one Friday headline, just a week after another: “New Hunting Rules Likely for Puget Sound Octopus.” Whenever the salad appeared on the menu, it sold out. Inevitably this posed a most uncomfortable question for Seattle’s food community: should it save the giant Pacific octopus or just eat it?

by Marnie Hanel, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Mark Saiget and Kyle Johnson

A Piece of the Action

Imagine having acquired a financial interest in LeBron James, Peyton Manning or Roger Federer early in their careers.

A new company wants to make this fantasy a reality for the next generation of superstars.

On Thursday, Fantex Holdings will announce the opening of a marketplace for investors to buy and sell interests in professional athletes. The start-up, backed by prominent executives from Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the sports world, plans to create stocks tied to the value and performance of an athlete’s brand.

It will have its debut with an initial public offering for a minority stake in Arian Foster, the Pro Bowl running back of the Houston Texans. Buying shares in the deal will give investors an interest in a stock linked to Mr. Foster’s future economic success, which includes the value of his playing contracts, endorsements and appearance fees.

Buck French, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said Fantex hoped to sign additional players in football and other sports, as well as expand into other talent areas like pop singers and Hollywood actors.

“Fantex is bringing sports and business together in a way never previously thought possible,” Mr. French said. “We have built a powerful platform to help build the brands of athletes and celebrities.” (...)

Nothing about Fantex is make believe. As of Thursday, investors can register with the company, finance their accounts with cash and place orders for shares in the Foster I.P.O. The offering plans to sell about $10.5 million worth of stock, representing a 20 percent interest in Mr. Foster’s future brand income. Mr. Foster will pocket $10 million; the balance will cover the costs of the deal.

Unlike many esoteric Wall Street investments that are available only to so-called high-net-worth individuals, the Fantex offering is available to United States residents 18 years and older, with a minimum investment of $50. There are some restrictions. For instance, investors with annual incomes of $50,000 to $100,000 may only invest up to $7,500 in the offering. Individual state securities laws might also place further limits and who can invest, Mr. French said.

Fantex will market the Foster I.P.O. in the coming weeks, offering 1.06 million shares at $10 a share. No one can own more than 1 percent of the offering, ensuring that it is available to a wide number of investors. If demand is less than the number of shares being offered, Fantex may cancel the deal.

by Peter Lattman and Steve Eder, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Eric Gay/Associated Press

Willy Ronis, Le petit parisien, 1952.
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Deer

Not asking for much kept me safe. There was nothing else to recommend the habit, just that. Books, music, the heat and smell of a fire in the wood stove—those were company and comfort. I didn’t go looking for more or expect it to come for me. I was close to 40 when Carrie held out her hand and we began our slow dance. She gave me time to feel the rhythm and follow it, to be grateful for a gift.

To expect another would have been greed, but I never said so to her.

When Nathan came, I loved him in the same whole-hearted, thankful way I loved his mother, perhaps because there was no one before her and there was no other way I knew. When he was asleep on my shoulder and it felt right and natural to have him there, I put away my suspicion that Carrie and I tempted our luck. I forgot for a while that happiness is fragile, that life is made of glass. Maybe I chose to forget those things or needed a rest from knowing them. Once I was reminded, I never forgot again.

Sorrow was an old acquaintance by the day I lingered at the edge of a cemetery and watched strangers put my wife in the ground and refill the rest of an ugly hole with nothing better than the earth that came from it. When they took all the flowers from people who loved her and laid them on the dirt, what I saw from a distance was a quilt Carrie sewed by hand and filled with down and spread over a bed that we were meant to share.

Nathan was there too, far enough away during the service that everyone knew not to talk to him, not even if—for once—they wanted to be kind. He didn’t want talking any more than I did. I did the bare minimum I was supposed to and told Carrie’s sister I wouldn’t be returning to my own house to eat and drink and mill around in little groups of people, as uncomfortable to be there as I would have been. I’ve never cared to see people or honor an occasion that way and I wasn’t going to do it without Carrie or even because of her.

