Category: Food

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Apparently it’s National Donut Day, and WaPo decided to look at regional differences in which chain is on top — if any.

We’re solidly in indie-land here. Even the Winchell’s I remember growing up became a mom and pop shop back in the 80s (though I think it *might* have been a Yum Yum at some point in between). I just looked it up and it’s still there, and still indie.

There are so many ex-Winchell’s in the LA/OC area that were picked up by mom-and-pop shops of all kinds that didn’t want to spend extra money replacing rounded-triangle the structure of the sign that I considered taking photos and starting a Tumblr called used-to-be-a-winchells back when Tumblr was still popular, but I never got around to it.

There’s one near where we live now that was an indie shop when we moved to the area, and had almost-but-not-quite the same name as another indie shop down the street, both using the street name as part of the shop name. The other shop changed its name to use the side street’s name instead…shortly before the ex-Winchell’s one closed. It’s now a completely different kind of business (not even a restaurant), but the sign shape is still the same!

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At first I thought this was a followup to another story about an anaphylactic reaction during an airplane flight last week. No, it’s a totally separate incident.

One patient had an expired epi-pen. The other had never had anaphylaxis before.

Both planes had bottles of epinephrine and a syringe, not an auto-injector. Fortunately there were doctors on both flights who knew how to figure out the dosage, properly fill and deliver a shot.

In the second incident, the patient who was experiencing anaphylaxis for the first time is a doctor, but…have you ever tried loading a syringe and injecting yourself while your throat’s rapidly closing up until you can’t breathe? There’s a reason they make auto-injectors!

It could be worse: the same site has an article about another in-flight reaction a month ago, where staff couldn’t get the emergency kit open for 10 minutes! This time it was a pair of nurses who measured and administered the shot.

This…seems to be more common than I thought it was.

And putting an emergency kit on the plane without training your flight crew how to use it is just ridiculous.

(Reminders to self: 1. Check epi-pen expiration date. 2. Make sure it’s easy to find in my carry-on next time I travel.)

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Food companies are adding sesame flour to foods that didn’t have sesame so they can “comply” with new labeling requirements by always labeling “contains sesame” instead of instead of adding it to their existing cross-contamination protocols.

Meaning people with sesame allergy are suddenly finding that foods they used to be able to eat are now hazardous.

This is like a skydiving outfit deciding to stop maintaining their parachutes and disavow responsibility in their waiver instead of complying with a requirement to maintain their parachutes a little better than they were doing before.

Actually it’s worse than that. It’s like actively damaging some of the parachutes, and adding fine print saying that people who want well-maintained parachutes shouldn’t fly with them. And not mentioning it to repeat customers outside of that fine print.

You wouldn’t add wheat to a dish just to avoid having to guarantee it was gluten-free. Or add lead to your water so you don’t have to worry about keeping environmental contamination out. Or…

Ugh, those sound way too probable. People can be awful sometimes, and business has a tendency to remove ethics from decision making.

Update: Malicious compliance is a good term for it.

Not the first time

And apparently this wasn’t the first time companies have done this crap, either. After the 2016 labeling law went into effect, some companies added peanut flour to foods that didn’t have it. Not enough to impact the baking or texture or flavor…but enough to trigger an allergic reaction.

Disturbingly, I missed that previous round. I say disturbingly because I actually am allergic to peanuts, so I’m lucky I didn’t end up in the ER from something that used to be safe. I can only think of two explanations for why I didn’t notice:

By 2016, I was doing most of my grocery shopping at some of the slightly crunchier stores, and buying snacks from smaller brands that were either less likely to take that shortcut, or already had foods I was allergic to by the time I took my first look at the ingredients panel.

2016 was also the year the Epi-Pen price-gouging scandal boiled over.

Corporations behaving badly

Pharma giant Mylan had already gained a virtual monopoly on epinephrine auto-injectors. After FARE spent years lobbying for states to require epinephrine to be stocked in schools for emergencies, Mylan raised the price of the auto-injector drastically (a factor of 5 or 6), to the point where many people who needed them couldn’t afford it anymore.

Whether FARE was used itself, or a co-conspirator who used its members, I lost a lot of trust in them and stopped following their newsletters as closely. That was also the last year I participated in FARE’s Walk for Food Allergy fundraiser, and I only did that after they stopped accepting money from Mylan.

(Interesting note: The Intercept article mentions that Mylan deliberately set out to stop selling single Epi-Pens in the early 2010s and only sell the two-packs in order to justify charging more. I was already carrying two-pack at my allergist’s recommendation, which turned out to be highly fortunate the time in 2006 or so when I was hit by anaphylaxis and messed up the first injection.)

Expanded from a thread on Wandering.shop

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There’s a peanut allergy alert for “Chocolate to Die For” ice cream.

I don’t think the name was intended to be taken literally 😬

It reminds me of the time I saw a recall of “Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge” candy, which turned out to actually be toxic. I mean, with a name like that…? (In that case it was lead found in the candy bars).

Though now that I think about it, my first full-on anaphylactic reaction was to an ice cream cake that was allegedly “chocolate, chocolate, everything chocolate” (and turned out not to be).

That’s eerily familiar.

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The weirdest thing about the apparently-not-actually-Covid case I’ve got has been its effect on taste and smell.

It’s already starting to go back to normal, but for a couple of days it went really wonky. It never went out completely. It was more like taking an audio equalizer and readjusting the sliders so that some frequencies are barely audible and others are louder than they should be. And maybe shifting tracks out of sync while you’re at it.

Umami was the only taste that stayed intact, so flavors like cheese were fine. Sour was blunted in some cases, overpowering in others. And sweetness was both faint and delayed, which was really strange.

Seriously: I tried a chocolate chip cookie, and at first it was like eating a cracker or plain biscotti, but after a few seconds of chewing I could taste the chocolate and then the sugar.

I could taste the garlic on roasted potatoes, but could barely taste the potatoes. I could taste soy sauce in a stir-fry sauce, but not the ginger. I could taste the bitterness of kale, but couldn’t taste anything of the carrots.

Spice, Spice, Maybe?

I did some experiments with smell and the spice cabinet. I could smell most of the dried herbs fine – oregano, thyme, dill, cloves. Rosemary was kind of faint, but I could pick it up.

Garlic was seriously intense.

I could smell cinnamon but not nutmeg, which I thought was odd.

But the really weird one: paprika, ancho, black pepper, cayenne and ginger all smelled subtly off from normal. It was like when you get a chile of a type that’s normally spicy, but isn’t, and you can still taste the flavor but it doesn’t have the bite you expect.

Saucy!

I also tried tasting a few sauces.

Ketchup and mustard tasted more sour than usual. Plain yellow mustard was so intensely sour I couldn’t stand it!

Teriyaki tasted a little more like sweet and sour sauce.

Gochujang and caramel were both a little bit off, but I can’t quite place how.

Chocolate syrup was interesting, because I could pick up the chocolate taste before the sweetness, so it started out tasting like darker chocolate.

The same thing happened with chocolate candies. We have an assortment of Ghirardelli squares, and I tried a few of them: the 60% cocoa tasted like the 72% normally does. The filling on the mint was more noticeable than its chocolate coating. And the sea salt caramel just tasted like salty chocolate.