I don't feel at home in this house anymore

[sovay]

It is beautifully sunny outside. I want to check on the magnolia I discovered at the start of this month. I am so tired, I am randomly falling asleep as a passenger in cars, which is not normal for me. I used to sleep on long-distance buses and trains, which I miss, in the ways that I miss traveling generally.

I just heard about the food companies which, faced with the enforcement of sesame as a legally identified allergen, decided to contaminate all of their products with sesame rather than make the effort of avoiding cross-contamination in their facilities, which seems to me indistinguishable from a city's water and sewer department making sure that all the drinking water contains nicely labeled lead. In addition to finding this letter-of-the-law mass fuck-you upsetting in the nearly incoherent way of things that are wrong, I don't understand how it's actually legal—it is an obvious dodge of the entire purpose of laws about food safety and labeling—and as a precedent it makes me feel a little like painting arsenic onto the morning toast of the persons responsible.

When I saw that Ben Ferencz had died, the first thing I thought after his memory for a blessing was how much I hated that he had not outlived the relevance of his life's work, which probably means he felt a lot more strongly about it.

Assembling tax materials and writing to doctors in the same afternoon is incredibly demoralizing and the overall condition of the world is not helping.

Comments

[yhlee]

Oh, I forget specifics - he visited us once early in his FDA career and we went grocery shopping for snacks and stuff, and I remember he picked up some drink or snack or whatever and pointed out that the label was not in compliance (there are sort of graphic design/standard rules on how information needs to be laid out and presented? I don't remember the details, this was ~20 years ago), he said this was almost certainly a "small company that doesn't realize they messed this up" rather than malice issue (apparently common with formatting/label design stuff), and also, no one from the FDA was EVER going to act on this or send them a note to fix the problem or fine them or whatever unless for some reason somebody else noticed and reported them and kicked it up the priority list (very unlikely).