The N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (NCDA&CS) has asked a Charlotte food distributor to recall jalapeno peppers and HASS avocados it received from a specific Texas food supply company because of possible salmonella contamination. In addition, the Texas supplier has been requested to recall all of the implicated products distributed in North Carolina.

NCDA&CS Food and Drug Protection Division and the N.C. Division of Environmental Health staff are working to determine how many North Carolina food distributors, restaurants, grocery stores and other food sellers received this produce. The HASS avocados were shipped from Texas in boxes labeled “Frutas Finas de Tancitaro HASS Avocados, Produce of Mexico,” 60 count with lot number HUE0810090889. The jalapenos were shipped in black plastic crates weighing about 15 pounds and containing no brand name or other label.

Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler emphasized that locally grown produce is not implicated in this contamination and that North Carolina produce may be consumed with proper handling. “We are working quickly and carefully with our state, local and federal partners in an attempt to solve this case,” Troxler said.

Once the establishments have been identified, regional environmental health staff and NCDA&CS Food and Drug Protection Division staff will conduct site visits to aid in the disposal of the product.

“We want to prevent the possibility of anyone consuming these contaminated food products,” Environmental Health Director Terry Pierce said. “Regional environmental health staff has been mobilized to inspect more than 100 food establishments in 25 counties across the state to ensure the product is properly disposed of in a timely manner.”

There is no indication at this time that this contamination is the same Salmonella Saintpaul strain that has sickened 23 people in North Carolina and more than 1,200 people nationwide. State Public Health Director Leah Devlin said, “We do not know yet whether this is the Salmonella Saintpaul strain, but these potentially contaminated products must be removed regardless. Consumers are cautioned to prepare their vegetables properly. Raw produce should always be thoroughly washed under running water and produce that is to be consumed raw should be kept separate from raw meats, raw seafood, and raw produce items.”

Additional testing by the North Carolina laboratories and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be necessary to determine whether the salmonella matches the Salmonella Saintpaul which is causing the national outbreak.

Chapel Hill – Environmental organizations will sue Duke Energy Carolinas today over Duke’s construction of a new coal-fired power plant at the Cliffside Steam Station that was not designed to meet legal limits on its emissions of hazardous air pollutants, such as mercury, arsenic and dioxins. The lawsuit will be filed in federal district court in Asheville, NC by the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council (”NRDC”) on behalf of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, the National Parks Conservation Association and NRDC. It seeks to stop construction of the new Cliffside plant until regulators determine that the plant will meet legal pollution limits and until Duke’s permit for the plant includes the pollution limits as conditions of operation.

“Every day that Duke continues to build this plant it flouts the law and exposes the public and its shareholders and ratepayers to unnecessary risk,” said John Suttles, Senior Attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “The Clean Air Act is clear: A properly performed analysis could change the way this plant is built and operated, and Duke must examine the best way to control mercury and other pollutants before it begins construction. By continuing to build this plant without meeting these Clean Air Act requirements, Duke creates an unacceptable choice—build a plant that exposes people and the environment to excessive levels of toxic air pollution or put its shareholders and ratepayers on the hook for the cost of fixing a plant that threatens people’s health.”

The Clean Air Act requires Duke to control its emissions of mercury and other hazardous pollutants to the maximum extent possible in order to protect people and the environment from the serious adverse effects of toxic air pollution. At a minimum, Duke must show that the proposed Cliffside plant will meet the pollution control level of the best performing similar plant in the nation. Duke must then implement controls that meet or exceed that level of control. In addition to mercury, Duke must analyze and determine the most stringent level of pollution control achievable for all hazardous air pollutants the facility would emit, which include 66 other toxic substances such as hydrochloric acid, arsenic, dioxins, and other heavy metals. These pollutants can cause serious and irreversible adverse effects to people’s health, including cancer, heart disease, stroke, and neurological impairment. In fact, one of those pollutants, dioxin, is among the most potent carcinogens in the world. The assessment, if performed correctly, will result in the most stringent emissions limitations achievable for mercury and the other hazardous air pollutants at the new unit.

“We remain disappointed in Duke’s lack of leadership on environmental issues,” stated Stephen Smith, executive director of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “Building a coal plant with today’s knowledge of global warming and the threats of mercury is simply irresponsible.”

At the state’s request, last month Duke agreed to take a “voluntary” look at its hazardous air emissions. But the company did not agree that it had to comply with the Clean Air Act’s stringent legal requirements designed to control toxic air pollution and refused to halt construction of the unit in the meantime to make sure that it was constructing its plant in a way that would maximize reduction of toxic air emissions, as the law requires. Furthermore, Duke only allowed two weeks for the analysis. The Secretary of DENR has estimated that a proper MACT analysis would take between 3 and 6 months.

“Duke’s proposal to voluntarily look at toxic emissions simply does not fly,” says Patrice Simms, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “An effectively standardless and unenforceable voluntary assessment is no substitute for the mandatory provisions of the Clean Air Act, which not only require rigorous analysis and stringent limits on mercury and all other hazardous air pollutant emissions, but ensure the public’s right to full participation in the standard-setting process.”

