Neo Kobe Pizza

The Domino’s pizza tainting incident is a disgusting reminder to be careful who we hire to prepare our food in restaurants.  What people may not be aware of is that food is being legally tainted in the production line.  The food industry lately has gone to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle level lengths to cut production costs.  Natural diet enthusiasts of many persuasions are warning people to read food labels, and be careful about what they’re eating.

Soy

Soy flour has become a very popular addition to many commercial breads and doughs.  In modern, industrial countries, it’s hard to find any bread in stores of bakeries that doesn’t have soy flour.  In some countries, like Israel and Columbia, bakers are required by law to add soy to their bread.

Soy oil is also becoming an increasingly popular addition to canned tomato sauces.  Many white sauces have soy powder, soy milk, or soy lecithin.

Read more about the dangers of soy, and how food marketers have conned the world into eating more of it.

High Fructose Corn Syrup

High fructose corn syrup is replacting glucose and sucrose (white sugar) in many commercial doughs and sauces.  It does make a difference.  Excess fructose that gets converted to fat tends to build up around the organs and abdomen rather than getting deposited evenly.

What can you do about it?

1. Make your own food from scratch.  If you make it, you know what’s in it.
2. Encourage your local restaurants and chains to make their own pizza dough and sauce, or to get sourced by companies that don’t use soy or high fructose corn syrup.
3. Vote with your dollars, and don’t buy products that contain soy or high fructose corn syrup, even if it’s very tempting.

Be careful out there.

Two very stupid people made video of themselves tainting the food, and posted it on YouTube.  Here are three clips The Consumerist managed to get.  If policies are are so lax at Dominoes as to allow this kind of thing to happen, goodness knows how many more people are doing it but just not being so public about it.

Apparently there are no cameras, and there’s no real supervision.  Kristy Hammonds Thompson and Michael Setzer were able to do what they did pretty much without any special attempts to conceal themselves.  They even had time to laugh about it.

Though the two pizza tainting sociopaths were dumb, Dominoes Pizza was dumb to hire them, and reacted to the situation in an even dumber way.  Rather than issuing a press release upon finding out about them, they went about systematically attempting to suppress the videos.  They went after YouTube, bloggers who ripped and posted the videos, and even people who posted video comments on it.  It’s hard to say which is the worst betrayal of loyal customers: the lack of proper supervision or the abuse of money and power to go after innocent people who were concerned that a couple of nutjobs were flicking boogers into their food.

The food industry is coming under increasing scrutiny of late, and these kinds of incidents don’t help.  Kristy Hammonds Thompson is a registered sex offender.  She was convicted of misdemeanor sexual battery for sexually abusing a teenage girl over a period of four months.

How did she get hired to work at Dominoes, a company that does pizza deliveries and sometimes hires teenagers?  Nobody has a real answer.  Apparently, they just don’t care enough.

It’s a sad day in the world of pizza.  This is one reason why I am very careful where I eat out, and generally prefer cooking my own food.  All this has inspired me to post recipes more often.