McDonald's urging franchisees to open on Christmas

McDonald's Corp. is urging U.S. restaurant owners to take the unusual step of opening on Christmas Day to deliver the world's biggest hamburger chain with the gift of higher December sales, AdvertisingAge reported Monday.

The request -- which comes as McDonald's tangles with resurgent rivals such as Wendy's, Burger King and Yum Brands' Taco Bell chain -- would be a break from company tradition of closing on major holidays.

"Starting with Thanksgiving, ensure your restaurants are open throughout the holidays," Jim Johannesen, chief operations officer for McDonald's USA, wrote in a Nov. 8 memo to franchisees -- one of two obtained by AdvertisingAge.

"Our largest holiday opportunity as a system is Christmas Day. Last year, (company-operated) restaurants that opened on Christmas averaged $5,500 in sales," Johannesen said.

"The decision to open our restaurants on Christmas is in the hands of our owner/operators," McDonald's spokeswoman Heather Oldani told Reuters.

Don Thompson took over as chief executive at McDonald's in July and has the difficult task of growing sales from last year's strong results in a significantly more competitive environment.

McDonald's monthly global sales at established restaurants fell for the first time in nine years in October, but unexpectedly rebounded in November.

The November surprise was partly due to a 2.5 percent rise in sales at U.S. restaurants open at least 13 months.

"Our November results were driven, in part, by our Thanksgiving Day performance," Johannesen wrote in a Dec. 12 memo to franchisees.

Oldani said 1,200 more McDonald's restaurants were open on Thanksgiving this year versus last year -- not 6,000 more as AdvertisingAge reported.

Still, the company has a high hurdle when it comes to posting an increase in restaurant sales this month because its U.S. same-restaurant sales jumped 9.8 percent in December 2011.

"It's an act of desperation. The franchisees are not happy," said Richard Adams, a former McDonald's franchisee who now advises the chain's owner/operators.

The push to open on the holidays goes against McDonald's cultural history, said Adams. In his first published operations manual, McDonald's Corp. founder Ray Kroc said the company would close on Thanksgiving and Christmas to give employees time with their families, Adams said.

"We opened for breakfast on Thanksgiving the last couple years I was a franchisee. It was easy to get kids to work on Thanksgiving because they want to get away from their family, but not on Christmas," Adams said.

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Quinn, Emanuel call for ban on assault-weapons

Mayor Emanuel attended the ribbon-cutting for a new police station today but his thoughts were on the tragedy in Connecticut.

Illinois' leading Democrats on Monday pushed for more gun control in the wake of last week's school shootings in Connecticut, but gun-owner rights groups criticized the move as politicizing a national tragedy and said they were prepared to fight in Washington and Springfield.

U.S. Sen Dick Durbin, the state's senior senator and the No. 2 Democrat in the chamber, called for congressional hearings aimed at finding constitutional limits to Second Amendment rights while Gov. Pat Quinn and Mayor Rahm Emanuel re-emphasized their long-standing call to ban semi-automatic, assault-style weapons at the state and federal level.

The efforts by the three Democrats, motivated by Friday's shootings in Newtown, Conn., that included the deaths of 20 schoolchildren, came against a backdrop of a federal appeals court ruling opening the way for concealed possession of firearms in public in Illinois.

"It's time that we as a city have an assault weapons ban, it's time that we as a state have an assault weapons ban, and it's time that we as a country have an assault weapons ban," Emanuel said at a Chicago Police Department graduation and promotion ceremony. "And I would hope the leadership in Congress now will have a vote of conscience. It is time to have that vote."

Quinn, at a separate appearance, said he hoped the scope of the tragedy would motivate state lawmakers to act by early next month on a state ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Lawmakers recently rejected Quinn's attempt to use his amendatory veto power to rewrite a bill to impose such a ban.

Officials for the Illinois State Rifle Association sent an email to their members accusing Quinn and Emanuel of being among the "political opportunists who have swooped down on Newtown like a flock of vultures hungry to devour the 2nd Amendment."

"The echoes of the sirens had hardly faded when Quinn and other gun-control extremists hit the airwaves calling for the passage of legislation that would effectively abolish the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution," the group said. "Law-abiding gun owners have grown used to being blamed for the misdeeds of others and we're equally used to mounting effective defenses against those who would deny us our rights."

