ThePopTort

Restaurant Bosses Caught With Hands in the Tip Jar

Here’s a tip for greedy food establishments: stop taking a bite out of your employees’ hard-earned wages.

Believe it or not, the latest trend to be sweeping the nation amongst restaurant owners and managers appears to be dipping into the tip jars of frontline workers, and transferring the proceeds into their own piggy banks.  The latest offender in this unappetizing practice was celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten who recently agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by his waiters for $1.75 million in pilfered tips.

Not to be outdone, two former waiters who claimed more than 100 workers were forced to share their tips with restaurant management recently sued Nobu restaurants, which are partially owned by actor Robert DeNiro.   Hip-hop mogul Jay Z has also been rapped with a lawsuit for allegedly keeping a cut of workers’ tips at his Chelsea hot spot, the 40/40 Club.

Even coffee baristas have been forced to seek relief from the civil justice system to reclaim misappropriated gratuities.  In March, a Superior Court judge ordered Starbucks to pay its California workers more than $100 million in back tips that the chain had unfairly given away to shift supervisors.

“Why does a successful establishment need to pay employees out of waiters’ tips?” asked attorney D. Maimon Kirschenbaum, who represented the plaintiffs in the Nobu case.  “It is almost impossible to understand.  If you need more money to pay your managers, charge more for your food.  I feel they’re just doing it because they can.”

Thankfully, workers’ access to civil remedies when their tips are stolen means greedy food industry bosses may be less apt to go for seconds.

The FDA Says, Essentially, "Oops."

Following up on an earlier post regarding the FDA not doing such a great job regulating our food supply, this editorial ran in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer,

The FDA: Food Fright

A red-faced Food and Drug Administration now admits that tomatoes were not the cause of a nationwide salmonella outbreak.

The culprit, apparently, is Mexican-grown jalapeño peppers. But the agency responsible for ensuring the safety of 80 percent of the nation's food supply still isn't sure of the source of the food poisoning, months after it began.

The earliest-known victim got sick on April 10. In May, four cases of salmonella poisoning showed up in Pennsylvania, including people in Bucks and Lancaster Counties. On June 7, the FDA issued its warning about tomatoes, and many local groceries pulled them from produce aisles. Fast-food restaurants such as McDonald's and Taco Bell stopped serving tomatoes.

By this month, more than 1,200 people in 43 states had been sickened, the worst such outbreak in a decade. And now the FDA says, essentially, "Oops."

This episode is only the latest in a string of examples of the FDA's falling down in its mission to protect U.S. consumers. It's all the more reason for Congress to proceed with beefing up the agency's food-inspection capabilities.

If the FDA were doing its detective work effectively, it would benefit business owners, too. Just ask people in the agriculture industry who got blamed erroneously for the salmonella outbreak. (read on)

"Qualified" is an Official FDA Euphemism For "All But Meaningless"

Okay, so we pick on the FDA quite a bit – but usually it is for drugs and medical devices.  But, as the name implies the Food and Drug Administration is also supposed to regulate our food supply.

Since April we have been hearing about the salmonella outbreak that has sickened at least 1,000 people across the country.  Although tomatoes are allegedly to blame, the FDA has yet to prove the connection (but none-the-less doing untold amount of damage to the tomato industry). 

So people continue to get sick and the FDA can't find the source but as we know, the FDA's problems are not just limited to recent headlines.

In Michael Pollan's (I became a big big fan of his after reading Omnivore's Dilemma) In Defense of Food – An Eater's Manifesto, among other points he rallies against processed food.  In the section I was reading last night, he talked about FDA approved food labels (p. 156):

It would appear that "qualified" is an official FDA euphemism for "all but meaningless."  Though someone might have let the consumer in on the game:  The FDA's own research indicates that consumers have no idea what to make of qualified heath claims (how would they?), and its rules allow companies to promote the claims pretty much any way they want – they can use really big type for the claim, for example, and then print the disclaimers in teeny-tiny type.

UPDATE:  Just after I posted this, I noticed that the FDA gave the go-ahead on eating tomatoes again.  Thanks, but I think I'll stick to eating local produce...

What You Are Really Getting in Your $5.96 Frozen Yogurt

I can't wait for Wednesdays when the New York Times publishes its food section.  But much to my surprise yesterday's paper had a great article about our civil justice system tucked in between a recipe for minimalist tacos and the discussion of dry Rieslings.

Thanks to a recent class-action lawsuit, we now know the popular frozen yogurt company Pinkberry hasn't always been accurate about their advertised "all natural" ingredients.  Not that the company was putting anything necessarily dangerous in their "swirly goodness" but it wasn't quite as "healthy, nonfat and all-natural" as they said it was.

Sure, we wish that companies would simply do the right thing (like list out their ingredients) but when they don't, I sure am glad we have our courts to make it right.  In this case, to make things right Pinkberry agreed to pay $750,000 to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.