When the gravediggers climbed back into their truck and drove away, Nathan and I were left to stare at one another across rows of polished granite, gray or pink, until he turned and disappeared behind a tall hedge and I heard the engine of his old pickup turn over. I didn’t know where he was going. I didn’t see him again for days.

by James Pouilliard, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Jacob Dimiter

Pearl Jam

Tierney Gearon
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Ry Cooder & The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces

The Bear Came Over the Mountain

Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to his wife’s strange tirades with an absentminded smile. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and her mother’s political activity was probably the reason. Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics—though she liked to play “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph, and sometimes also the “Internationale,” very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her—she said he was a Visigoth—and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.

“Do you think it would be fun—” Fiona shouted. “Do you think it would be fun if we got married?”

He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

***

Just before they left their house Fiona noticed a mark on the kitchen floor. It came from the cheap black house shoes she had been wearing earlier in the day.

“I thought they’d quit doing that,” she said in a tone of ordinary annoyance and perplexity, rubbing at the gray smear that looked as if it had been made by a greasy crayon.

She remarked that she’d never have to do this again, since she wasn’t taking those shoes with her.

“I guess I’ll be dressed up all the time,” she said. “Or semi-dressed up. It’ll be sort of like in a hotel.”

She rinsed out the rag she’d been using and hung it on the rack inside the door under the sink. Then she put on her golden-brown, fur-collared ski jacket, over a white turtleneck sweater and tailored fawn slacks. She was a tall, narrow-shouldered woman, seventy years old but still upright and trim, with long legs and long feet, delicate wrists and ankles, and tiny, almost comical-looking ears. Her hair that was as light as milkweed fluff had gone from pale blond to white somehow without Grant’s noticing exactly when, and she still wore it down to her shoulders, as her mother had done. (That was the thing that had alarmed Grant’s own mother, a small-town widow who worked as a doctor’s receptionist. The long white hair on Fiona’s mother, even more than the state of the house, had told her all she needed to know about attitudes and politics.) But otherwise Fiona, with her fine bones and small sapphire eyes, was nothing like her mother. She had a slightly crooked mouth, which she emphasized now with red lipstick—usually the last thing she did before she left the house.

She looked just like herself on this day—direct and vague as in fact she was, sweet and ironic.

***

Over a year ago, Grant had started noticing so many little yellow notes stuck up all over the house. That was not entirely new. Fiona had always written things down—the title of a book she’d heard mentioned on the radio or the jobs she wanted to make sure she got done that day. Even her morning schedule was written down. He found it mystifying and touching in its precision: “7 a.m. yoga. 7:30–7:45 teeth face hair. 7:45–8:15 walk. 8:15 Grant and breakfast.”

The new notes were different. Stuck onto the kitchen drawers—Cutlery, Dish-towels, Knives. Couldn’t she just open the drawers and see what was inside?

Worse things were coming. She went to town and phoned Grant from a booth to ask him how to drive home. She went for her usual walk across the field into the woods and came home by the fence line—a very long way round. She said that she’d counted on fences always taking you somewhere.

It was hard to figure out. She’d said that about fences as if it were a joke, and she had remembered the phone number without any trouble.

“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,” she said. “I expect I’m just losing my mind.”

He asked if she had been taking sleeping pills.

“If I am I don’t remember,” she said. Then she said she was sorry to sound so flippant. “I’m sure I haven’t been taking anything. Maybe I should be. Maybe vitamins.”

Vitamins didn’t help. She would stand in doorways trying to figure out where she was going. She forgot to turn on the burner under the vegetables or put water in the coffeemaker. She asked Grant when they’d moved to this house.

“Was it last year or the year before?”

“It was twelve years ago,” he said.

“That’s shocking.”

“She’s always been a bit like this,” Grant said to the doctor. He tried without success to explain how Fiona’s surprise and apologies now seemed somehow like routine courtesy, not quite concealing a private amusement. As if she’d stumbled on some unexpected adventure. Or begun playing a game that she hoped he would catch on to.

“Yes, well,” the doctor said. “It might be selective at first. We don’t know, do we? Till we see the pattern of the deterioration, we really can’t say.”