The call to action by Emanuel and Quinn came as another home-state Democrat, President Barack Obama, appeared to be taking a more cautious approach on the gun issue. A day after Obama pledged to use the power of his office to prevent gun violence, the White House did not provide any details on an approach, and spokesman Jay Carney said it was a "complex problem that requires a complex solution."

Durbin, a prominent Obama campaign surrogate who introduced the president as the party's nominee at the last two presidential conventions, has long supported additional gun control laws. But he also appeared to follow the lead of the president and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said the chamber "will engage in a meaningful and thoughtful debate about how to change laws and culture that allow violence to grow."

On the Senate floor Monday, Durbin asked gun control opponents and gun rights supporters to try to find common ground.

"What will it take for a majority of Americans to speak out for sensible firearms policy in our nation?" Durbin asked. "It will take more than the shootings on streets in Chicago, East St. Louis and cities across the country. And sadly, it will take more than 26 victims, including 20 children, in a Connecticut grade school."

Durbin said the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights will hold hearings on the Second Amendment and gun control early next year. Durbin is chairman of the subcommittee.

A federal ban on assault weapons — which prohibited 19 specific types of military-style semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines — expired in 2004 under the Republican White House of President George W. Bush and a GOP-controlled Congress after 10 years. Emanuel has repeatedly touted his work as a top aide to President Bill Clinton in enacting the ban.

Like Durbin, Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy connected the Connecticut tragedy to the steady drumbeat of gun violence in America's cities.

"Any major city in this country is experiencing ongoing gun violence," McCarthy said. "It's these issues like this that all of the sudden explode and the gun debate starts and at the end of the day, nobody does anything about it. ... It would be nice if we see some action this time, and it would probably at least be some sort of way to try to make sense of a tragedy moving forward."

In Illinois, Quinn has called repeatedly for a state ban on semi-automatic weapons, most recently last week when the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it was unconstitutional for Illinois to ban comprehensively the carrying of firearms outside the home. The appeals court gave the state until June to try to craft new gun regulations.

Illinois is the only state in the nation to prohibit the concealed carrying of weapons in public.

In late July, when Quinn sought to write his own assault weapons ban onto another bill, it followed another mass killing — a shooting spree at a movie theater in Colorado that left a dozen dead and 50 people injured.

On Monday, the Democratic governor said he had reached out to legislative leaders as well as supporters of a ban on semi-automatic firearms and urged them to act quickly.

"This is the moment to do it," Quinn said.

"All of us who are parents, watching those grieving parents losing their children, their precious children, we've got to make sure that they did not die in vain. And one way to keep faith with those victims of that massacre on Friday is for Illinois, the heart of the heartland, to ban assault weapons," he said.

Lawmakers are scheduled to return into their lame-duck session shortly after the New Year, and Quinn already has called upon them to act on a number of high-profile issues, including gay marriage and public employee pension reform. A Quinn aide said the governor also is studying the possibility of pushing a gun measure after new legislators are sworn in Jan. 9, when more Democrats will take office.

The ban Quinn previously sought would have prohibited the sale, delivery, manufacture and possession of AR-15-style assault rifles, a civilian version of the military's M-16. A variant of that firearm was used in the Connecticut shooting, authorities said.

But the state rifle association, a lobbying group that holds great sway over Downstate Republican and Democratic lawmakers, urged gun owners to contact their state legislators "and deliver the message that lawful firearm owners will not play the role of scapegoat."

"As we have said many times before, gun control is a disease and you are the cure," the group told its members. "We're about to face an epidemic of attempted gun grabs. Be prepared and arm yourself with the resolve to uphold that which so many brave men and women have died to defend."

Tribune reporter Monique Garcia contributed.

hdardick@tribune.com

rap30@aol.com

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What If Nothing or Nobody is to Blame for Adam Lanza? Guns, Video Games, Autism or Authorities

What if there is nobody or nothing to blame for Adam Lanza‘s heinous acts? Other than Lanza, of course.

What if school security and the school psychiatrist kept an eye on Lanza since his freshman year? The Wall Street Journal has a compelling narrative about the red flags addressed.

