The Independent says Britain’s rivers have come back to life

Britain’s rivers, some of which were little better than sewers a generation ago, are now at their cleanest for more than a century.

A row has started in South Africa over chicken targeted for sale in black neighborhoods. The BBC reports poultry makers now stand accused of being ‘racist’

Blade Nzimande said that the poultry industry was selling “rotten” meat to black people.

He said chicken past its best-before date was being recycled – thawed, washed and injected with flavouring – then sold to shops in black townships.

A spokesman for the poultry industry admitted the practice takes place, but said it was both safe and legal.

Is it fowl play to serve recycled chicken? In America it’s called Kentucky Fried Chicken. I’m kidding, of course…

Here is the real punch-line to this story. The South African poultry industry says not to worry because their internal safety practices are higher than baselines set by regulators. They themselves check the chickens before they try and squeeze a few more dollars out of those old smelly carcasses.

[A spokesman for the poultry industry said] the chickens were tested and certified by the producers before being sent out again and that these standards were actually higher than those required by the department of health.

But he also accepted that re-worked chicken did not go on sale in major supermarkets, which served the country’s wealthier suburbs.

Internally certified is like saying non-certified certification. I hear this kind of reasoning all the time in information security. Experts tell me their internal security practices are better than compliance. It’s a lot like contestants who get eliminated from American Idol and protest that the judges can’t tell real talent. So now I have to wonder if security professionals would take a different view on regulations if we’re talking about old chicken meat.

Which of them believes, in other words, they can trust the poultry industry standards more than the department of health? Does the department of health really allow chicken repackaging and resale, or is it a loophole? Maybe I should serve some chicken at the start of my next compliance presentation, tell this story, and see who keeps eating.

Sell-by and use-by dates are notoriously misleading and irregular in America. I often find people do not realize that they are not required by regulators for anything but food for babies. It clearly serves the industry to set expiration dates but not necessarily the consumer, as the above story illustrates.

The FDA page on Safe Eats – Meat, Poultry & Seafood, for example, does not mention anything about spoiled chicken indicators, but it has a section on fish.

“How can I tell if fish is fresh?”
Perfectly fresh fish and shellfish have virtually no odor. It’s only when seafood starts to spoil that it takes on a “fishy” aroma. Fresh fish will have these signs:

* The eyes are clean and bulge a little.
* Whole fish and fillets have firm and shiny flesh and bright, red gills free from slime.
* The flesh springs back when pressed.
* There is no darkening around the edges or brown or yellowish discoloration.
* The fish smells fresh and mild, not “fishy” or ammonia-like.

Note: Keep in mind that just because fish is fresh doesn’t mean it’s bacteria-free. You still need to follow the food safety tips above when handling or preparing fresh fish.

I confess I did not know about the bulging eyes. I thought all fish had bulging eyes. Maybe I have just been lucky and lived in the right neighborhoods? I would like to see that added to real-estate listings — quality schools near-by, fish with bulging eyes at the markets…

Back to the main point, expiration dates are not a regulation or law in America, as I have mentioned before here, here and here. America’s regulations are handled and explained by the USDA.

Is Dating Required by Federal Law? Except for infant formula and some baby food (see below), product dating is not generally required by Federal regulations. However, if a calendar date is used, it must express both the month and day of the month (and the year, in the case of shelf-stable and frozen products). If a calendar date is shown, immediately adjacent to the date must be a phrase explaining the meaning of that date such as “sell-by” or “use before.”

Dating by law? Even marriage is not required by federal law…but I digress. I have not yet found the exact food safety laws in South Africa. However, I can see that if this were a debate in America the poultry industry only would have to print the month with day of the month and a phrase like “use before we inject this with flavoring and sell in the other neighborhoods for less”. I’ll have to think some more about how that would be translated into cloud provider security. Maybe the question should be which security flavors are best for “aaS” injection.

In the meantime I have found an image to easily identify when chicken has gone bad:

A few more of these stories and I’ll have to start a poultry of information security site.

Body Earth has an excellent blog post on the Health Risks of Low-Fat Milk

For years my family only drank low-fat milk. It’s supposed to help us keep our weight down and reduce the risk of heart disease, right? Wrong. In fact, reduced-fat milk can harm our health. We now steer clear of the stuff whenever possible.

[…]

We always drink whole milk and cream now (never ultra-pasteurized) from cows that eat grass. Whole milk is a wonderful food that comes with the fat needed to use the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K) it contains.

Definitely worth reading. I always stuck with whole milk and avoided low-fat milk because the data that said whole milk was fattening seemed inconclusive to me. Obviously it had not been a problem in the past, so what had suddenly changed it to a high-risk food? Moreover, I recognized that fat is necessary for brain development and other healthy body requirements. Whole milk, with just 3.5% fat, seemed like a great and time-tested option.

I also have noticed that arguments for low-fat are severely lacking. Whole Food’s puts this example forward as evidence of something remarkable:

A recent study conducted by the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has shown the dramatic impact that milk choices can have on intake of calories and fat. Over a 4-year period (2006-2009), the New York City Department of Education shifted it milk purchases over from whole milk and chocolate milk made from whole-milk or low-fat milk to fat-free milk (whether unflavored or chocolate). In other words, students in 5 city boroughs (Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx) were only able to purchase fat-free milks in school by the end of this 5 year period. As a result, the New York Department of Education ended up purchasing and serving 4.6 billion fewer calories from milk products and 422 million less grams of fat!

Dramatic impact to what? What does their meaningless statistic prove? They banned whole milk and then did basic math on the difference between milk types. This is like saying they switched from selling 2 pencils per student to selling 1 pencil per student, for 1,000 students, and…amazingly ended up selling 1,000 fewer pencils! They do not say anything about the health or behavior of those in the study. Did they buy less milk? Lose weight? Get better grades? Anything? If this is their best and only example, they must not have seen any positive results worth reporting.

My guess is Whole Foods sells low-fat because they know it is popular right now. My guess is also that Whole Foods did not actually read the study when they used it as an example (they also did not include it in their references). If they had, they might have noticed this caveat:

…no data were collected on total food consumption during the school day, so the effect of the milk switch on overall diet is unknown. Students might compensate for the averted calories/fat from milk by changing their consumption patterns.

Compare that with a doctoral thesis in Sweden by a nutritionist who found that children drinking whole milk more than once a day had a lower body mass index than those who did not drink, or rarely drank, milk.

Maybe this tells us that children who drink a lot of milk also lead a more active lifestyle, or it is served to them along with healthier foods compared with the other kids, but at least the study tries to explain results with a measurable benefit instead of meaningless numbers.

The Soviet Union was famous for pushing meaningless calculations around. I had an economics professor once who had studied real cases where success was measured on output without factoring input. It had led to all kinds of absurd attempts to cheat and manipulate the measures. If a factory was measured on area output, the input would be spread as thinly as possible. If they were measured by weight, the input was collected into small and dense areas. Take the production of glass windows, for example. All the windows either were so thin they immediately broke or they were so thick they did not fit the frames.

From what I can tell, based on measures and studies so far, whole milk is still the safest, healthiest and best-tasting option. That is why I avoid low-fat milk.