synesthesia

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(Belgium) Found a mealworm in Delhaize rooibos “tea”. Return refused. Food safety report ignored. Do we rely on Twitter for food safety? in c/publichealth@mander.xyz
[–] synesthesia@thebrainbin.org 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I am so much more motivated than the typical consumer. My goal is that when someone else (your typical lazy consumer who may only care to get a refund) returns a can of worms to the grocery store, that the grocer have an obligation¹ to record the food quality/security issue and report it in a way that it gets tracked and ideally in a centralised place.

So indeed as I said, we need to evolve more. We have banks hyper-reporting on mere suspicion of something they perceive as off under excessive AML rules as if there is a gun to their head, yet you bring a real live creepy crawly to a grocer and there is minimal action.. as you say getting swept under the rug as shrinkage.

¹ or pressure of some kind.

(Belgium) Found a mealworm in Delhaize rooibos “tea”. Return refused. Food safety report ignored. Do we rely on Twitter for food safety? in c/publichealth@mander.xyz
[–] synesthesia@thebrainbin.org 1 points 2 weeks ago

It’s something that should have been recorded and analysed. Perhaps they would discover something, like maybe they should inspect the rooibos before adding the white chocolate (if they are not already).

(Belgium) Found a mealworm in Delhaize rooibos “tea”. Return refused. Food safety report ignored. Do we rely on Twitter for food safety? in c/publichealth@mander.xyz
[–] synesthesia@thebrainbin.org 0 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

It might have had that, I don’t know; I don’t have the tin anymore. But indeed, we need to evolve more. Consumers are not going to pay to ship a tin to a producer. Store returns are managed by stores who potentially ship stuff back to their suppliers. In this case a bean-counter refused a return which then caused them to neglect to record a creepy crawly in their own food brand.

(Belgium) Found a mealworm in Delhaize rooibos “tea”. Return refused. Food safety report ignored. Do we rely on Twitter for food safety? in c/publichealth@mander.xyz
[–] synesthesia@thebrainbin.org 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It was alive. It was in the tin for a while too. The tin had a tight fitting lid so there is no way it could have entered after I bought it and put it in my pantry. I did not discover it until about half the roobios was consumed.

(edit) just attached a pic to the OP.

Guess I should phrase it as a food security issue, not food safety, since security is broader and covers shortages. I probably got less “food” because that live worm has a lot more weight per volume than rooibos I was buying. Plus it probably ate some of it. So there’s my courtroom testimony ready to go :)

(Belgium) Found a mealworm in Delhaize rooibos “tea”. Return refused. Food safety report ignored. Do we rely on Twitter for food safety? in c/publichealth@mander.xyz
[–] synesthesia@thebrainbin.org 2 points 2 weeks ago

I did not reach out to them in this particular case. But I would expect Test Achats to focus on getting me a refund of 2 euros or whatever it is; I would not think Test Achats would do anything to intervene in quality control.

When I have contacted Test Achats in the past, they said something like subscribe to their magazine to become a member, then they will advocate for me on consumer issues. I decided not to subscribe.

Then a few years later I complained about at a consumer issue to a gov agency who then forwarded the complaint to ECCNET, which apparently is the same org as Test Achats. They responded to say they only handle cross-border problems and that anything that is entirely in Belgium (where both the consumer and merchant are in Belgium) is outside of their jurisdiction.

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(Belgium) Found a mealworm in Delhaize rooibos “tea”. Return refused. Food safety report ignored. Do we rely on Twitter for food safety? (media.thebrainbin.org)
 

It may be difficult or impossible to control food quality well enough that every container be mealworm-free. But I expect metrics to be kept so someone can monitor whether or not a supply chain is doing something notably reckless.

Delhaize historyDelhaize started off as a food producer who was regarded as a brand of high quality products. Then they became a big grocery store chain. So of course they sell their own products. And in fact I have never seen Delhaize products sold by other stores.

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When I tried to return the rooibos, the CSR asked for a receipt. I did not have one, so he refused. I said: look, it’s brand of the store, so of course it came from here. He argued that it may not have come from /this/ precise store.

I don’t give a shit about getting a 2 euro refund. My whole point was to get the incident recorded so they can look into QA issues. So then I reported this to the food safety authority in Belgium. It’s possible they acted on it, but they sent no acknowledgement. Which effectively signals to consumers they are wasting their time by reporting quality issues.

Is this all normal? I would expect a public health agency to be keen to encourage reports of worms packaged in food.

I think the norm is (sadly enough) to use Twitter. Someone tweets “worm in my food” with a good photo, it gets some attention, then the supplier is forced to try to remedy their embarrassment. This hack doesn’t work for non-Twitter non-Facebook users.

(edit) attached a pic

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Creepy crawly found living in Brussels toilet. Help needed solving this mystery. (lone.earth)
 

This creepy crawly was found living in a rarely used toilet in Brussels.

I was alarmed to find it. Is it a parasite? Hookworm, or roundworm?

Some history:

This is a rarely used part of the house. One day I discovered the toilet bowl was teeming with sewer drain fly larvae. Also creeped me out until I worked out what I was looking at. I’m not bothered about drain flies so I just left it alone. Returned to the toilet a couple months later and the trap was bone-dry. There was a hard blob of something.. mud, limescale, I don’t know. Not sure how it got there. It was the size of a golf ball so more mass than I would expect from limescale. I used a strong acid to descale the toilet. I made the toilet sparkling clean.

Then I used the trap to clean a dread-lock style mop because I could stuff it in there and squeeze out the the grime. And the mop could also reach deeper into the trap to clean the toilet better. Toilet water would become instantly black but easy to flush and repeat. After 10 or so iterations the water was still gray so I gave up.. maybe the mop should be bleached.. so I put the mop away. The mop was previously used to clean up cat urine (neighbors cat keeps entering my house, peeing on the livingroom floor and stairs, then bailing.. does not hang-out [why mark in a territory it does not intend to use?]). Anyway, I did not defecate in the toilet after cleaning it. Maybe urinated a couple times over the span of a couple months.

Then out of the pure blue I find this creepy crawly. Should I bring this thing to a doctor? I cannot work out how it got there or if it came from me. Perhaps equally important are the sand grains (50 or so?) around it.

theory 1: it entered the cistern from the Brussels water supply, perhaps as an egg. Hatched in the cistern. Brussels water contains sand which builds up at the screens of the tap airators and also in the cistern. A typical flush does not bring any noticable sand into the toilet bowl, but maybe if a worm were in the cistern it would have moved the sand around so that a pinch of sand would go in a flush, along with the worm.

theory 2: it came in from the Brussels water supply and ended up in the sewer pipes like most of the water does, grew in the sewer pipes and crawled up into the toilet trap from the sewer side. As it crawled, sand and scum from the sewer pipe stuck to it and washed off it when it entered the trap.

theory 3: it came out of me and ended up in the sewer pipes and crawled into the toilet. No!!! I hope not. But if so, it’s the lower floor toilet that I use, so the worm would have to do a straight up vertical clime 1 story high inside of PVC. Seems unlikely.

theory 4: I leave the window open most of the time and the toilet seat up, so a bird could have flown in and dropped something in the toilet.

They all seem unlikely.