Some days you just don’t feel like eating healthy. I typically feel this way after I’ve sweat my nutsack off after a two-hour intense workout. Sure, not eating great tends to defeat the entire purpose of said workout, but when you’re keeping it sort of healthy to a burger and a garden salad (minus olives, because fuck olives), I’m totally willing to talk myself into it. Plus, I almost never have a burger more than twice a month now, if that, so I’ve hit my almost-quota, which I think makes this whole thing fair.

Anyways, whenever I order a burger, I ask for it to be done ‘medium’. ‘But Sahltines, medium-rare is where it’s at!’ Yeah, you’re right, most food tastes slightly better with a tiny bit of rareness in there; there’s no argument from me. I always err on the side of caution, though, to ward away the ‘evil boogeyman’ that is E.coli and have my red meat cooked longer so that the bacteria is more likely to completely be eradicated in the process. The burger I had was slightly rarer than normal, and I had to double-check because I’m so used to the medium post-cooking coloring, but let it be known that it was, indeed, fit for consumption. When I did my search, however, I came upon one more of those unknown cul-de-sacs of a website titled Barfblog.

Apparently, this place is run by a bunch of doctorates who specialize in food safety. You wouldn’t know it considering the main Twitter feed is full of retweets of asinine garbage and snide quips, whereas the website is just littered with news article reposts & article aggregation and a plethora of those shitty safety sheets that are designed like the average reading audience is still in diapers; never mind that the majority of them border on propaganda since they never bother to actually cite where the information is coming from. You have to trust them, of course, because it’s heavily implied that the only reason these things exist is because people care; fuck the sources and put your faith into something that looks like a kindergarten construction paper project!

For the record, I know food safety is a constant issue. Thousands of restaurants like those on Kitchen Nightmares are open every day and go unchecked. I’ve no doubt there is corruption since health inspectors are government officials and real people who also need to eat, and that sometimes the people who cook the best damn food don’t preserve it properly. I know that unregulated bacteria, like E.coli, can kill. I applaud any restaurant that makes sure to cook safe food, stores food intelligently and disposes of it properly.

I also know that living in a first-world, first-class, front-seat country like the United States or the UK or Australia means that the chances of you dying from something like E.coli, let alone getting sick enough to go to a hospital, are fairly small at best. People love to go bat-shit crazy when words like ‘e.coli’, ‘giardia’, ‘influenza’ and ‘norovirus’ are used in reports and articles, like we still live in fucking medieval times and we drink the water the horses just took a dump in. I’ve experienced every single side effect of the big four I listed above, and you know what they all end up resulting in?

Nausea and fatigue.

Oh man, those tummy rumblies, heaven help us! Speaking of, I detest how influenza is now able to be ‘vaccinated’, you just have to do it every year. Motherfucker, that’s not a vaccination, that’s a goddamn subscription fee. You know what we had vaccinated? Fucking polio and measles, at least until those retards in California afraid of their kids ‘catching the autism’ from vaccinations decided to not immunize their kids and then put them out into the world to bring back dead plagues. A vaccine means that strain, or multiple strains, of a specific virus is completely harmless to us. It doesn’t mean it’s necessarily gone, since viruses can evolve, but for the next long period of time until it evolves, we don’t have to worry about it.

Not to mention, all the flue does is upset natural homeostasis, which you can fix with rest and clean water, and guess what people in the US have plenty of? ‘But Sahltines, California is having a drought!’ Fuck off. If California was having a drought, the price of California Almonds and California Raisins would skyrocket. They haven’t, which tells me that California is, once again, being the backwater state it really is and getting upset that it doesn’t have enough reservoirs to fulfill its water needs; ironically, this wouldn’t have been a goddamned problem for the state if they had not gone all ‘SAVE THE WHATEVER THAT THING IS’ for forty years and made it nearly impossible to terraform the land. Lastly, whomever came up with ‘norovirus’ is a dipshit who should have his/her doctorate revoked while being launched into the sun. The shit is low-grade food poisoning/influenza. It didn’t need a name, but like all bored and greedy people, some asshole just had to push it, like those morons who pushed the ED-NOS nonsense, until they got their way.

