Café Rotavirus - a barf poem by John Estes
There’s an upside to getting written up in Slate magazine, as barfblog.com did last week, and it’s that a new audience can be reached.
Like the barf poetry crowd.
John Estes, who teaches at the University of Missouri, wrote me this morning to say he discovered barfblog.com through the Slate article, and that,
“Since you have no barf poetry (it's a niche genre) I wanted to offer my poem, 'Cafe Rotavirus.'"
So here it is (and that's John's son, Jonah, with their dog, Sophie, right)..
Cafe Rotavirus
Last time we all
ate here, a Sunday, after
the baby played with
—chewed on—
their toys: six
days and nights
of puke and diarrhea.
This stuff kills
starving kids in Africa,
underdeveloped as
electrolyte industries
are there.
But I cannot stop
returning and returning.
What pathogenesis
makes me weak
for, so consoled by,
this biscuits and gravy—
though I cannot
stop imagining
trillions of rotifer-driven
microbes racing
around this apparent
locus amoenus
like, but not like,
animated soap
bubbles scrubbing up
bathtub scum?
To believe in history,
now that fixed
stars are not so fixed,
might be to believe
each instant struggles—
fatally, hopefully—
to loose itself from
some unoriginate whole.
But, and this makes
instinctual sense
so long as instinct is
nothing but undigested
experience, it may also,
or maybe instead,
be the collective orgy
clearing its gorge,
suffusing each instant
with the particles
of every other
but in tastier order,
because nothing is real
until it means
and nothing means
until it returns,
returns like a dog returns,
as it will with verve,
to a baby’s vomit.
John Estes teaches at the University of Missouri and lives in Columbia. Recent poems have appeared (or will) in West Branch, Southern Review, New Orleans Review, Tin House, and other places. He is author of Kingdom Come (C&R Press, forthcoming) and two chapbooks: Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoön (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and Swerve (Poetry Society of America, 2009) which won a National Chapbook Fellowship. See his website for more poems and prose.
Fatz Café: continuous training and reinforcement to establish a culture of food safety
Director of Training Sara Anderson said, "We were already doing ServSafe [the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation’s food-safety training program] with our management, but we wanted to make sure that it was truly getting down to the front lines. …
"We really had to start marketing to them to get the buy-in on the importance of it. These habits take time to form. Educating people on why it’s so important has really helped make it happen and make it become real-life practices. We just keep adding more and more aspects of it. It’s become a part of our culture more than it ever was. … We’re sticking to basics and constantly talking about it."
Food safety information must be rapid, reliable, relevant and repeated. And to really create a culture that values microbiologically safe food, start marketing such efforts.
Food science cafe
We had our first, monthly, Food Science Café, last night, and while numbers were small, I still believe that, if you build it, they will come.As long as it's useful.
Adrianna Deweese of the Kansas State Collegian wrote that Douglas Powell, scientific director of the International Food Safety Network at K-State, said the purpose of the monthly discussions is to talk about food safety and science in a different setting than a classroom.
Powell showed his meat thermometer to those in attendance, and said it is important to get a digital, instant-read, tip-sensitive meat thermometer, which costs about $12.
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"Lots of people use it for whole birds or roasts, but I think it's more important actually for the burgers and the ground beef," Powell said. "Ten years ago I would have never used one, but now I feel naked when I don't - I feel vulnerable."When he is asked at a restaurant how he would like his hamburger cooked, Powell said he responds he would like it "160," meaning he would like it cooked to 160 degrees Fahrenheit.
Food color often is a poor indicator of when it is properly cooked, Powell said. K-State food-safety research has found about 25 percent of tested hamburgers turned brown before they reached a safe temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit, he said.
"We're always just trying to find one way to put information out and take information in," he said. "We're just always trying to find new ways to get it out there so we have fewer sick people."
The network also has several blogs at www.donteatpoop.k-state.edu and
barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu. Powell also wore a T-shirt Monday night that said "ne mangez pas de caca," which is French for "Don't eat poop."
"It's had more effect than anything else," Powell said of the message.
Angela Dodd, senior in food science, was quoted as saying Food Science Café discussions are
"a great way for students to become aware of what's going on in the media about food safety. Food pertains to everybody, and it's a part of everybody's life."
I didn't really like the long table set-up. Next month, we're probably going to do it in the on-campus bowling alley. Only place to get a beer at K-State.
The Safe Food Café
President Jon Wefald likes to remind me that Kansas State University will not be getting a hockey arena any time soon. I even gave him one of our collectors T-shirts (left, exactly as shown) and he said, no way.Which is too bad cause one of our ideas to help finance the arena was the Safe Food Café, a restaurant and observational food service kitchen where we could videotape the food safety behaviors of employees and customers, and experiment with interventions.
Apparently the Dutch were listening in, and have come up with their own variation.
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The Associated Press reported that a new research centre -- dubbed the "restaurant of the future" -- at the Dutch university of Wageningen will track diners with dozens of unobtrusive cameras and monitoring their eating habits.
Rene Koster, head of the Center for Innovative Consumer Studies, said,
"We want to find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel. We try to focus on one stimulus, like light," as overhead bulbs switched through green, red, orange and blue. This restaurant is a playground of possibilities. We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse. The changes must be small. If you were making changes every day it would be too disruptive. People wouldn't like it."
University staff who want to eat at the new restaurant have to sign a consent form agreeing to be watched.
The new research centre -- which cost almost 3 million euros ($4.26 million) -- was set up in partnership with French catering group Sodexho Alliance and other companies interested in using the restaurant to test their products.
