The Kansas City Health Department has released its annual Grade A Food Excellence Awards for food safety, and tucked in among the stadium stands, theme-park kiosks, and school cafeterias of the world are a few local, independent restaurants.
The list, based on health inspection reports from 2010, includes 160 locations (up from 95 last year) that have consistently outperformed health department standards. The institutions recognized have permits in good standing, came in below a set number of violations, and were not the source of any food-borne illness in the city.
Recently, Fresh Express salads compared its new way of washing lettuce to the iPad. While trying to sound cool and trendy (spoiler alert: fail), Fresh Express apparently broke some supersecret business pact not to speak about the 2006 E. coli outbreak in the salad industry.
"Food safety should never be a competitive advantage," Tom
Stenzel, president and CEO of the United Fresh Produce Association, tells trade paper The Packer. "If a
new product improves food safety, we should share it with the whole
industry."
When I got to visit my brother-in-law in Los Angeles, he has a simple rule for picking a restaurant for dinner.
"Nothing below a B," he says.
A "B" is the letter grade that a restaurant has received from the city's health department based on the number or lack of health code violations. And now when I go to visit my brother in New York City, I wonder if we're going to have the same rules. New York just adopted the letter grade system, rolling out grades for 24,000 restaurants.
The office refrigerator is like a bad practical joke. At first, you can get enjoyment out of watching a new employee stagger from the yawning mouth of the stench box. But all too quickly that smell can pervade the often tiny lunchroom and turn your guffaws into gags.
The Wall Street Journal reports that as more employees bring brown-bag lunches, the forgotten office fridges of the world are descending further into funkdom. According to the WSJ, fewer than half of all fridges are cleaned once a month.
It's not just the performance on the field for local sports teams that is hard to swallow.
While the good news is that Arrowhead Stadium has less critical violations for vendors than Kauffman Stadium. The bad news is that it was 56 percent of vendors with critical violations as compared to 62 percent. So, listen up Blanc, we're looking to you to elevate the game during your time at Arrowhead.
ESPN issued a roundup of stadium health inspection reports on Sunday that covers stadiums around the country for the major sports leagues: NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB. And the facilities at the Truman Sports Complex didn't fare so hot.
We're more turf than surf here in Kansas City, which means we don't have a lot of fresh seafood options. Many Kansas Citians are wondering if the seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is safe to eat.
AOL News -- along with the rest of the country -- was wondering the same thing. Last night, the site published the results of a two-week investigation into who is responsible for determining the safety of the seafood and just how the food is tested.
I've been on flights from three separate airlines in the past month. When the flight attendant offered me snacks, I was amazed that peanuts were still among the choices.
There are nut-free rooms at my daughter's day care. Food labels are peppered with warnings that packaged goods may have come into contact with peanuts or other tree nuts. But I can still struggle to tear open that tiny foil-sealed container of peanuts while my elbows are pinned to my sides in a middle seat.
Back on the ground in Kansas City, I learned that the classic airline bag of peanuts may be going the way of free checked luggage. The U.S. Department of Transportation recently announced that it was considering restrictions or a ban on airlines serving peanuts, in part to allay the concerns of those with peanut allergies.
Are smart phones eliminating the safety net provided by "employees must wash hands" signs in bathrooms? That's the scary suggestion from the Barf Blog, which notes that all too many people continue to text or respond to e-mail while technically indisposed.
The issue with "dirty thumbers" is that even if they wash their hands, the potential for bacterial transfer is still intact because they haven't washed their phones. That's a real problem. While the social taboo (thankfully) of calling someone from the bathroom is still in place, texting carries no such stigma. Our short attention spans carry some real health risks.
So the next time you see a cashier briefly check his cell before taking an order -- either get out the Purell or consider a different line.
The labels on your milk, meat and produce can tell you a lot more than the nutritional information if you just know what to look for on the sticker.
Lifehacker has a solid break out of what various marketing terms mean in relation to products. The two key points are that organic is one of the only strongly regulated words (and there's still some gray area) and that terms like natural and grass-fed don't actually say much about the conditions in which an animal was raised.
A new survey in the March edition of Consumer Reports suggests that consumers should wash packaged greens or salad even if the packaging states that it has been pre-washed.
The consumer advocacy group used an independent lab to test 208 bags of salad from 16 brands sold in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. It discovered that 39 percent contained high levels of coliforms, a potential indicator of fecal contamination. The study did not find disease-causing bacteria,such as E.Coli, listeria or salmonella.
Milk & Honey has the best I've had in KC. http://milkandhoneykc.com/
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