Where was I? Oh yeah, at that stupid website.

Pack it up, ladies and gentlemen.

The first article I decide to not skim and actually read, and this is how it starts. This is why you proof-read before you shoot something off to be finalized.

This feels very condescending.

I wish I knew what the word ‘cormey’ meant because that phrase makes no sense to me, and not just because it’s something that should probably not be hyphenated. The way this guy writes in these paragraphs that are all disjointed when they shouldn’t be is also beyond irritating. I’ll be honest and say that had I not dug deep enough to find one of the places he claims he was a professor at, this horrendous writing would lead me to believe that this the owner of the blog is just some old nutter butter shouting at clouds. I mean, he is that, even if he occasionally covers some stuff that is worthy of covering (contaminated water outbreaks are one), which is a shame since real problems that affect thousands and potentially millions is small potatoes compared to a handful of people getting stomachaches.

Also, yeah, we know where Ontario is, you dipshit. You know, it wasn’t until recently that this wave of Canadians who think people are too stupid to know where they are came flooding in all over the world and especially into the States. It bothers me to no end because we’ve known of their existence since the 1700s, and yet these asshats feel the need to always say remind us of where they’re from. It’s not even like this is a Canadian-only thing; I see it with authors I come across when they simply move to the state next to them. It’s annoying and condescending no matter who it comes from because it assumes the audience isn’t smart enough to remember that map from junior high. Worse than that, while I don’t expect everyone from the hat of the United States to be cordial like all Canadians are portrayed, covert ‘look at me, I come from another place’ shit like this helps notch negatives against the wonderful nation of Canada, just like those BLM retards in Toronto. Most importantly, who gives a shit about owning an asparagus farm? Not even native Canadians would give a damn about that, so why brag about it, especially when said farm probably hasn’t existed since it was sold since nobody buys any goddamn asparagus.

You mean that thing you’re trying to do.

I’ve skipped an unnecessary story our author put in here, which I’ll probably be doing for the bulk of this since the man tends to ramble a ton, to focus on gems like this. This doesn’t make any sense because he’s assuming the people are the ones wanting to be educated, despite his clearly negative implications of groups wanting to educate consumers. How do you know that ‘people’ want to be educated? This bit only makes sense if the groups want to do the education but the people don’t give a shit about it, which runs counter to your statement of people wanting to be educated. Again, this is why you proof-read.

What?

I love that this fool thinks these companies just go, ‘Hey, you know what we should do? We should explain to everyone how our processes work so they will understand what we do. This way, we can have a more intelligent and open dialogue with our consumers!’ The reason a company like Cargill would introduce a Non-GMO anything is because of the absurd fear that people have when it comes to the concept of extremely controlled cross-pollination. Seriously, that’s all GMOs are: organisms subjected to tons of different, controlled cross-pollination knocked up to eleven. Yeah, gene splicing is involved, as are other methods to help speed the shit up, but it’s the same crap we’ve been doing since we learned how to farm.

People are only scared of GMOs because morons like you keep claiming that they will one day force feed us our thoughts via tomatoes. Keeping companies like Monsanto in the dark, like they have been for eons because people just didn’t care, is what leads to that kind of a future. When companies become more transparent, it means the open themselves up not just to governmental organizations, but the public, and there are always people in the public watching you and waiting until you fuck up so they can jump all over you. There is no benefit to being more transparent for a company, or anything for that matter (except for glass).  They are doing this shit because you people complained and whined about it, and that goes for those ‘fact sheets’ you want to ‘scream’ about. More over, why are you getting so butt-mad when they’re doing exactly what you are? Oh, it’s because it’s fine when you do it and not when others do it, of course.