What if he had a form of autism that has little or no link to violent behavior? Lanza may have had Asperger’s syndrome but, even so, that is not a cause.

(RELATED: How To Make Sense of America’s Confusing Patchwork of Gun Control Laws)

What if it’s too simple to lay the massacre at the feet of the gun lobby? Reader Larry Kelly tweets that shaming Aspies “makes about as much sense at stigmatizing the NRA. Pick an enemy … any enemy. Let outrage and fear rule.”

What if Lanza wasn’t provoked by video games? David Axelrod, a close friend an adviser of President Obama, tweeted last night: “In NFL post-game: an ad for shoot ‘em up video game. All for curbing weapons of war. But shouldn’t we also quit marketing murder as a game.”

When I asked whether he was laying groundwork for a White House initiative, Axelrod said no: “Just one man’s observation.” A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said today that Axelrod was not a stalking horse for Obama on this issue.

What if Lanza’s mother did everything she could, short of keeping her guns out her adult son’s reach? What if he wasn’t bullied?

What if there is nobody or nothing to blame? Would that make this inexplicable horror unbearable?

What if we didn’t rush to judgement? What if we didn’t waste our thoughts, prayers and actions on assigning blame for the sake of mere recrimination? What if we calmly and ruthlessly learned whatever lessons we can from the massacre — and prevented the next one?

What if it wasn’t one thing, but everything, that set off Lanza?

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Gabby Douglas, Adele among brightest young stars -Forbes magazine

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Fashion designer Carly Cushnie, actress Kate McKinnon and videogame creator Kim Swift may not be household names yet, but they are destined to do great things and will be tomorrow’s young stars, Forbes magazine said on Monday.

Along with Olympic Gold medalist gymnast Gabby Douglas, rapper Wiz Khalifa and researcher Josh Sommer, they have been chosen by the magazine for its “30 Under 30″ list of top achievers under 30 years old in their fields.

They are considered the top 30 achievers in 15 categories ranging from education, energy, music, science and healthcare to sports, technology games and apps and marketing.

“This is a celebration of youthful ambition and success. These are really amazing people and they are doing amazing things. It makes you very hopeful about the world,” Michael Noer, the executive editor of Forbes, said in an interview.

Many on the list, including singers Bruno Mars and Justin Bieber, as well as actresses Ashley and May Kate Olsen and fashion designer Alexander Wang, the newly appointed creative director at the French fashion house Balenciaga, are already well known.

Some are returnees to the list that was launched last year – like British singer and new mother Adele, the 24-year-old multiple Grammy Award winner, and American entrepreneur Kevin Systrom.

Noer said there has been a 60 percent turnover since 2011, so there are plenty of new faces on the list drawn up by Forbes staff and industry experts.

“I think there are a lot of interesting names on the list,” he said.

In energy, it is 28-year-old Leslie Dewan, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate and co-founder and chief science officer of Transatomic Power.

“They are developing a new type of nuclear reactor that uses nuclear waste,” said Noer.

In music, Pittsburgh-bred Khalifa, 25, topped the list. Swift, the 29-year-old creative director at Airtight Games, was noted for creating hit videogame Portal.

“Kate McKinnon, the actress from ‘Saturday Night Live’ who just joined in April is our Hollywood selection. She is being hailed as the next Tina Fey,” Noer said.

Sommer, the executive director of the Chordoma Foundation which raises funds for research into chordoma, a rare, slow-growing bone cancer most commonly found in the spine, is another young achiever, according to Forbes.

Sommer created the foundation with his mother after being diagnosed with the disease while a student at Duke University in North Carolina.

“He was diagnosed with a rare type of bone cancer, dropped out of school to find a cure and he has made some progress,” said Noer.

The full list will be published in the January 21 issue of Forbes and can also be found at www.forbes.com/under 30 .

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; editing by Paul Casciato and Mohammad Zargham)

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Ancient Bones That Tell a Story of Compassion

Lorna Tilley

DISABLED Almost all the other skeletons at the Man Bac site, south of Hanoi, are straight. But the man now called Burial 9 was laid to rest curled in a fetal position that suggests lifelong paralysis.

While it is a painful truism that brutality and violence are at least as old as humanity, so, it seems, is caring for the sick and disabled.

