If you want to virtue signal your eating habits to others, Los Angeles is a great place to be. Everyone touts organic, holistic, free-range, wild-caught, artisanal, non-GMO, you name it and if the price can be expensive, someone will sell it.
Los Angeles media influencers love to sell readers what they want to buy and an event at the Hollywood Palladium costing $300-800 per ticket to promote the Los Angeles Times' list of the '101 best restaurants' was sure to make big money - even if you give 80 attendees food poisoning.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said the norovirus provided by these "best restaurants" was at over 80 people, and those are just who they know about. If someone just had food cramps and vomited and didn't report it, there is no way to know.
Since a similar outbreak happened in British Columbia, health epidemiologists believe the culprit was Fanny Bay oysters sold by Santa Monica Seafood but that we can't blame the last two companies in the supply chain, the distributor and then the supposed elite restaurant taking them out of the package, tells you how ridiculous these artisanal food claims are.
No chef is going out there dredging for oysters, any more than they are flying to China to see if that imported organic food really uses only old pesticides that marketing departments for American companies who run the National Organic Standards Board section of the USDA Marketing Service (yes, they are just a marketing designation) decided to claim is better for the environment than modern chemicals that lead to less strain on the planet.
If you are interested in making positive changes for the new year, stop overpaying for intellectual placebos like organic food, and definitely stop supporting groups who shame poor people and suggest they are bad parents if they don't do it either. Don't bother trying to change government, the local CDC in LA only needed two weeks to know fancy, overpriced oysters were poisoning people, while the federal government CDC needs 6 weeks to tell us lettuce has E. coli.
