Sunday, February 27

tainted fodder

Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks. Or increasingly, in the hands of the food producers and processing companies.

As The Independent puts it, another week, another food scare. This time, it's an orangey-red food colourant named Sudan 1, which appears to have carcinogenic effects on lab animals. Although it's quite difficult to locate truly hot sauces in the UK, chillie powder tainted with Sudan-1 seems to have made its way to a surprisingly high number of products. Of course, the company responsible will escape sanctions. No one will ever know if the company wittingly hoarded tainted chillie powder for 3 years before passing it out onto the food chain. Or if there will be any steps to prevent a repeat. Food scares aren't anything new in these parts, of course...The last major British food scare was BSE. And people still haven't figured out a solution, because this latest Sudan 1 discovery was made in Italy. Sheesh. Amateurs. Haven't they heard of adding ground up bricks to chillie for that authentic fiery orange colour ? Unscrupulous vendors in SL have been doing that for years.

And onto other news, if you haven't heard this yet, Firefox has a new update out. It fixes several security flaws and also has a bandaid for Unicode addressbar spoofing. I didn't use the installer, but downloaded the zip archive instead. You *must* delete all the contents of the Firefox directory before unzipping the update, though. There have been a few bugreports by people who forgot to do this. 1.0.1 seems to be a bit faster than 1.0, but YMMV. All the extensions still work fine.

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