Eric S. Burkett is a San Francisco-based Kitchen manager, cook, and freelance writer. His work appears online in Delish on MSN.com, the Food Examiner in Examiner.com and Food Safety News. His work has been published in San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Wheel of Dharma and in ViMax Publishing & Marketing Inc. publications. He is a former daily newspaper reporter, who says, “Writing and cooking are my two great loves.”
Are companies with a vested interest in the outcome of environmental assessment studies qualified to conduct those studies themselves? A pilot project announced by an agency at the United States Department of Agriculture is preparing to give for-profit corporations the ability to do just that. Earlier this month, the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) published a...
Pretend you're an inspector for the Hawaiian Department of Agriculture and you've just arrived to examine several pallets full of produce -- bagged spinach, for example. You know that the ideal temperature for transporting spinach, a particularly fragile green, is 32° F. You also know this spinach has been sitting in a Honolulu warehouse for at least six hours since it...
Calling it a modest step with enormous implications, San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar urged the city's other supervisors to place new restrictions on the use of toys to promote fast food meals to children. While city residents lined up in the basement of City Hall to cast their own ballots in the mid-term elections Tuesday, two floors up the supervisors voted...
San Francisco's efforts to restrict the use of toys to promote fast food for children has been pushed back a couple of weeks. Why? Depends upon whom you talk to.The city's 11-member board of supervisors moved Tuesday to postpone a vote on the controversial measure until Nov. 2. There were concerns about the timeline for implementing the ordinance if it...
In a move industry insiders say could mark the beginning of a national trend, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed new legislation requiring nearly all of the more than one million food handlers in the state of California to be certified in safe food handling procedures.The new law, Senate Bill 602, was approved by lawmakers in a 74-1 vote in late August...
It's becoming an increasingly familiar sight in large cities around the country: specialty chefs selling artisan and exotic foods from mobile food carts and trucks on the cities' streets. Some cities, such as Portland, Ore., where as many as 500 carts work the streets to feed hungry residents, have embraced the phenomenon and crafted special legislation to foster its development. Others,...
New regulations for controlling the spread of a form of Salmonella, whose mode of transmission still isn't entirely understood, kicked into effect last Friday. The new regulations, the FDA insists, could reduce the number of illnesses by as many as 79,000 people, and deaths by up to 30 individuals, each year. Announced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a...
Part II in a II-part series on Linda Rivera's battle with E. coli O157:H7. Once a week, Jeanine Iyala loads her two kids into the car and makes the roughly 60-mile round trip from Pleasanton to San Francisco to visit her step-mother at Davies Medical Center. Traveling any distance with a 2-year-old and a 9-month-old is hardly convenient but for...
Part I in a II-part series on Linda Rivera's battle with E. coli O157:H7.It's one of those glorious, fogless summer days in San Francisco when the winds whisk the skies clear and everyone is outside basking in sunlight. From Linda Rivera's hospital room at Davies Medical Center, you can see the city's skyline--including the pyramidal TransAmerica Tower--and, if you look...
Do inexpensive plastic toys lure children--or their parents--into making unhealthy food choices? A leading consumer advocacy group believes they do and is threatening to sue fast food giant McDonald's if the company doesn't end its practice of using toys to promote its products.The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) on Tuesday served Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald's USA with...
Ice. While it's found nearly everywhere from Mars to the coils of a restaurant's refrigerator--that is, when it's not working properly--ice really doesn't come into its own until now, the height of the summer season between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Picnics, camping trips, and parties during the warm months help move 80 percent of the ice sold in the...
While the country's poultry producers wonder aloud whether they're even necessary, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has issued new compliance guidelines to reduce the levels of Salmonella and Campylobacter in chicken and turkey. The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) published the new standards--an update to guidelines published in 2008--last week. The new guidelines take some pretty dramatic...
Are you looking for a tasty little cheese with an image problem?It's delicious in enchiladas, it complements black beans beautifully, and it's a wonderful addition to salads. Unfortunately for queso fresco--that quintessential Mexican fresh cheese--it also seems to have a knack for attracting pathogens such as Listeria. If you go through the records for recalls over the past few years,...
With spring comes Easter which, counter-intuitively to some perhaps, draws my attention to the flavors of the Mediterranean and Middle East. But while others are craving hams and deviled eggs, I find myself hungering for the spicy, bright flavors of the eastern Mediterranean which, of course, is where the whole show got started. Beyond that, however, I find myself looking...
The Easter egg hunt went well. The kids had fun decorating the eggs the night before and even more fun hunting for them the next day. At the end of the day you ran across a couple of eggs they hadn't found. What do you do with them? Go ahead and toss them into the refrigerator, they'll make a great...
Copyright © Marler Clark
Free-Lance Writer