As a fellow of the STEM world, it fucking kills me when I see another real scientist just spouting absolute garbage. It also kills me because this dipshit is now trying to cash in on what his diploma says he has attained, and the vast majority of it is just him completely plagiarizing other work. Whatever led K-State to give him the teaching deal of the last century is beyond me:

‘Eclectic’ is code-word for ‘nuttier than squirrel poop’.

There are 365 days in a year, which means he’s posting three times a day, minimum. I’ve only spent five minutes on the site, but most of his shit is straight-up ripped from other places. I don’t mean that he takes a snippet and comments and then provides the link, I mean he copies the source wholesale while providing the link to the source and then posts it. He even has the fucking gall to put everything into italicized quotations, even if he adds nothing of his own to the post, like that’s perfectly okay to do. Never mind that I’ve personally covered tons of content aggregate/plagiarizing websites here and how they all resort to spamming the internet with as much shit as possible in the hopes that it will stick, which it usually doesn’t, yet this guy thinks it will not only work, but that he’s doing the world a fucking service by lifting others’ work wholesale. Never mind that this shit is exactly the same thing that ‘Reaction’ channels on YouTube do to actual content creators and everyone loathes it, except it’s via text and not video. And, despite all this, he has the fucking stones to complain about getting shit-canned, despite the university bending over backwards for him and him working in a field of education that would benefit enormously from him him being present and holding laboratory sessions, which he cannot do if he is not at the fucking university.

I ask everyone in the world: why in the fuck is this man a respected individual?

He hasn’t even slowed down from posting, as in my short time on his bandwidth cesspool he put up a week’s worth of plagiarized link dumps in a single day. This man has a doctorate in a real scientific field. He has published actual papers in reputed journals, and he’s resorting to the same methods as shitty websites like Polygon, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and Jezebel? Are you fucking kidding me?

The irony.

Back at the first article, Powell is complaining about ‘big money’ doing the same shit he does. Of course this is bad because it’s ‘big money’, and it’s always bad when ‘big money’ does it. I mean, it’s not as if I couldn’t throw a digital stone into the sea that is the internet and hit a fish-article of someone doing some stupid shit because society is full of morons and we only move as fast as our slowest link. Oh, wait, that’s exactly it.

Social justice has shown that people of this current generation are not only more stupid than they ever have been, but that they are perfectly willing to be duped if it fits their personal belief system. I hate to pick on the obvious in Hillary Clinton, but the damn ‘Woman Card’ business was exactly that. So was her campaigning, most of which completely ignored how openly self-interested and dangerous she was back in the 90s. This was all ignored because the narrative was, ‘We had a black man, now let’s have a woman’, even though the black man wasn’t all that great and the woman would’ve been objectively worse based on her goddamn track record. The fact that you, Mr. Powell, believe people are going to actively search to improve themselves like you are clearly implying in this piece of yours, shows that you are as out of touch with society as the guy ten blogs over who thinks the Earth is flat. I’m definitely not advocating with forcing people to think a certain way; shit, that’s why I’m bitching about you doing exactly that while complaining ‘big money’ is doing it. I’m just not so naive to believe that if you don’t leave breadcrumbs to intersection of all the different available paths, the average person will stumble upon the intersection all on their own. Have you seen the average first-world adult? They’re fat as fucking hell, there’s no way they’re walking to that intersection, let alone all the other paths that branch out from there.

‘Sahltines, you seem to be going in really hard on this guy. I mean, he’s actually researched this stuff and you don’t know dick about food. Maybe you should just dip before you get in too deep, man..’ Hell no, and the reason is this article.

Yeah, one small moral grand-standing paragraph set me off. I mean, it’s just something he repeats ad-nauseum in nearly every article he quotes, every entry he writes, every plagiarization he makes, despite it making no goddamn sense to anyone who has taken a high school chemistry course. But no, I’m going too ham on a guy who is willfully plagiarizing the works of others, using scare-mongering tactics, and pushing his agenda despite it being a total goddamn scientific farce while he holds an actual doctorate in a real field of actual science.

