Ask the Critics: What Should I Do if I Get Food Poisoning?

?Rebecca F. asks: My boyfriend and I think we got food poisoning from a restaurant we ate at a few days ago since we both got sick within half an hour of each other. Are we supposed to tell the restaurant? What do we do?

Dear Rebecca: Getting food poisoning flat-out sucks. Unfortunately, resolving the poisoning does, too.

Food poisoning is a common occurrence, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actually just published new findings reporting that one in six Americans will get sick from known and unknown bacteria, viruses, and microbes each year. That's about 48 million people, resulting in about 128,000 hospitalizations and about 3,000 deaths. Among these bacteria and viruses, norovirus causes about 60 percent of food-poisoning-related illnesses, while salmonella is the leading cause of hospitalizations.

However, the problem with food poisoning is that because microbes spread in so many ways, it's exceedingly difficult to know if your illness was caused by food or something else. Generally speaking, though, the time elapsed between ingestion and symptoms will be 24 to 72 hours. So if you get sick 20 minutes after eating oysters, don't be so sure that the oysters are to blame and immediately ring up the seafood restaurant where you dined.

I contacted the New York City Health Department with your inquiry, and their recommendation for consumers is not to call the restaurant directly, but to call 311, noting how many people in the dining party became ill. The Health Department will then follow up and interview callers about all food consumed, and will then follow up with the restaurants to determine if there is the possibility of a food-borne illness. If it's determined that there is a possibility, they will send an inspector to the restaurant. The Health Department also recommends keeping any suspicious food for possible testing, but, unless you suspect your diarrhea was caused by your takeout dinner, this can be rather difficult.

If you think your food poisoning was caused from something that you purchased, you can call one of two governmental hotlines. For meat, poultry, egg, and milk products, call the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline at 888-674-6854. For any other food product, call 888-723-3366.

So that's the short end of it. Unfortunately, just because one person who got sick called 311 doesn't mean that everyone else who got sick from the same place called 311, making the likelihood of a restaurant inspection very small. It's probably best, though, if you and your boyfriend call 311 independently of each other. But basically you're shit out of luck. Literally.

Have a restaurant tip or other food-related news? Send it to fork@villagevoice.com.

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Anthony Mackie's Bed-Stuy Bar 'Should Open Next Year'

?In August, word surfaced that Anthony Mackie -- an actor best-known for his role in The Hurt Locker and currently starring as a former Black Panther in Night Catches Us -- was planning to open a bar in Bed-Stuy. At the time, a September opening was projected for the establishment, but today, via an interview Mackie did earlier with NPR, comes news that the bar, called No Bar, "should open next year." Vague, yes, but less vague is the fact that Mackie, who splits his time between the neighborhood and New Orleans, is modeling the place after late-1800s France, and building all of its furniture.

Have a tip or restaurant-related news? Send it to fork@villagevoice.com.

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Should Megabanks Be Broken Apart? (NYT Room For Debate)

By Simon Johnson.? This?material was prepared as part of the New York Times’ Room for Debate on “Should Mega-Banks Be Broken Apart“?? I strongly recommend the post by Anat Admati.

Writing in the Washington Post, in November 2009, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan Chase, argued:

“Creating the structures to allow for the orderly failure of a large financial institution starts with giving regulators the authority to facilitate failures when they occur. Under such a system, a failed bank’s shareholders should lose their value; unsecured creditors should be at risk and, if necessary, wiped out. A regulator should be able to terminate management and boards and liquidate assets. Those who benefited from mismanaging risks or taking on inappropriate risk should feel the pain.”

But the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation does not create a “resolution mechanism” that can deal with cross-border megabanks; this point is admitted by all involved. And there is nothing in the G20 process or underway with any other international forum that would make a difference in this regard.

So when very big banks are on the brink of failure, the Obama administration and Congress will have to?face this choice: either let this big bank go through bankruptcy, like Lehman Brothers, or provide it with a bailout — meaning complete protection for all creditors (but hope you can at least remove some management this time around).

Unfortunately, the Irish experience shows that the “let’s do an unsavory bailout” will like not end well next time. Our megabanks are getting bigger — as we demonstrated in 13 Bankers and as Thomas Hoenig argued in the Times last week — not because of any kind of legitimate market process, but because they benefit from an unfair and non-transparent government subsidy. And these big banks have recklessly dangerous levels of debt relative to equity, as Anat Admati and her colleagues have pointed out.

Put simply, by allowing our biggest banks to become even bigger — and more leveraged — the government is taking on a large contingent fiscal liability. Whatever you think of current fiscal policy — and whatever the outcome of the current debate over taxes and spending in the U.S. — remember this: by all standard balance sheet measures, Ireland was running responsible fiscal policy over the past decade. But the implicit liabilities of the Irish state were ballooning out of control, in direct proportion to the size of the biggest Irish banks. Three banks failed and this has taken down the entire Irish economy.

There are no economies of scale or scope in banking over about $100 billion in assets. Bankers, like Jamie Dimon, make claims to the contrary — including in an interview published in the New York Times on Sunday. But they do not have a single piece of evidence that society gains from having megabanks at today’s scale and with today’s leverage.

Our biggest banks are already subject to a partial size cap. According to the Riegle-Neal Act of 1994, no one bank can have more than 10 percent of total retail deposits in the United States. Unfortunately, the growth of wholesale financing and the global spread of these banks essentially made a mockery of this sensible macroprudential regulation.

We should update and apply the Riegle-Neal Act, exactly as proposed by Senators Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman in spring 2010.

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