“Mercury pollution poses serious health risks– especially to women and unborn babies,” Molly Diggins, State Director of the North Carolina Sierra Club added. “A rushed analysis puts us all at risk. We need to be sure we have the best possible plan to protect our communities from mercury pollution.”

In early February, a federal court ruled that EPA violated the Clean Air Act when it removed oil- and coal-fired power plants from the list of hazardous air pollution sources that are subject to the Act’s most stringent air pollution controls. The appeals court ruling confirmed that air permits for new coal plants such as the new Cliffside unit must be based on a case-by-case analysis of the maximum achievable control technology for mercury and other hazardous air pollutants and that the analysis be performed in advance of construction. Duke, however, has not heeded the ruling and has instead forged ahead with construction of the new Cliffside plant without the required analysis, which could require fundamental changes to the plant’s design.

“It’s hard to understand why Duke Energy believes clean air laws don’t apply to them,” said Michael Regan, southeast climate and air director with Environmental Defense Fund. “There is absolutely no question Duke has an obligation to provide maximum protection from harmful mercury emissions that threaten our children’s health and welfare.”

“Travelers to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park expect healthy wildlife and clean air when they visit,” said Program Analyst Bart Melton from NPCA’s Southeast office. “Duke cannot be allowed to illegally shower toxic mercury and other pollutants over the Smokies. Americans deserve to breathe clean air when they visit parks, and expect the government to enforce clean air laws to make that happen.”

Two ospreys have built a nest in a tall tree near our house. They’re beautiful to hear and to see wheeling around the sky, calling to one another, tending things.

Can’t see young ones yet, but then the nest is pretty big, and when we were in Nags Head we saw several little ones pop up from a nest that had also looked empty. We saw what looked like a third osprey around today — maybe an adolescent? Maybe a visitor?

Anyone know more?

Hey All –

I’m trying to help out a friend with a cat situation and thought maybe one
of you could help or might know somebody who could.

My friend Rosie’s husband Eric, a Marine, was wounded last week in Iraq.
He’s at Bethesda now and had surgery today on his leg, and they’re still
sort of waiting to see how things are going to be. Today the president came
by to give him his Purple Heart but Eric missed the whole thing b/c he was
still in recovery!

So here’s where the cats come into it. They have three. Eric’s recovery
process is likely to be quite long and physically and logistically
challenging and they are concerned about the cats, who are very friendly and
social, being underfoot and whatnot. So they are trying to find new homes
for them. Obviously they don’t want to just drop them off at the shelter -
it would be much better if they were going to a good home.

I don’t have full biographies on the cats but I do know that there are two
females and one male, neutered/spayed, with claws, adult but not old, long
haired, one orange, one black and one grey, very sociable with people, never
been around dogs, and cool with kids. Rosie and Eric have a two-year-old,
and they’re great with him.

So if you think you can provide a home for any of them or you know somebody
who is in the market for a cool kitty, give me a shout and I’ll get you the
cat hook-up.

Best,

Logan

The new path is really nice! It’s rolling and fully separate from Eastwood itself, shaded in some areas by trees, smoothly paved and divided, well-marked. It’s already a boon for bike commuters, I’ll bet.

But what about Mayfaire? “Everything is there now,” you hear people say. I cut from the bike path across Eastwood onto Clipper (?) (map), which leads back into Mayfaire Hilton, to the “Mayfaire Reserve” (What is it? A conference center? A shriner’s lodge?), and comes up on “Main Street” Mayfaire from the rear, where Harris Teeter, the theaters, and Fox & Hound are doing their best to keep even their loading areas spick and span and luxe-like.

Riding past the townhomes on Viking, past the entrance to Parkside, which is being heavily promoted in the papers as a Landfall-like subdividion with even more convenient access to the shops, I felt what Mayfaire’s master designers must have meant me to feel: that this really was a commons, that their Main Street was the center of town, now, though as a residential area, I gather the condos actuall perched new urban fashion atop Banana Republic and next to Belk’s second floor aren’t filling to the capacity that their planners hoped (Does anyone live there?)

There is no development in the whole northeast of Wilmington, good or bad, that doesn’t in some respect have to do with Mayfaire and its new reign, including the bike path I rode to get there. Including the sales of homes in Bayshore and other developments way up off of Highway 17.

As someone who loves downtown Wilmington and makes an effort to visit and patronize it whenever I can, I have been of course a detractor of Mayfaire and what it represents, with its omnipresent private security guards, its gurgling chlorinated fountains and cobbled walks, its faux ye-olde and scrubbed, crannyless surfaces. It’s a simulation, a thing that exists apart from reality, instead of reality. Like Disney’s notorious living community Celebration, its pretensions to vibrant, leave-your-door-open leisure are just the white enamel on the long, decayed tooth of immersive commerce and non-stop selling.