Alright, I’ll fully admit that last bit was definitely off the rails and bad rage comedy, but it doesn’t devalue my point. Nobody sane uses a thermometer and just a thermometer to ensure their food is safe to eat. A culinary thermometer ends in a single, localized area, which is essentially the same as a point. This is only useful to gain a rough estimate of something’s hotness; the best situation for a a meat thermometer is a big, voluminous object like a whole chicken or turkey where the entire probe length will be subjected to temperatures in said bird, thus resulting in a more accurate readings. However, it’s still useless for dealing with the real issue, which is that you’re measuring a three dimensional heat field with something that measures a one dimensional point value.

Not only that, but when cooking, you are typically transmitting heat from some heat source into another object to then heat the food itself. That’s not even addressing grill cooking, which uses open flames and has a built-in thermometer in most of the modern units to ensure the food is always being cooked at proper temperatures, or pit cooking where you’re actually trapping all the heat, ensuring that not only the flame (which generally burns well over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit), or even the goddamn fact that most cooking involves you heating up the surfaces to temperatures that will enable food to be safe for human consumption.

To add shitty anecdotal ‘evidence’ to the mix, I’ve never cooked anything that has made anyone sick, nor has anyone in my family. Of course, we actually keep watch over our food, use timers, do things like put scrape lines on meat slabs, preheat surfaces correctly, rotate appropriately and things an intelligent human being would do when cook. One thing I also do is I make sure to make a small incision at some point during the cooking to check the coloration and the grain behavior of the meat. Sir Powell would surely frown on this and try to stab a disgusting thermometer in my burger, therefore opening up a hole in the meat for heat to uselessly pass through. If the meat is able to retain shape, then it’s cooked well. If the innards fall out like a girl with huge knockers wearing a super-tight low-cut top (schwing!), then it’s not done. Meat shouldn’t behave like soup. Honestly, the more I read and the more I ruminate on this, Powell seems like the kind of guy who would come over for food, then immediately leave after snooping while you were in the bathroom for a meat thermometer, only to call you later and tell you you’re a piece of shit for trying to ‘poison’ him.

Now, none of this is to say that people shouldn’t use meat thermometers. Use them, because even if they’re not accurate for figuring out what the actual fluctuating heat field that’s cooking your food is, they give you a rough estimate. Just don’t rely on them entirely, because then you turn into that moron in the office who argues that the numbers show a two-percent increase and the company needs to increase its bottom line, yet doesn’t take into account the other factors that go in to making the decision. Stat-screamers are some of the worst people out there, and their robotic-like adherence to simply listening to the digits and general abandon of logical thought and reasoning are, to say the very least, dangerous.

To top all this off, I have never once been to a restaurant that cooks fresh, raw meat products from scratch that also does not have some warning somewhere that ordering food certain ways may result in the food being technically ‘undercooked’ and that it is your own damn fault for this. Yes, people do get incorrect orders and then get sick from them, but those issues are far more likely to come from moronic customers who don’t know what they’re doing to themselves, improper food storage and poor food management practices. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still issues that need to be minimized, but it does mean that slamming thermometers everywhere like it’s somehow going to make poor storage better is beyond retarded. In fact, I’d posit it’s exacerbating the problem since Dr. Powell over here thinks the only reason people get sick is because steaks don’t hit the magical 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Never mind that the most dangerous foods are produce and shellfish because these are generally quick to spoil and are featured in many dishes that are consumed raw. Never mind that in the time I’ve spent on his blog he never once complains about goddamn sushi; it’s just all about red meat and pork and poultry.