And some archaeologists are suggesting a closer, more systematic look at how prehistoric people — who may have left only their bones — treated illness, injury and incapacitation. Call it the archaeology of health care.

The case that led Lorna Tilley and Marc Oxenham of Australian National University in Canberra to this idea is that of a profoundly ill young man who lived 4,000 years ago in what is now northern Vietnam and was buried, as were others in his culture, at a site known as Man Bac.

Almost all the other skeletons at the site, south of Hanoi and about 15 miles from the coast, lie straight. Burial 9, as both the remains and the once living person are known, was laid to rest curled in the fetal position. When Ms. Tilley, a graduate student in archaeology, and Dr. Oxenham, a professor, excavated and examined the skeleton in 2007 it became clear why. His fused vertebrae, weak bones and other evidence suggested that he lies in death as he did in life, bent and crippled by disease.

They gathered that he became paralyzed from the waist down before adolescence, the result of a congenital disease known as Klippel-Feil syndrome. He had little, if any, use of his arms and could not have fed himself or kept himself clean. But he lived another 10 years or so.

They concluded that the people around him who had no metal and lived by fishing, hunting and raising barely domesticated pigs, took the time and care to tend to his every need.

“There’s an emotional experience in excavating any human being, a feeling of awe,” Ms. Tilley said, and a responsibility “to tell the story with as much accuracy and humanity as we can.”

This case, and other similar, if less extreme examples of illness and disability, have prompted Ms. Tilley and Dr. Oxenham to ask what the dimensions of such a story are, what care for the sick and injured says about the culture that provided it.

The archaeologists described the extent of Burial 9’s disability in a paper in Anthropological Science in 2009. Two years later, they returned to the case to address the issue of health care head on. “The provision and receipt of health care may therefore reflect some of the most fundamental aspects of a culture,” the two archaeologists wrote in The International Journal of Paleopathology.

And earlier this year, in proposing what she calls a “bioarchaeology of care,” Ms. Tilley wrote that this field of study “has the potential to provide important — and possibly unique — insights into the lives of those under study.” In the case of Burial 9, she says, not only does his care indicate tolerance and cooperation in his culture, but suggests that he himself had a sense of his own worth and a strong will to live. Without that, she says, he could not have stayed alive.

“I’m obviously not the first archaeologist” to notice evidence of people who needed help to survive in stone age or other early cultures, she said. Nor does her method “come out of the blue.” It is based on and extends previous work.

Among archaeological finds, she said, she knows “about 30 cases in which the disease or pathology was so severe, they must have had care in order to survive.” And she said there are certainly more such cases to be described. “I am totally confident that there are almost any number of case studies where direct support or accommodation was necessary.”

Such cases include at least one Neanderthal, Shanidar 1, from a site in Iraq, dating to 45,000 years ago, who died around age 50 with one arm amputated, loss of vision in one eye and other injuries. Another is Windover boy from about 7,500 years ago, found in Florida, who had a severe congenital spinal malformation known as spina bifida, and lived to around age 15. D. N. Dickel and G. H. Doran, from Florida State University wrote the original paper on the case in 1989, and they concluded that contrary to popular stereotypes of prehistoric people, “under some conditions life 7,500 years ago included an ability and willingness to help and sustain the chronically ill and handicapped.”

In another well-known case, the skeleton of a teenage boy, Romito 2, found at a site in Italy in the 1980s, and dating to 10,000 years ago, showed a form of severe dwarfism that left the boy with very short arms. His people were nomadic and they lived by hunting and gathering. He didn’t need nursing care, but the group would have had to accept that he couldn’t run at the same pace or participate in hunting in the same way others did.

Ms. Tilley gained her undergraduate degree in psychology in 1982 and worked in the health care industry studying treatment outcomes before coming to the study of archaeology. She said her experience influenced her interest in ancient health care.

What she proposes, in papers with Dr. Oxenham and in a dissertation in progress, is a standard four-stage method for studying ancient remains of disabled or ill individuals with an eye to understanding their societies. She sets up several stages of investigation: first, establishing what was wrong with a person; second, describing the impact of the illness or disability given the way of life followed in that culture; and third, concluding what level of care would have needed.