In a while it hardly mattered what label was put on it. Fiona, who no longer went shopping alone, disappeared from the supermarket while Grant had his back turned. A policeman picked her up as she was walking down the middle of the road, blocks away. He asked her name and she answered readily. Then he asked her the name of the Prime Minister.

“If you don’t know that, young man, you really shouldn’t be in such a responsible job.”

He laughed. But then she made the mistake of asking if he’d seen Boris and Natasha. These were the now dead Russian wolfhounds she had adopted many years ago, as a favor to a friend, then devoted herself to for the rest of their lives. Her taking them over might have coincided with the discovery that she was not likely to have children. Something about her tubes being blocked, or twisted—Grant could not remember now. He had always avoided thinking about all that female apparatus. Or it might have been after her mother died. The dogs’ long legs and silky hair, their narrow, gentle, intransigent faces made a fine match for her when she took them out for walks. And Grant himself, in those days, landing his first job at the university (his father-in-law’s money welcome there in spite of the political taint), might have seemed to some people to have been picked up on another of Fiona’s eccentric whims, and groomed and tended and favored—though, fortunately, he didn’t understand this until much later.

by Alice Munro, The New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Bryan Adams

Should You Eat Chicken?

I tell this friend about the latest salmonella outbreak, and she asks me, “Should I stop eating chicken?”

It’s a good question. In recent weeks, salmonella on chicken has officially sickened more than 300 people (the Centers for Disease Control says there are 25 illnesses for every one reported, so maybe 7,500) and hospitalized more than 40 percent of them, in part because antibiotics aren’t working. Industry’s reaction has been predictably disappointing: the chicken from the processors in question — Foster Farms — is still being shipped into the market. Regulators’ responses have been limited: the same chicken in question is still being sold.

Until the Food Safety and Inspection Service (F.S.I.S.) of the Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) can get its act together and start assuring us that chicken is safe, I’d be wary.

This is not a shutdown issue, but a “We care more about industry than we do about consumers” issue. Think that’s an exaggeration? Read this mission statement: “The Food Safety and Inspection Service is the public health agency in the U.S. Department of Agriculture responsible for ensuring that the nation’s commercial supply of meat, poultry, and egg products is safe, wholesome, and correctly labeled and packaged.” What part of “safe” am I misreading?

We should all steer clear at least of Foster Farms chicken, or any of the other brands produced in that company’s California plants, although they’re not all labeled such. Costco pulled nearly 9,000 rotisserie chickens from a store south of San Francisco last week, after finding contamination -- this is after cooking, mind you -- with a strain of salmonella Heidelberg, which is virulent, nasty and resistant to some commonly used antibiotics.

In sum: 1. There’s salmonella on chicken (some of which, by the way, is labeled “organic”). 2. It’s making many people sick, and some antibiotics aren’t working. 3. Production continues in the plants linked to the outbreak. 4. Despite warnings by many federal agencies (including itself!), the U.S.D.A. has done nothing to get these chickens out of the marketplace. 5. Even Costco can’t seem to make these chickens safe to eat. (...)

To its credit, Costco pulled the rotisserie chicken from its shelves, as did a couple of other retailers. (To its debit, Costco left raw Foster Farms chicken on the shelves, once again transferring the burden of safety to the consumer, even though the store must have known that it couldn’t guarantee that cooking the chicken would render it safe.) Foster Farms has not recalled a single piece of chicken, although it’s arguable that this same contamination has been going on for months. And F.S.I.S. officially has no power to do so.

The agency could, however, remove its inspectors from the three suspect plants, which would close them, and last week it threatened to do just that. Three days later, Foster Farms “submitted and implemented immediate substantive changes to their slaughter and processing to allow for continued operations.” What’s that mean? “We cannot tell you what their interventions are, because that’s a proprietary issue,” said Englejohn, adding that the interventions comprise “additional sanitary measures that reduce contamination.” Well, we hope so.

by Mark Bittman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Paul Sakuma

Clare Elsaesser
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