The Food Babe Army
Witnessing the power of the Food Babe
Army this week has been absolutely incredible.
On Tuesday, February 4th, I launched a
petition for the removal of a dangerous
plastic chemical called azodicarbonamide
from
Subway sandwich bread – the same stuff used in yoga
mats, shoe rubber and synthetic leather. This
was after repeated attempts to reach out to Subway since June of 2012 to learn
more about why they are using this (asthma inducing and potentially
carcinogenic) chemical here in North America and not in any other countries.
They never responded until now.
Within 24 hours, the petition received
over 50,000 signatures, and Subway’s social media channels were completely
overrun by concerned citizens and the Food Babe Army. I want to thank the
countless number of friends, family members, fellow bloggers, organizations,
and everyday citizens who took swift action to tell Subway we deserve the same
safer ingredients they use overseas.
To date, the petition has received over
78,000 signatures and counting.
Late Wednesday afternoon in an email to
me from Michelle Dinello,
Director of Corporate Communications, Subway announced they would be removing
this ingredient from their sandwiches “soon”. In this email, she apologized for
not responding sooner and specifically to my inquiry on January 25th that went
unanswered. They said “that we are already in the process of removing azodicarbonamide from
our bread as part of our ongoing bread improvement program” and additionally
told reporters that their change had nothing to do with the petition. We know
this is just a corporate spin and how big companies operate. They don’t want us
to know how much power we have over their decisions. We’ve seen this kind of
deceptive marketing move before when Gatorade took out a flame retardant
chemical and said it had nothing to do with a petition with over 200k
signatures. And again, most recently in Kraft, when they started removing
artificial food dyes from their Mac & Cheese and said it had nothing to do
with our 350k signatures petition. Since Subway has been exploiting us with
unsafe ingredients that are prohibited in other countries for all these years,
wouldn’t it be nice if they’d just be straight with us?
As soon as I received this email, I wrote
back and asked for a timeline and asked if they would provide the new
ingredient list.
There’s been dead silence on their end.
The Glass In The Baby Food
Some parents in Brooklyn, NY, fed their
infant some Gerber baby food and noticed he was spitting it out. The parents
thought it was just the messy tendencies of a baby until they noticed he was
bleeding from the mouth caused by a dangerous shard of glass in the jar. The
scarier part is the national wave of complaints that followed from more than 30
states with similar complaints. Maryland even enacted an outright ban of one
brand of baby food because of contamination fears.
The Human Skin Slice In The Chicken Sandwich
Finding a finger in your food is
frightening but it’s far from the first time. A man in Florida ordered a
sandwich from a fast food restaurant and found a whole slice of bloody skin in
between the buns. An investigation revealed that the restaurant’s manager was
slicing lettuce when he accidentally sliced off a big chunk of his finger and
after he tended to his injury, he neglected to throw out the lettuce and served
it up along with the skin slice still inside of it.
The truly scary part is where this
happened: it was at ANOTHER Arby’s restaurant. Maybe they should just tell the
public they are switching to serving finger sandwiches instead.
Finger In My Chili
Finger In My Chili
In 2005, San Jose, Calif., police were
investigating the strange case of a woman who claimed to have found a finger in
her bowl of Wendy's chili. In what turned out to be remarkably like a game of
Clue, detectives had different ideas about where the finger might have come
from: A recently deceased aunt? A mysterious ranch worker? A rural Nevada woman
who lost it to a pet leopard? The answer: None of the above. Police determined
that the finger belonged to a Nevada man who had given it to the woman's husband
to plant in her food, hoping to scam the restaurant chain for money.
Finger In My Custard
A man found part of a severed finger
packed inside a pint of frozen custard he'd bought from a Kohl's Frozen Custard
shop, and officials said it belonged to a worker injured in a food-processing
machine accident there. The customer, Clarence Stowers,
said he put the finger in his mouth, thinking it was a piece of candy when he
opened the pint at home. Stowers said
he spat the object out, and "I said, 'God, this ain't no
nut!' So I came in here to the kitchen and rinsed it off with water and realised it
was a human finger and I just started screaming."
The custard shop owner, Craig Thomas,
said that the 23-year-old employee who lost the finger had dropped a bucket
while working with a machine that dispenses the custard. He tried to catch the
bucket when the accident occurred. Thomas said that as several employees tried
to help the injured worker, a drive-thru window attendant apparently scooped
the chocolate custard into a pint before being told what had happened.
