following the news

Total recall

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

A week ago I had a Dangerous Dining post talking about breakfast cereals, in the course of which I mentioned how Quaker’s Harvest Crunch granola cereal was one of my go-to favourites. Just a day or two later a recall was announced by Quaker that had that same cereal listed as possibly contaminated with salmonella.

Ouch!

Usually I don’t pay any attention to grocery recalls because they seem to always involve brussels sprouts or instant ramen. This one took me a bit by surprise, and not just for coming from such a major brand as Quaker. I mean, I’m sure it’s not impossible to get salmonella from granola, but isn’t it strange?

Salmonella is a bacteria most often found in poultry, eggs, raw and undercooked meat, and dairy products. At the end of several lists of foods most likely to be contaminated with salmonella I also found things like nut butters, some processed foods, and infant formula.

Not granola.

Even stranger was the wire story on the recall:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has received at least 24 reports of adverse events related to the products initially recalled, but no illnesses have been confirmed to be linked to the foods, an agency spokesperson said Friday. Adverse events can include medical problems, but also complaints about off taste or color of a product, defective packaging or other non-medical issues, the official said. FDA will continue to investigate the reports.

So no illnesses confirmed to have been linked to the foods? And “adverse events”? That sounds really vague. It even includes “complaints about off taste or color of a product, defective packaging or other non-medical issues.” Defective packaging?

I don’t know how much of this recall is due to an excess of caution, and how big the actual risk might be. In any event, seeing as I had several boxes of the suspect cereal this has become the first product recall that I’ve actually taken part in. I filled out a form online, attached a picture of the unopened boxes I had in my cupboard, and was told my request would take up to 8 weeks to process.

I’m curious to see what happens. Do manufacturers actually pay out when they have a recall? You’re on the clock, Quaker! I’m not expecting anything, but let’s see how you do.

Update, May 27 2024:

All’s well that ends well!

Celebrity bios: then and now

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

“Waive the laws of history.” Cicero

Long-time readers of this site will know I have a pet peeve about celebrity bios, and the way people who enjoy wealth, power, and fame use them to carefully fashion their image and brand. See, for example, the posts here and here. I also had a post a while back mentioning how old a story this is, and how Michelangelo, upset at the (worshipful, not to mention truthful) account of his life written by Vasari, got one of his students to write a more flattering, inaccurate portrait.

But the great tradition of phoney, fawning biography goes back further than this. I recently came across this little gem while reading Anthony Everitt’s Cicero:

Aware that his public image needed burnishing but sensing the public would not welcome any more self-praise from his own pen, Cicero tried to interest a respected historian, Lucius Lucceius, in writing a history of his Consulship, exile and return, the main purpose of which would be to expose the “perfidy, artifice and betrayal of which many were guilty towards me.” He was candid about his expectations, and asked Lucceius to write more enthusiastically than perhaps he felt. “Waive the laws of history for once. Do not scorn personal bias, if it urge you strongly in favour.” Lucceius agreed, although for some reason the books seems never to have appeared.

Maybe it just wasn’t any good, much like Cicero’s own self-indulgent epic poetry. And for that we may be thankful.

What brought this to mind again was the publication this past month of a couple of instant bestsellers written by two of the most prominent biographers working today: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson and Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (on Sam Bankman-Fried) by Michael Lewis. I haven’t read either book, but reviews have called out both authors for an overly deferential attitude taken toward their subjects, accompanied by a shrug at their various “demons” (the handmaid of “genius”) and other failings.

I would have thought that the mere fact of the special access they were given in writing “authorized” bios would have been enough to set off all kinds of alarms. In her New York Times review of Going Infinite, Jennifer Szalai criticizes Lewis for being “stubbornly credulous” and for having “a front-row seat — from which he could apparently see nothing.” This is, just to repeat the point I’ve been banging on in all these posts, to mistake the reason why someone is given access, or “a front-row seat,” in the first place. It’s precisely so the author won’t see anything, or at least want to talk about it.

Making matters even more embarrassing, Isaacson and Lewis were going into print when their subjects were on the verge of imploding, leading some to question the divine status of figures like Musk and Friedman as masters of the universe.

What can I do but keep repeating myself? So I will: “if you’re reading the bio of a living celeb (meaning one who still has the ability to have any influence over what someone is writing about them) you have to assume that it’s going to be, at best, only the loosest facsimile of the truth. It has always been thus.” Remember: if you’re not reading something that the subject of the biography didn’t want written, it’s just an ad.

