It’s Christmas Eve and time for Food Safety News to present its second annual Naughty List. By publishing this list on the day before Christmas, those named will know they should not expect anything special (from us) on the big day.
Tomorrow we’ll publish the second half of this exercise with our annual Nice List.
NAUGHTY: Glenn Beck, radio talk-show and Fox News Channel host, who for several days referred to food safety legislation in the Senate as “the farm bill.”
NAUGHTY: The People’s Republic of China, not for our concerns about their food exports to the U.S., but for for their decision to send parent Zhao Lianhai to prison for two and half years for his advocacy for his then three year old son who was a victim of melamine-contaminated milk and baby formula.
NAUGHTY: Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, for repeatedly blocking the food safety bill in the Senate, leaving little room on the clock to get it done.
NAUGHTY: Chicken King “Jack” DeCoster, for not telling Congress it was his feed mill, serving two egg production operations, that was responsible for the Salmonella contamination that led to the largest egg recall in the nation’s history.
NAUGHTY: R-Calf president Max Thornsberry, for calling for the editors and a popular columnist for BEEF, Drovers, and Beef Today–some of his industry’s best-known publications and websites–to be fired just because they didn’t agree with him.
NAUGHTY: Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, for using American Meat Institute’s J. Patrick Boyle for some cheap laughs at AMI’s expense. (Not that we did not enjoy it, but it was naughty.)
Naughty and nice lists have long been a part of Christmas, but did you ever wonder about the history of Christmas itself? We checked into what some experts called the History Guys, produced by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, had to say. We learned:
- The Puritans actually outlawed the celebration of Christmas.
- The Bible is silent on when Jesus was actually born.
- In the fourth century, the Catholic Church picked Dec. 25th as the birth date in part because it wanted to take over the existing celebration of the Winter Solstice.
- The modern Christmas centering on peace, family, and gifts grew out of the 1820s.
Check out more at Back Story with the American History Guys. Or, if you need to be put in the Christmas mood, see tomorrow’s Nice List.
