It tuns out that cannibals like a break from cooking, too. A cannibal restaurant tops this month’s edition of the Neews, food safety stories that put the eew in news.
Earlier this month, police in Anambra, Nigeria shut down a hotel restaurant that had been serving human flesh, according to story in The Independent. Police, who discovered two bloodsoaked human heads wrapped in cellophane, two AK-47s, other weapons and a cache of cell phones at the restaurant, arrested the owner and 10 other people.
In any other month, Steve Melendez and his Ratopia Restaurant Map featured in Gothamist would have been a Neews headliner. Using information from New York City’s health department, Melendez created a color-coded map that shows by zip code the percentage of restaurants with a rodent problem. Neighborhoods with high scores on the map include Queens Village/Bellaire where 60.9 percent of restaurants inspected had rodent problems, Far Rockaway’s 11691 zip code with 54 percent, and Brooklyn’s 11218 zip code with 52 percent. Ratatouille anyone?
A special investigation by the The Clarion Ledger revealed that some meat processed for human consumption at Mississippi slaughterhouses was smeared with feces, kicked by workers and stored under dripping pipes or in rooms that were inhabited by flies, maggots and roaches.
Also in the dripping pipes category is Mongiello Italian Cheese Specialties, Inc. d.b.a. Formaggios. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found dipping pipes, other unsanitary conditions and Listeria monocytogenes, one of the deadliest fooborne pathogens, during a recent visit, according to a January 23 warning letter to the company.
A current Listeria outbreak linked to soft cheese made by another company, Roos Foods of Kenton, DE, has sickened seven people in Maryland and killed one person in California. Among those sickened are three newborns.
Wet or moist areas provide a breeding ground for Listeria. At Formaggio, inspectors found a water-like substance dripping from a green stained part of the ceiling in the curd cutting room near an open vat of cheese curd; off a pipe over an open vat of product in another area; and off of a light fixture in the mozzarella cooler where it splashed onto the floor near trays of unwrapped product.
They also found condensation on a pipe above the filling machine and on the ceiling of the cheese production room, which contains numerous open vats of cheese in various stages of production; and condensation on a plastic pipe in the mozzarella room above exposed blocks of cheese.