Bad calls

/ Alex Good / 16 Comments

Over the last ten or so years I think there are very few amateur political commentators who can claim to have been so consistently wrong in their predictions, about pretty much everything, as I’ve been. That said, it seems as though one of my hot takes has blown up in record time with the recent announcement from Premier Doug Ford’s Ontario government that they are reversing the controversial Greenbelt land swap. In an earlier post I concluded that the land was never going back into the Greenbelt, but now it look as though it might.

At least for a while. I still think it’s likely to end up being rezoned after the next official Greenbelt review, but for now Ford seems to have made a political calculation to sacrifice the interests of the developers to shore up some of the political damage he’s been taking. But given the amount of money at stake I think this is a story we’ve yet to hear the last of.

The real green

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Still looking green, for now. (CBC News – Patrick Morrell)

Ontario’s ruling conservative party has recently found itself in hot water after taking nearly 3,000 hectares of mostly agricultural land out of the protected Greenbelt around Toronto and opening it up for development. Technically this was part of a “swap,” with 3,800 hectares being newly included in the Greenbelt elsewhere. The government says that the land was needed to build more affordable housing in the province, but few people are buying that argument.

Premier Doug Ford now says there will be a re-evaluation of the land swap deal after two government watchdogs raised serious questions about how it happened, including a report from Ontario’s auditor general that found the process was heavily influenced by a small group of politically connected developers. Housing Minister Stephen Clark has stepped down amid all the controversy.

Opposition parties, and many public voices, are calling for the lands to be returned to the Greenbelt. Indeed, one of the auditor general’s 15 recommendations made in their report was for the land swaps to be reconsidered.

In response, that was the one report recommendation that Ford’s government refused to even consider. In Ford’s statement that he will re-evaluate the process he even suggests that the result may be that he takes more land out of the Greenbelt.

I could be wrong, but I feel safe in saying that that the decision to take the land out of the Greenbelt is not going to be reversed. According to the auditor general’s report the owners of the land (not farmers, but the developers who bought it up) stand to see the value of it rise by $8.3 billion.

$8.3 billion.

It doesn’t matter what environmental groups and government watchdogs say. It doesn’t matter if ministers resign in disgrace. It doesn’t matter if governments are voted out of office. It doesn’t even matter if people go to jail. With so much money at stake literally nothing else matters. That land isn’t going back into the Greenbelt.

Update, September 21 2023:

I called it wrong.

Disaster tourism

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

Destination hotspot.

Recent weeks have seen record-setting heat waves in the United States and southern Europe. In Greece wildfires have been raging and thousands of tourists had to be evacuated from the island of Rhodes. Overall, July is set to be the planet’s hottest month ever recorded, leading the United Nations Secretary General to declare “The era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived.”

Scientists have pointed to “absolutely overwhelming” evidence of human-induced climate change in the latest wave of high temperatures. One contributing factor to climate change is air travel, though people argue as to how significant a factor it is. From what I’ve read, air travel causes about 3% of the warming all human activities cause. But make not mistake: that’s a lot. One stat I saw says that if the aviation sector were a nation, it would be among the top 10 global emitters, and that it is responsible for 12 per cent of transportation emissions. So it makes a real difference. And it’s almost entirely unnecessary.

Now personally I don’t travel much, and I think the last time I was on a plane was twenty years ago. But I get that a lot of people like to travel. Indeed, that’s the problem. It’s a sector that’s expected to grow significantly in the next couple of decades. Tourism is projected to generate up to 40% of total global CO2 emissions by 2050. The effect of such growth won’t help the planet, especially as any new energy efficiencies in air travel will be more than offset by more frequent flying.

But I’m not flight shaming here (flight shaming being the name of the anti-flying social movement). Like I say, I get that people want to travel. During the COVID lockdown I had to stand witness to two acquaintances, both retirees, literally break down in tears at the fact that they were somehow being cheated of going on more vacations before they died. It was embarrassing, but it revealed just how important travel is to a certain segment of the population. Because I guess there’s nothing else for them to do. So even if it’s not a feeling I share, I can at least say I get it.

Anyway, these recent headlines were brought home to me yesterday as I was talking to a friend whose sister and brother-in-law are currently vacationing in Greece. I gather they’ve been complaining about it. The heat. The fires. And it made me think of the cognitive dissonance this must involve.