Frankly, I think our good man Powell doesn’t give a shit about food safety. I say this because he wouldn’t be spamming stolen content to his blog that absolutely nobody reads if he really gave a shit. He would be looking for teaching jobs, trying to get media appearances, writing books & other literature, conducting research on his own dime & time, or just about anything that would actually result in his message getting far more airplay. Instead, he spends his time filling his blog with tripe and working on ‘studies’ where him and his team go around to random restaurants, order medium-rare burgers and then come to the conclusion that not only are the burgers not cooked to an appropriate level of ‘doneness’ (whatever the fuck that means), but that servers do a bad job of telling the customer if their burger was ‘properly done’ (whatever the fuck that means) or not.

Yes, this was an actual study that was done; the link is only a short preview, but it’s still hilarious. I love how the abstract, which is way too long to be called an abstract proper, subtly hints that the team chose places that appear to tend towards having ill-repute, meaning that the team biased their own results, making the conclusions worthless. I also like how on the last page before the preview ends, they spend time explaining that oxygen makes meat red and raw meat loses oxygen over time, thus it browns faster and can fool people into thinking it’s undercooked. It’s almost like it’s tacitly acknowledging that the people they’re writing this for are idiots and make up a tiny portion of the population at large, thus making their complaints almost entirely irrelevant.

The paper spends nearly five pages on a confusing-ass table that I don’t know how to decipher, but from my count details how many people have been ‘casualties’ (my word, not theirs) of food poisoning due to ‘undercooked food’. It tallies at 1656 people, but this is over the course of nearly fourteen years, which means a person gets ill about every three days, which means this is a huge waste of time. It also doesn’t include age groups, but does include where the incidents occurred, and the majority appear to be at private homes, which leads me to believe these things occur at barbecues and cookouts, which are occasions where people are likely to be drinking and their illness could be a hangover or their hospitalization could be far more due to other foods or alcohol poisoning. Of course, because there appears to be no mention of controlling for all this, I am only left to call this paper garbage until I’m able to get a full copy of it, and I’m not paying that money (forty bucks for a PDF? Hell nah). I mean, they could very well fully control this experiment of theirs, but the way they’re being deliberately misleading with the simplest of tables and how there appears to be a blatant biasing addressed in the abstract, I think it’s reasonable I have heavy pause on this.

Where was I? Oh yeah, I don’t think Powell really gives two fucks about food safety, at least not anymore. His rants and ramblings and lack of effort to try and reach out to the masses and push for higher quality standards in food handling, transport, preparation and consumption indicate, at least to me, that he is butt-mad about people enjoying meat slightly undercooked and that people dare to walk a tiny bit on the wild side. Perhaps it’s something far less conspiratorial, like he’s just an old man shouting at clouds on a mountain, but I always like to think it’s a little more animated and involved than that. Can you blame me? I’m writing a stupid diatribe over four-thousand words in length about a dude who gets extremely peeved that people have access to more ‘fact sheets’ (read: callously murdered forests) and that people like a little pink in their meat.

Ultimately, this whole endeavor is a little depressing because Dr. Powell, as I said earlier, covers really good stuff. He’s brought up cases where civil workers have done a spectacularly poor job of keeping the nearby town’s drinking water potable, and his overall message, which essentially is ‘be safer and smarter about your food’, is a solid message. It just sucks that he would rather wave a picket sign and a pitchfork at anyone who doesn’t live to his absurd standards, and how that side is the side that constantly is in plain view for everyone to see. Perhaps it’s also depressing to know that fellow academics are not absolved from being really goddamn stupid. I mean, I know that moronic eggheads are out there, and I can comprehend their existence, but it’s just disheartening that someone wasted so much time on self-education and improvement to come out on the other side arguably less intelligent than the point they started.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you out there; make sure to thank your ma (provided she isn’t dead, hasn’t gone spare, or isn’t a towering cunt that you don’t get along with). Go buy her some beats or something. Also make sure you guys get some steak or burgers, and get them medium rare. You only live once, right?