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McDonald's urging franchisees to open on Christmas

McDonald's Corp. is urging U.S. restaurant owners to take the unusual step of opening on Christmas Day to deliver the world's biggest hamburger chain with the gift of higher December sales, AdvertsingAge reported Monday.

The request -- which comes as McDonald's tangles with resurgent rivals such as Wendy's, Burger King and Yum Brands' Taco Bell chain -- would be a break from company tradition of closing on major holidays.

"Starting with Thanksgiving, ensure your restaurants are open throughout the holidays," Jim Johannesen, chief operations officer for McDonald's USA, wrote in a Nov. 8 memo to franchisees -- one of two obtained by AdvertisingAge.

"Our largest holiday opportunity as a system is Christmas Day. Last year, (company-operated) restaurants that opened on Christmas averaged $5,500 in sales," Johannesen said.

"The decision to open our restaurants on Christmas is in the hands of our owner/operators," McDonald's spokeswoman Heather Oldani told Reuters.

Don Thompson took over as chief executive at McDonald's in July and has the difficult task of growing sales from last year's strong results in a significantly more competitive environment.

McDonald's monthly global sales at established restaurants fell for the first time in nine years in October, but unexpectedly rebounded in November.

The November surprise was partly due to a 2.5 percent rise in sales at U.S. restaurants open at least 13 months.

"Our November results were driven, in part, by our Thanksgiving Day performance," Johannesen wrote in a Dec. 12 memo to franchisees.

Oldani said 1,200 more McDonald's restaurants were open on Thanksgiving this year versus last year -- not 6,000 more as AdvertisingAge reported.

Still, the company has a high hurdle when it comes to posting an increase in restaurant sales this month because its U.S. same-restaurant sales jumped 9.8 percent in December 2011.

"It's an act of desperation. The franchisees are not happy," said Richard Adams, a former McDonald's franchisee who now advises the chain's owner/operators.

The push to open on the holidays goes against McDonald's cultural history, said Adams. In his first published operations manual, McDonald's Corp. founder Ray Kroc said the company would close on Thanksgiving and Christmas to give employees time with their families, Adams said.

"We opened for breakfast on Thanksgiving the last couple years I was a franchisee. It was easy to get kids to work on Thanksgiving because they want to get away from their family, but not on Christmas," Adams said.

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President Obama: 'We will have to change' to keep our children safe

President Barack Obama is offering the Connecticut town grappling with the aftermath of a deadly school shooting "the love and prayers of a nation." (Dec. 16)

NEWTOWN, Conn.—

He spoke for a nation in sorrow, but the slaughter of all those little boys and girls turned the commander in chief into another parent in grief, searching for answers. Alone on a spare stage after the worst day of his tenure, President Barack Obama declared Sunday he will use “whatever power” he has to prevent shootings like the Connecticut school massacre.

“What choice do we have?” Obama said at an evening vigil in the shattered community of Newtown, Conn. “Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

For Obama, that was an unmistakable sign that he would at least attempt to take on the explosive issue of gun control. He made clear that the deaths compelled the nation to act, and that he was the leader of a nation that was failing to keep its children safe. He spoke of a broader effort, never outlining exactly what he would push for, but outraged by another shooting rampage.

“Surely we can do better than this,” he said. “We have an obligation to try.”

The massacre of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday elicited horror around the world, soul-searching in the United States, fresh political debate and questions about the incomprehensible — what drove the 20-year-old suspect to kill his mother and then unleash gunfire on children.

A total of 6 adults and 20 boys and girls ages 6 and 7 were slaughtered.

Obama read the names of the adults near the top his remarks. He finished by reading the first names of the kids, slowly, in the most wrenching moment of the night.

Cries and sobs filled the room.

“That's when it really hit home,” said Jose Sabillon, who attended the interfaith memorial with his son, Nick, a fourth-grader who survived the shooting unharmed.

Said Obama of the girls and boys who died: “God has called them all home. For those of us who remain, let us find the strength to carry on and make our country worthy of their memory.”

Inside the room, children held stuffed teddy bears and dogs. The smallest kids sat on their parents' laps.

There were tears and hugs, but also smiles and squeezed arms. Mixed with disbelief was a sense of a community reacquainting itself all at once.