But it’s hard to stay mad at Mayfaire. You end up going because Paco’s playing on that little lawn they have there. Or because Pomegranate’s credit card machine is on the blink. Or you want to see a movie. And you like the cobblestones after a while. You like the little window railings above the flaneur walkways, even if there’s never anybody in them. What’s wrong with making a place look nice, you say — if you’re going to put all those stores together anyway. What’s inaccurate about Mayfaire’s pretensions to be the center, the cosmos in the cosmopolitan — given how much downtowns and other common areas have always been about commerce, about selling.

And everybody’s there, and isn’t that the litmus test? It serves as the center. And people buy those little parking lot townhomes and walk to Teeters with their european rope-handled shopping bags and their practicing the new urbanism just fine.

On what grounds is the “old urbanism” of downtown superior, or more authentic? It’s seedier and poor people live there? It’s older? It’s disregarded and bar-hoppers are routinely mugged? Are these real? It’s not un-planned, certainly — it’s just not planned very well. Lots of people work a lot to plan the downtown as an environment. They just don’t succeed as well as the environment of Mayfaire has. And maybe that’s because they can’t wipe the slate clean and start over — as many developments like Mayfaire do — because there are people, places, history. Is history what makes a place real? (It may be. A particular history makes a place seem as if it “deserves” to appear a certain way.) Does popularity make a place unreal?

If you go downtown in order to have a more “authentic” experience, as I admit to doing, is that precise eagerness not a kind of jeopardy for “the real”? Are pseudo-squalid places like Hell’s Kitchen any more real than Victoria’s Secret on “Main Street” in Mayfaire? Mayfaire still seems creepy to me, like a Stepford outdoor mall. But then the Chandlers Wharf shops seem even creepier. And their cheesier. And they’re empty.

The pizza is thin and — above all — very, very salty. It tastes as if a much larger piece of food had been cooked down into salty two-dimensionality — a salt reduction. Like on those old science fiction movies where things are shunken by giant lasers. Or like Lot’s wife.

Their health score is an 87 — and high eighties ain’t a B+ in health scores. We’ve tried the margherita and the pepperoni — the restaurant is close to our home and the space itself is inviting, with a bar right inside and some nice common space outside, a little bridge of over a man-made pond in back swarming with tadpoles, a shared patio with Mason’s Haunt next door. We’ve ridden our bikes there a couple of times now — You can get to the restaurant using roads other than the bike-averse Loop road, and that’s one of the reasons we wanted to like it. We had hopes about our little ecosystem of bike jaunts and renourishment and beer.

It’s positioned as upscale, with the sponge-textured wall tones, black uniforms for the staff, Morretti beer, and the framed posters of Florence etc. that are obligatory for a certain haute mall vibe. But these are so much lipstick on the salt-lick if the food is as bad as it has seemed to this eater.

Admission is free, but space is extremely limited, making the event an up-close experience with local musicians. Capacity in the Gallery is 80 and only 60 actual seats will be available for the concert. WHQR’s front desk will start taking reservations for seats on July 14.

The performers for this first show will be none other than Wilmington’s favorite folk-grass trio, the Barnraisers. You can check them out at www.barnraisersmusic.com, and listen to an older interview with them right here on The Grove Project.

Almost two-fifths of Americans report meditating at least once a week. This practice is particularly common among Buddhists, but nearly half of evangelical Protestants and Muslims say they meditate at least weekly. About one-quarter of the unaffiliated report weekly meditation. These patterns may incorporate elements of both Christian and non-Christian traditions.

The idea of OBOC is that a whole community read a single book and that this be the basis for discussion, commonalities, debate. The book itself is mind-altering and very, very well-written in this reader’s opinion. I just can’t get over how well — and how subtly — Ishiguro manages the thoughts and intentions of the characters. They are perfectly rendered and perfectly familiar in an otherwise strange and dystopic, future-is-now landscape. And the ethical implications! Just the fact that Ishiguro unwinds what is actually the situation so slowly…

UNCW has broadened the one-book-community by including UNCW undergrads, too: All entering freshmen are required/exhorted to have read Never Let Me Go this summer before starting classes in the fall, when presumably there’ll be some discussion and literary checking-in. This is part of the university’s “Common Reading Experience“. (Last year they did this at Chapel Hill with Tyson’s Blood Done Signed My Name and caused a predictable mini-stir. I think the Koran was a choice in years past as well?) Too, the county libraries are involved in New Hanover’s One Book One Community, along with high schools, the Star News, reading groups, local bookstores.

But that’s the thing. It’s such a great idea but it doesn’t seem to have gelled into an actual community project. (Or has it? Am I missing a party somewhere?) It’s not for lack of planning: The site itself, the resources, the collaboration across these various smaller communities, the sheer effort to get this going….But where would I discuss this book with others? With whom? How does one discuss the book across these various agencies and small groups?

Have you read the book? Want to? Can we discuss it, please?