Latest news with #Moth
The Advertiser
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Is it ever okay for a memoir to stray from the truth?
Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring.
The Hill
2 days ago
- Health
- The Hill
Multistate salmonella outbreak linked to recalled frozen sprouted beans: CDC, FDA
(NEXSTAR) — Federal food and health officials have connected a salmonella outbreak impacting patients in 10 states to frozen sprouted beans that have been recalled. Since last fall, 11 people have been diagnosed with salmonella, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows, with most of the cases occurring since early April. According to the CDC, Massachusetts has seen two cases in connection with this outbreak. Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington have all recorded single cases. Patients range in age from less than a year old to 78 years old, and many of them said they had shopped at Indian grocery stores and consumed Indian cuisine. Four said they ate or likely ate sprouted beans. Which companies have agreed to drop artificial food dyes? The CDC said testing done by the Food and Drug Administration in May revealed samples of frozen sprouted mat, or moth, and moong beans tested positive for the same salmonella strain found in those who became ill. 'This means that people likely got sick from eating sprouted beans,' the CDC explained. Which products have been recalled? On Wednesday, Chetak LLC Group issued a recall for packages of Deep brand frozen Sprouted Mat (Moth) and Sprouted Moong. Both products were sold in 16-ounce pouches, the notice on the FDA website reads. Impacted packages will have one of the following lot codes printed on the back of the bag: Sprouted Mat (Moth): 24330, 25072, 25108, 24353, 25171, 24297, 25058, 25078, 24291, 25107, 24354, 24292 Sprouted Moong: 24330, 25072, 25108, 24353, 25171, 24297, 25058, 25078, 24291, 25107, 24354, 24292 The company said that while 'no illness have been reported to date in connection with this problem to company,' the sprouted beans were recalled over potential salmonella contamination that 'was noted after routine testing by FDA.' Meanwhile, an investigation into 'the source of the problem' is ongoing. If you have any of the recalled product, you are asked to return it for a full refund. What is salmonella? It's caused by the salmonella bacteria, which the CDC estimates cause 1.35 million infections, 26,500 hospitalizations, and 420 deaths in the U.S. yearly. Salmonella infections are commonly associated with diarrhea, fever and stomach cramps, according to the CDC. Symptoms can begin between six hours and six days after you've ingested the bacteria. Most people can recover without receiving treatment within four to seven days. Illnesses may be more severe for young children, the elderly and those with weakened immune systems. Some may require medical treatment or hospitalization, the CDC explains. Infections can only be diagnosed with a laboratory test of a person's stool, body tissue or fluids. Other recent salmonella outbreaks have been linked to pistachio cream, eggs, and cucumber products.
Graziadaily
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Graziadaily
‘I Interviewed The Salt Path Author – I've Been Forced To Reconsider What She Told Me'
It was the ultimate tale of triumph over adversity: the mother who, homeless and with a seriously ill husband in tow, undertook a 630-mile walk and became a national sensation. Raynor Winn's 2018 memoir The Salt Path became a book club hit, shifting over 2million copies, and in May becoming a Hollywood film starring Gillian Anderson (opposite Jason Isaacs as the author's other half, Moth). But cracks have begun to emerge in this 'unflinchingly honest' epic. An investigation by the Observer earlier this month found that the Winns are in fact Sally and Tim Walker; that she was questioned by police after allegedly embezzling £64,000 from a former boss, and that the circumstances in which the pair lost their home - which they had always maintained was the result of a bad business deal with a friend – were not as they had depicted. Rather than being homeless, the report found, they have owned a property near Bordeaux since 2007. Winn – or Walker – has denied many of the claims, describing the investigation as 'grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life.' The most heartbreaking, she added, was 'the suggestion that Moth made up his illness' (each of her three bestsellers charts his battle with corticobasal degeneration or CBD, a fatal neurological condition). The fallout has been unabating. The pair has been dropped by the CBD charity they fundraised for and lambasted by the owner of a cider farm they were invited to live on after he read The Salt Path, who says he feels 'gaslit.' The release of On Winter Hill – Winn's fourth book, due out this autumn – is on ice; her live tour dates with a local folk group cancelled. The eye-watering allegations currently engulfing the couple have hit fans hard. Social media is awash with the devastation of those who bought into this seemingly authentic story and now feel duped; who uprooted their lives inspired by the Winns' travels, and who turned two unlikely then 50-somethings into a major success, possibly under false pretences. I too have been forced to reconsider Winn's words anew. Two Julys ago I boarded a train for the small Cornish town of Lostwithiel, ahead of the release of her third book. It was a hot Friday afternoon