One man said it was less mournful, more familial. Some kids chatted easily with their friends. The adults embraced each other in support.

“We're halfway between grief and hope,” said Curt Brantl, whose daughter was in the library of the elementary school when the shootings occurred. She was not harmed.

The president first met privately with families of the victims and with the emergency personnel who responded to the shootings. The gathering happened at Newtown High School, the site of Sunday night's interfaith vigil, about a mile and a half from where the shootings took place.

Police and firefighters got hugs and standing ovations when they entered. So did Obama.

“We needed this,” said the Rev. Matt Crebbin, senior minister of the Newtown Congregational Church. “We needed to be together to show that we are together and united.”

Obama told Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy that Friday was the most difficult day of his presidency. The president has two daughters, Malia and Sasha, who are 14 and 11, respectively.

“Can we say that we're truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose? I've been reflecting on this the last few days,” the president said, somber and steady in his voice. “And if we're honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We're not doing enough and we will have to change.”

He promised in the coming weeks to talk with law enforcement, mental health professionals, parents and educators on an effort to prevent mass shootings.

The shootings have restarted a debate in Washington about what politicians can to do help — gun control or otherwise. Obama has called for “meaningful action” to prevent killings.

Police say the gunman, Adam Lanza, was carrying an arsenal of ammunition big enough to kill just about every student in the school if given enough time. He shot himself in the head just as he heard police drawing near, authorities said.

A Connecticut official said the gunman's mother was found dead in her pajamas in bed, shot four times in the head with a.22-caliber rifle. The killer then went to the school with guns he took from his mother and began blasting his way through the building.

“There is no blame to be laid on us but there is a great burden and a great challenge that we emerge whole,” First Select Woman Patricia Llodra said. “It is a defining moment for our town, but it does not define us.”

Obama said his words of comfort would not be enough, but he brought them anyway, on behalf of parents everywhere now holding their children tighter.

“I can only hope that it helps for you to know,” he said, “that you are not alone in your grief.”

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Jack Hanlon, actor in Our Gang films, dies in NV

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Jack Hanlon, who had roles in the 1926 silent classic “The General” and in two 1927 “Our Gang” comedies, died Thursday in Las Vegas at the age of 96.

His niece, Wendy Putnam Park of Las Vegas, says the precocious, freckle-faced Hanlon was a natural as a child actor from 1926 to 1933.

After a small role with Buster Keaton in “The General,” he played mischievous kids in two of Hal Roach’s “Our Gang/Little Rascals” films: “The Glorious Fourth” and “Olympic Games.”

Hanlon also played an orphan in the 1929 drama “The Shakedown,” and got an on-screen kiss from Greta Garbo in the 1930 film “Romance.”

After leaving Hollywood, Hanlon became a furniture mover and moved to Las Vegas in 1994.

Burial will be in Santa Monica, Calif.

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Mislabeled Foods Find Their Way to Diners’ Tables

ATLANTA — The menu offered fried catfish. But Freddie Washington, a pastor in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who sometimes eats out five nights a week and was raised on Gulf Coast seafood, was served tilapia.

Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

Consumers are misled most frequently when they buy fish, investigators say, because diners have such limited knowledge about seafood. 

It was a culinary bait and switch. Mr. Washington complained. The restaurant had run out of catfish, the manager explained, and the pastor left the restaurant with a free dinner, an apology and a couple of gift certificates.

“If I’m paying for a menu item,” Mr. Washington said, “I’m expecting that menu item to be placed before me.”

The subject of deceptive restaurant menus took on new life last week when Oceana, an international organization dedicated to ocean conservation, released a report with the headline “Widespread Seafood Fraud Found in New York City.”

Using genetic testing, the group found tilapia and tilefish posing as red snapper. Farmed salmon was sold as wild. Escolar, which can also legally be called oil fish, was disguised as white tuna, which is an unofficial nickname for albacore tuna.

Every one of 16 sushi bars investigated sold the researchers mislabeled fish. In all, 39 percent of the seafood from 81 grocery stores and restaurants was not what the establishment claimed it was.

“This thing with fish is age old, it’s been going on forever,” said Anne Quatrano, an Atlanta chef who opened Bacchanalia 20 years ago and kick-started the city’s sustainable food movement. “Unless you buy whole fish, you can’t always know what you’re getting from a supplier.”

