144 | Postcard from America | Housekeeping | Seafood Fraud |

A short (sweet) issue

• Postcard from America;

• Housekeeping: managing your subscription, special lifetime offer;

• Food Safety News and Resources;

• Learn About Seafood Fraud;

• Food fraud news, emerging issues and recent incidents

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

Howdy!

Welcome to Issue 144, thank you for joining me. And a special huge 👏👏 thank you 👏👏 to all my wonderful new subscribers for supporting my work and our food safety community.

This week is the end of the financial (tax) year in my country. To celebrate I have a special offer for new subscribers. Read on to learn more.

With the end of the year, I’m also taking a moment to do some newsletter ‘housekeeping’, so this week’s issue is a little shorter than usual.

But never fear, you still get our not-boring food safety news and resources roundup, which this week includes new microplastics research, a huge chocolate recall and three helpful free webinars (plus more) and my super-popular weekly food fraud updates for paying subscribers. Usual programming resumes next week.

Cheers,

Karen

P.S. If you know someone who needs to stay up to date with food safety and food fraud news (without ads and boring bits), please tell them about this newsletter.

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Postcard from America

I’m currently in North America, on my first visit to this continent. Wow.

As a food safety person, I’m thrilled with the consistently excellent handwashing facilities in public restrooms here on the West Coast: every restroom I have visited, from National Park picnic areas to interstate gas stations has been equipped with clean sinks, reliable soap dispensing and functioning hand dryers or paper towels. They put the public toilets (‘restrooms’) in my home country of Australia to shame.

Other food-related thoughts: eating out and eating dark green vegetables are mutually exclusive activities; spray-on ‘cheese’ tastes better than I imagined; the yummiest burger I’ve had is from a chain that sounds like a laundromat (In-n-Out); people buy large-size drinks in restaurants that offer unlimited self-serve refills, even though small-size drinks are cheaper; and candy bars are big.

Laffy Taffy; a serious-sized candy bar; Visiting In-n-Out (a burger chain, not a laundromat); salad; crab pots at Fisherman's Wharf; caramel apples; 'cheese' in a can.

Next month I will be attending the IAFP (International Association of Food Protection) conference in Longbeach, California and can’t wait to share what I learn about the latest developments in food safety with you all. Stay tuned!

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Special Offer: 25% off, for life

As the end of the financial year approaches in some countries, it’s the perfect time to make a deductible or expense-able purchase for work. If you haven’t yet become a paying subscriber, or have let your subscription lapse, this offer is for you.

Upgrade to a paid subscription before 30th June and get 25% off your annual subscription for life.

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Newsletter Housekeeping

Subscribing, unsubscribing and renewals

The Rotten Apple has thousands of happy readers, hundreds of weekly issues and more than 300 total posts on the website.

With so many readers and so many emails going out each week, I have to be careful about email deliverability. That means only sending emails to people who really want to receive them. Email services like Gmail and Outlook keep track of newsletters that are not opened by their subscribers, and flag such senders as ‘spam’. That’s not where I want to be!

You can help with deliverability by:

• opting out if you don’t need this newsletter any more;

• keeping your email address up to date - for example, when changing jobs;

• actively managing your paid subscription if your situation changes.

To opt out, simply click ‘unsubscribe’ at the bottom of any email.

To change your email address, visit: https://substack.com/settings; click on "Edit" in the Email section; enter your new email address and click "Save".

If you aren’t loving this newsletter, please take a moment to unsubscribe now.

To manage your paid subscription, including updating credit card details, and pausing or cancelling your subscription, follow the instructions on this page.

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Food Safety News and Resources

Our food safety news and resources roundups are always free and never boring.

This week’s highlight: New research: is your cookware adding microplastics to your food?

Click the preview box below to access it.

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Learn About Seafood Fraud

This video by Business Insider is built on well-sourced data from Oceana, an international conservation organisation. It contains more (and more interesting) information than just the usual “the Red Snapper on your restaurant plate might actually be cheap Tilapia”.  It also addresses the often-overlooked issue of large-scale illegal fishing operations (29 minutes).

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📌 Food Fraud News 📌

Below for paying subscribers: horizon scanning and incident reports

In this week’s food fraud news:

📌 Warning for fraud in used cooking oil for biofuels.
📌 Fake fruit allegations;
📌 Food safety testing workers accused of fraud;
📌 Palm oil warning.