when we met, Winn collecting me from the station and driving me up to the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery, where music and loud chatter abounded beneath the blooms. The woman whose emotional turmoil had poured across her pages was far more reserved in person: the rawness I had expected from someone who had battled so much unbelievable misfortune was absent. As we spoke, I struggled to learn more about her life than had already been recounted in her books; Winn repeating some of the anecdotes I'd read. On leaving, I couldn't help feeling our encounter had been somehow unsatisfying: that everything beyond what she had already written was somehow off-limits. Moth's illness was on my mind then, too. I had looked forward to meeting the man who had so spectacularly defied the odds of his disease (those with CBD typically live for six to eight years in a progressively deteriorating state; he had by then been diagnosed a decade earlier, and in each of the books undertook months-long walks that would test even the fittest among us). But ahead of the interview, the location shifted from their home to a solo meeting with Winn elsewhere. The photoshoot also got postponed. Given the lows of his condition – the agony, bowel problems, memory slips and despair – and the apparent healing powers of their walks, I had mulled whether living out in the open had triggered a decline they were unwilling to share. Yet the images that did eventually get taken showed him looking well; ditto those taken alongside Isaacs around the time of the film's release, where he appeared more dashing, perhaps, than the Hollywood actor enlisted to play him. On this, and much else, I have been asked the same question over and over since the scandal broke: did I speculate then that something might be amiss? To which the answer is, plainly, no. Medical miracles, though rare, do happen. Some people aren't born raconteurs; interview locations change. While I understand the anger that so many are now grappling with, I also feel for the Winns – that their story, which remains entirely real to them, has been so publicly pulled apart. Their publisher is sticking by them, for now. Whether readers can ever really trust Winn again is another story entirely.
Newsweek
3 days ago
- Health
- Newsweek
Bean Recall Sparks Nationwide Warning to Customers
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Chetak LLC Group is recalling its Deep Sprouted Mat (Moth) and Deep Sprouted Moong, each shipped in 16-ounce packaging, due to fears the beans could be contaminated with salmonella. Newsweek reached out to the company via email Wednesday night for comment. Why It Matters Numerous recalls have been initiated in 2025 due to the potential for damaged products, foodborne illness, contamination and undeclared food allergens. Millions of Americans experience food sensitivities or allergies every year. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the nine "major" food allergens in the U.S. are eggs, milk, fish, wheat, soybeans, Crustacean shellfish, sesame, tree nuts and peanuts. Salmonella bacteria, which triggered the contamination concern, are a known source of foodborne illness. Infections may lead to fever, diarrhea and abdominal cramps, typically appearing 12 to 72 hours after exposure, and can last up to a week. Severe infections are especially dangerous to vulnerable populations such as children, older adults and those with weakened immune systems, and can result in hospitalization or even death. What To Know The bean products were distributed nationwide, the FDA says. The impacted lot code numbers for the Deep Sprouted Mat (Moth) 16-ounce bags are: 24330, 25072, 25108, 24353, 25171, 24297, 25058, 25078, 24291, 25107, 24354 and 24292. The impacted lot code numbers for the Deep Sprouted Moong 16-ounce packets are: 24330, 25072, 25108, 24353, 25171, 24297, 25058, 25078, 24291, 25107, 24354 and 24292. The potential for salmonella contamination was noticed after routine testing, the FDA says. No illnesses have been reported related to the recall as of Wednesday. "Production of the product has been suspended while FDA and the company continue their investigation as to the source of the problem," the alert notes. Sprouted Moong beans can be seen in a recall alert on July 16. (Photo from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) Sprouted Moong beans can be seen in a recall alert on July 16. (Photo from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) What People Are Saying The FDA, on its website in 2019: "Salmonella can be spread by food handlers who do not wash their hands and/or the surfaces and tools they use between food preparation steps, and when people eat raw or undercooked foods. Salmonella can also spread from animals to people. "People who have direct contact with certain animals, including poultry and reptiles, can spread the bacteria from the animals to food if they do not practice proper hand washing hygiene before handling food. Pets can also spread the bacteria within the home environment if they eat food contaminated with Salmonella." The agency later added: "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that approximately 450 persons in the United States die each year from acute salmonellosis." What Happens Next Consumers who have purchased the recalled products are asked to return them to the original place of purchase for a refund, the FDA says. Those with additional questions may call the company at 908-209-8878.