The vacationing couple are wealthy retirees (she was a government lawyer, he was an academic) with no kids. And they travel a lot. They have three international vacations planned this year alone, and they travel deluxe all the way. But hearing about how they were grousing over the impact of climate change on their trip triggered me a bit.

As I see it there are several different responses one can have to living this kind of apex-consumer lifestyle in the present day.

(1) The travel Neros: this was a name given to a movement a while back where global warming was taken for granted, with frequent flying being a major contributing factor. But the travel Neros took the position that the world was going to burn to a crisp anyway so they were going to party while it fried. Maybe not socially responsible behaviour, but it’s a position that has its own integrity.

(2) The deniers: climate change is all a hoax foisted on us by the Chinese or global elites or killjoy environmentalists. Don’t listen to them! Keep consuming! After all, if you damage the economy in any way trying to save the planet, the cure will be worse than the disease! Not a position I agree with, but again at least it holds together as a belief system.

(3) Those who acknowledge climate change is real and air travel is only making things worse, but feel that their own personal contribution doesn’t make a difference: here is where I think the cognitive dissonance comes into play. “It would be better if people didn’t fly as much, but since they do it would be stupid for me to give up one of life’s great pleasures just for some benefit to the planet that I likely won’t benefit from anyway.” To my eye, this is just casuistry. How, I wonder, do the tourists in Europe this summer feel the heat and see the clouds of smoke on the horizon and say to themselves “This has nothing to do with me. I hope they get it all fixed up when I come back next year.”

As I say, the whole conversation I had with my friend ended up really triggering me and I said something about how what the the vacationers were experiencing in Greece was due in part to their being there in the first place. This was met with the response that that couldn’t be true because Canada has been wracked with forest fires this summer and those forests weren’t being overrun by tourists. Honestly. This was one of the stupidest things I’ve heard in a long time.

After I explained (in my typical, hard-to-follow and sputtering way) how climate was a global system and was affected by human activity everywhere, with its effects experienced differently in different places, I got a more realistic, though even more depressing response. The vacationers were retired, you see. And, well, what else was there for them to do? How were they going to stay occupied in their remaining years except by traveling? (And they had both taken early retirement and were only in their early 60s, so they potentially still have a lot of time ahead of them to, you know, burn.) And then there was the matter of their being rich. What else were they going to spend all their money on? What could they spend it on?

It may well be that our entire civilization is going to die of affluence and boredom.

Crowned

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

Today marks the coronation of Charles III as king of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.

As a political institution the British monarchy ceased having any purpose back in the 18th century. Because of its near total irrelevance, and the expense of its maintenance, there have been frequent calls for getting rid of it. These have become more pointed recently, as Charles is not well liked and is 74 years old, which seems very old to finally be elevated to the position of even nominal head of state. At least until you realize that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are older. When will we be rid of this cursed generation?

How much longer will the monarchy go on for? Will cancel culture ever come for it? I doubt it, but if it does I imagine it will be for the reason any long-running show finally gets the (metaphorical) axe: a fall in ratings.

The thing is, few people care at all about the monarchy anymore. According to one recent poll, a whopping 78% of young people in Britain fell into this camp. The Crown is more popular than the Crown.

Things were different just forty years ago. The marriage of Charles and Diana was a big deal, and a popular show. But then the funeral of Diana was perhaps the last TV special that drew an audience. The media put a huge amount of effort into selling Harry and Meghan, and the funeral of Elizabeth II, but these weren’t even blips on my radar. The coronation will receive enormous coverage, even in markets like the U.S. that severed their ties to the monarchy a couple of hundred years ago, but I wonder if anyone will pay attention despite all the play on CNN. I know I won’t be watching. And this really is the key point in our attention economy. If royalty aren’t celebrities then they’re nothing at all.

Man and Trump and God

/ Alex Good / 4 Comments

Holding a book he’d never read, standing before a building he’d never been in.

Over at Good Reports I’ve added an omnibus review of a bunch of a books on evangelical support for Donald Trump. Much of the Trump phenomenon is meant to generate outrage, but the support of the religious Right or Christian nationalist movement is probably the most outrageous thing about it of all.

It’s hard to imagine Trump coming back, but as of this writing he’s still the frontrunner to be the Republican standard bearer in 2024. The rot in the American body politic goes deep. What’s worse is that it’s hard to see how the conditions that gave rise to Trump are going to improve anytime soon. I may be reviewing more books like this again in another couple of years.

