Cosmic Iguana - Voice of the Evil Doers

UNSANITARY ACTS: Former HSU student tells of unsafe food practices in US Military Bases in Iraq

Jim High, NORTH COAST JOURNAL

...Yarbrough never dreamed she'd be fired a month later for what in her view was simply an effort to implement the Army's own safety and sanitation standards. Nor did she imagine that she'd be telling congressional staffers about potentially dangerous food being served to U.S. soldiers by ESS Support Services, a food-service subcontractor to Halliburton...It's a system in which highly paid Americans oversee a huge corps of Indians, Pakistanis and other so-called "third-country nationals" working in sweatshop conditions for as little as $3 a day...

...when Yarbrough started her first 12-hour overnight shift, she was shocked at conditions in the kitchen. Freezers and refrigerators weren't working. Food was spoiling. The kitchen workers were exhausted, and some of them weren't following basic sanitation practices. "It became apparent to me that much of the food served at the banquet the night before was ... possibly dangerous," she wrote.

At 2 a.m. Yarbrough saw a lone kitchen worker spreading mayonnaise onto several thousand slices of bread for the next day's sandwiches. He was halfway through the job, and the mayonnaise had sat in open bowls for hours....

There were 160 employees in the massive kitchen, and when she saw workers returning from breaks without washing their hands or using spoiled BBQ sauce, she was going to continue speaking to them directly instead of wasting time searching for the night manager...

..."I gave a short brief on salmonella, likely sources, mode of contamination, toxicity and symptoms of infection," she wrote. "Cooks seem pleased with this nightly entertainment."

She planned to give the same talk to day cooks, but she was suspended the next day, relieved of duty and told to pack up and be ready to take the next convoy back to Kuwait.

Yarbrough's supervisor told her she was being fired for wearing a dirty shirt, leaving work early once and other infractions. But Yarbrough felt certain these were bogus charges. The supervisor seemed "eaten up with guilt," she recalled in an interview. "He wouldn't look me in the eye."...[*]