Swapping one ingredient for a less expensive one extends beyond fish and is not always the fault of the person who sells food to the restaurant. Many a pork cutlet has headed to a table disguised as veal, and many an organic salad is not.

The term organic is regulated by the Department of Agriculture, but many other identifying words on a menu are essentially marketing terms. Unscrupulous chefs can falsely claim that a steak is Kobe beef or say a chicken was humanely treated without penalty.

In cases of blatant mislabeling, a chef or supplier often takes the bet that a local or federal agency charged with stopping deceptive practices is not likely to walk in the door. “This has been going on for as long as I’ve been cooking,” said Tom Colicchio, a New York chef and television personality. “When you start really getting into this stuff, there’s so many things people mislabel.”

At Mr. Colicchio’s New York restaurants, all but about 5 percent of the meat he serves is from animals raised without antibiotics, he said. It costs him about 30 percent more, so he charges more. “Yet I have a restaurant down the street that says they have organic chicken when they don’t, and they charge less money for it,” he said. “It’s all part of mislabeling and duping the public.”

Consumers are misled most frequently when they buy fish, investigators say, because there are so many fish in the sea and such limited knowledge among diners. The Food and Drug Administration lists 519 acceptable market names for fish, but more than 1,700 species are sold, said Morgan Liscinsky, a spokesman with the agency.

Marketing thousands of species in the ocean to a dining public who often has to be coaxed to move beyond the top five — shrimp, tuna, salmon, pollock and tilapia — is not an exact science.

The line between marketing something like Patagonian toothfish as Chilean sea bass or serving langostino and calling it lobster is a fine one.

Robert DeMasco, who owns Pierless Fish, a wholesaler in New York, used a profanity to describe someone who buys farm-raised fish and sells it as wild. “But on some of this, they’re splitting hairs,” he said.

In 2005, a customer sued Rubio’s, a West Coast taco chain, for misleading the public by selling a langostino lobster burrito. The FDA ruled that practice acceptable, which allowed chains like Long John Silver’s and Red Lobster to sell the crustacean called langostino and legally attach the word lobster to it. Maine lobstermen and lawmakers fought the decision unsuccessfully.

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Reyes joins growing craft beer market with Windy City deal

Independent breweries are still a niche category in the marketplace, but interest in them continues to grow.

Reyes Beverage Group, a division of global food and beer distributor Reyes Holdings of Rosemont, said Sunday it has reached an agreement to purchase Windy City Distribution, a well-regarded distributor of craft beers.

Brothers Jim and Jason Ebel founded Windy City in 1999. The firm operates as a distributor across eight northern Illinois counties for more than 40 craft breweries, such as Tyranena, Lagunitas and Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales. The Ebels also are the brewers behind Warrenville-based Two Brothers beer.

The deal, which is expected to close by the end of the year, is yet another sign of the coming-of-age of the craft beer scene, which is now much more part of the mainstream beer industry. In 2012, 442 craft breweries opened, according to the Beer Institute. The Brewers Association, a trade association, said sales of craft brews increased 14 percent in the first half of 2012 and volume jumped 12 percent.

While the beer industry overall has shown limited growth, the explosive interest in craft beer is enticing giants such as Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser, and MillerCoors, both of which have struggled to enter the craft market on their own. Since acquiring Chicago's Goose Island in 2011, Anheuser-Busch has aggressively expanded that well-known label. Earlier this year, it revealed plans to increase Goose Island's distribution to all 50 states, making it one of the few craft brands with a true national footprint.

Reyes' Chicago Beverage Systems and Windy City will not integrate their operations. Windy City's president, Bob Collins, and his management team will join Reyes. Chicago Beverage Systems distributes Miller, Coors and Heineken brands, among others.

"Windy City Distributing will be a new entity in our network focused solely on the craft beer market," said Ray Guerin, chief operating officer of Reyes Beverage Group. "I look forward to working with Windy City to learn more about servicing the craft beer industry while providing Reyes Beverage Group's expertise to help Windy City expand."

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Both companies are privately held.

mmharris@tribune.com

Twitter @chiconfidential

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