Grocery bills

/ Alex Good / 4 Comments

Inflation has been a big story in the news recently, with its impact on the public being most directly felt and reported on in regard to grocery bills. I didn’t notice this as much just coming out of pandemic (I was more exercised by the fact that gym memberships doubled), but more recently it has been showing up on my radar.

The pizza place across the way, for example, always used to sell individual slices for 99 cents. The same now cost $1.67 (and they’re cut smaller). Quite a jump, percentage-wise! On average, grocery prices went up 10% last year, which was considered huge. That’s a number to keep in mind as we proceed.

Most of my grocery shopping is done at a No Frills store which usually has the lowest prices around. Indeed, they used to match any lower price advertised by a competitor, though they stopped doing that just before COVID. Today I think they’re still probably the best place to get groceries in town, but even so there have been some price hikes that have caught my attention.

A large bag of Doritos, for example, now regularly goes for $4.50. Before the pandemic it would be $3 tops and sometimes $2 or less when on sale. Now I realize there was a major conflict between Loblaws and the major chip suppliers a year or two back that was eventually settled, and that the store probably doesn’t have a lot of leeway to set these prices, but it still led me to dig in my heels. I haven’t bought Doritos in over a year, and I do like them.

A bag of water softener salt now goes for $7. Before the pandemic they would be $5 tops and usually $4. $2.50 when on sale. Ouch! That’s a big increase for something you have to buy. Literally money going down the drain.

A box of breakfast cereal used to go for something under $3 but now goes anywhere from $4 to $6 depending on the brand.

I often buy specialty ciabattas (sun-dried tomato, black olive, cheese and onion) either to eat with stew or make a sandwich out of. These used to go for $2.50 but now are priced at $3.50. So I only pick them up when they’re on the 50%-off “enjoy tonight!” shelf. Because I don’t believe in expiry dates.

One of the biggest jumps I’ve noticed is for cucumbers. $2.79 for a single cuke? These used to be $1.50, or 98 cents on sale. I like to slice up cucumbers to put them in a salad or make them part of a sandwich, but there’s no way I’m paying $2.79 for one of them. I don’t know what’s going on there. I know cucumbers aren’t in season, but neither are peppers and they don’t cost twice as much as they did a couple of years ago.

So yes, prices have increased — in some cases quite considerably — just in the last couple of years. And I think some of this inflation is more than the producers can attribute to higher costs. It is also the result of “greedflation,” which has been defined as taking advantage of high inflation to earn excessive profits at the expense of consumers.

In any event, one thing seems a safe bet: we’re not going back to 2020 prices again. It’s dieting time!

O.J. then and now

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

Over the past month I’ve been rewatching Ezra Edelman’s outstanding 2016 ESPN documentary series O.J.: Made in America. If you’ve never seen it, take this as a recommendation. It’s 7.5 hours but never flags for a minute.

For anyone old enough to remember it, the O.J. Simpson trial (which ran for nearly a year, ending in October 1995) really was the trial of the century. You can’t overstate how big it was. In 1996 I was actually in Los Angeles during the subsequent civil trial and even that was a media circus, though nowhere near as big a deal. I went to the courthouse one day and drew a ticket to get in to watch it, but wasn’t selected.

Revisiting all of this today, I was surprised at how the racial divide foreshadowed what was coming own the pipe in terms of American politics. What I’m referring to is the polarization and rejection of a shared reality. As Jeffrey Toobin puts it in the documentary when describing Johnnie Cochran’s address to the jury, “the heart of the summation was ‘whose side are you on?'” The point being that the jurors, who were mostly Black, were angry at the police and wanted payback not just for Rodney King but a whole history of racial injustice.

This felt very similar to the “jury nullification” of the Trump impeachments. The question wasn’t Trump’s guilt or innocence. The reporting I’ve heard is that there were no Republicans in the Senate who didn’t believe Trump had done everything he’d been accused of. The question was “whose side are you on?” Once you’d chosen your side, the verdict could be taken for granted. There was no need to build a case or present any evidence. The votes were already locked in.

There are other connections too. Like the celebrity angle and the way the media transformed the trial into spectacle and entertainment. It’s become fashionable among political historians to cite Newt Gingrich and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, the same year Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered, as signaling the beginning of a slide into increased anger and polarization in American politics. Looking back, I think the Simpson trial was representative of the fracturing to come.