Scroll.in
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘The Salt Path' scandal: Defending a memoir's ‘emotional truth' is a high-risk strategy
Raynor Winn, author of the award-winning memoir The Salt Path, which was recently adapted into a film, has been accused of 'lies, deceit and desperation'. Writing in The Observer, reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou claims that Winn left out significant facts and invented parts of the story. The Salt Path follows a transformative 630-mile trek along England's South West Coast Path that Winn took with her terminally ill husband Moth, after they lost their home and livelihood. The Observer article claims that aspects of both the story of losing their home and Winn's husband's illness were fabricated. In a statement on her website, Winn has defended her memoir, calling the claims 'grotesquely unfair' and 'highly misleading'. There's a long list of memoirs which have been shown to be problematic. James Frey's recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003) was allegedly exaggerated. In 2006, he apologised for fabricating portions of the book. Worse, Binjamin Wilkomirski's feted Holocaust survivor memoir F ragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995) was completely fake. Wilkomirski's real name was Bruno Dössekker and he was not a Holocaust survivor; he had simply invented his 'memories' of a death camp, though he seemed to believe they were true. Trust the artist or trust the tale But, for readers, how much does this matter? Novelist DH Lawrence wrote that readers should: 'Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.' As readers of The Salt Path, we fear for Raynor and Moth as they desperately try to escape drowning from a freak high tide at Portheras Cove. We are relieved when we hear that Moth's terminal disease was 'somehow, for a while, held at bay'. The origin of the word fiction is from the Latin fingere, which means not to lie, but to fashion or form. All memoirs – indeed, all texts, from scientific articles to history books to bestselling novels – are 'formed' or 'shaped'. Writing doesn't just fall from a tree; we make it, and it reveals the world by mediating the world. But this idea, that writing is a 'shaping', is why this case matters. Writing, done by oneself, or by a ghostwriter (or even by AI), has conventions, not-quite-rules that underlie its creation and reception. Some of these are in the text (the enemies eventually become lovers); some are outside the text itself (you really can judge a book by its cover). But most conventions are both inside and outside at the same time. Works by historians have footnotes to sources, so you (and other historians) can check the claims. Each scientific article refers to many others, because each article is just one tiny piece of the whole puzzle on which a huge community of scientists are working, and the extensive references show how this piece fits (or doesn't). Non-fiction follows conventions, while novelists can do whatever they want, of course, to challenge or obey the conventions (that's one reason why novels are exciting). Memoir has a particularly important convention, revealed most clearly by the historian Stefan Maechler's report on Wilkomirski's fraudulent memoir. Maechler argued that Wilkomirski broke what the French critic Philippe Lejeune called the 'autobiographical pact', a contract of truth between the author and the reader. For Lejeune, however, this pact is not like a legal agreement. A memoir, unlike a scientific article, need only put forward the truth as it appeared to the author in that area of their life. While the information needs to be accurate to some degree, its level of verifiability is less than a legal document or work of history. Much more important for Lejeune is the harder-to-pin-down fidelity to meaning. After all, many meaningful things – falling in love, for example, or grief – happen mostly inside us and are hard to verify. Even more, the developing overall shape of our life as it seems to us is not really a historical fact, but our own making of meaning. For Lejeune, in a memoir, this emotional truth is more significant than the verifiable truth. Playing with 'emotional truth' The author of The Salt Path seems to have leaned into this idea. In her first statement after The Observer 's piece, she claims that her book 'lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives … This is the true story of our journey'. How, after all, could one verify a 'spiritual journey'? However, I don't fully agree with Lejeune. Perhaps our inner and outer worlds are not as separate as he supposes. Our public actions, including sharing facts, show who we are as much as our words describing our inner journeys. In a memoir, the verifiable truth and the emotional truth are linked by a kind of feedback loop. As readers, we allow some degree of playing with verifiable truth: dialogue is reconstructed, not recorded; we accept some level of dramatisation; we know it's from one person's perspective. But we also make a judgment about these things (there's no fixed rule, no science to this judgment). If there's too much reconstruction, too much dramatisation, we begin to get suspicious about the emotional truth, too: is this really how it felt for them? Was it honestly a spiritual journey? And, in turn, this makes us more suspicious of the verifiable claims. By contrast, the novelist's pact with the reader admits they fake emotional truth, which somehow makes it not fake at all: that's one reason why novels are complicated. This is why defending a memoir's 'emotional truth' is a high-risk strategy. We know from our own lives that people who are unreliable in small (verifiable) things are often unreliable in large (emotional, meaningful) ones. So, for readers, the facts behind The Salt Path matter less in themselves and more because each question points to a larger issue about the book's meaning. When you call someone 'fake', you don't really mean that 'their factual claims are inaccurate', but that they are somehow inauthentic, hollow or – it's a teenager's word, but still – phoney. Once the 'autobiographical pact' looks broken in enough small details, the reader no longer trusts the teller or the tale. In a lengthy statement published on her website in which she addresses the allegations in detail, Winn said that the suggestion that Moth's illness was fabricated was an 'utterly vile, unfair, and false suggestion' and added: 'I can't allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories, or the joy they have given so many.' Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway University of London.
