Food Poisoning, Foodborne Illness Information and Research : International Food Safety Network : BarfBlog

Hopefully. It’s from the creators of Super Troopers and Beerfest, two quality, underrated flicks, and the trailer for the film, opening Dec. 11/09, shows promise.

The wiki entry says,

The Slammin' Salmon is a 2009 film by Broken Lizard. The film is about the owner of a restaurant initiating a contest to see which of his waiters can earn the most money in a single night, with a prize of $10,000. For the loser, a beating by the owner, Cleon Salmon (played by Michael Clarke Duncan). Kevin Heffernan will be directing the film; it is his first time directing a Broken Lizard film. "Salmon" was filmed in 25 days at the beginning of 2008.
 

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I shop at Dillons in Manhattan (Kansas), owned by Kroger. I’ve gotten to know the staff, we talk food safety stuff, and I’ve really enjoyed the few times I’ve chatted with Gale Prince, who used to be head of food safety at Kroger.

But I don’t understand the press release Kroger sent out today about its new line of salads which includes new technology on the packaging that enables customers to learn where the produce was grown as part of Kroger's "Quality You Can Trace" program.

I don’t really care where it was grown. I do care if it was grown in cow shit.

The Kroger's Fresh Selections are the only salads with HarvestMark technology sold in the U.S. today. Each bag carries a 16-digit code shoppers can enter at HarvestMark.com to learn more about the salad's origin, packing location, ingredients, date and time the product was packed.  Customers can also offer their feedback on the product.

The PR BS goes on to say,

"Kroger continues to be a leader in offering customers innovative food safety tools and resources," said Joe Grieshaber, group vice president of Kroger's meat, seafood, deli and produce departments.  …  Food safety is a top priority at Kroger.  Our partnership with HarvestMark makes it easy for customers who are interested to learn more about the food they purchase for themselves and their families. 

This has nothing to do with food safety. A food safety program for leafy greens would provide at retail – or at least through a url – practices on irrigation water testing, soli amendments and human hygiene programs for the workers. Market food safety directly and stop dancing.

Left, is a bag of Dole spring mix, purchased at Dillons. Included on the package is a salad guide that says taste, 4, on the mild to bold scale, and texture is 2 on the tender to crunchy guide.

The label also says the spring mix pairs well with balsamic vinaigrette, crumbled goat cheese, julienne sliced sun-dried tomatoes and a pinch of Mediterranean herbs. It’s thoroughly washed, preservative free and all natural. And Kosher certified and has a recipe for Balsamic vinaigrette.

I want to know if it has E. coli and is going to make me barf. Don't eat poop. And if you do, cook it.

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Most food purchases are based on faith. That’s why an extensive series of rules, regulations and punishments emerged beginning in 12th century Mediterranean areas.

Faith-based food safety systems are prevalent from the farmer’s market to the supermarket, especially in the produce section. And almost anything can, and is, claimed on food labels – except microbial food safety.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced they are going to examine the growing number of nutrition claims found on the front of food packages after complaints the labels promote health fairytales.

In the U.K., the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has encouraged diners to boycott restaurants that cannot answer questions about the origin of their food.

British chefs Raymond Blanc, Peter Gordon, Martin Lam, Paul Merrett and Antony Worrall-Thompson issued a joint statement saying:

“The British public need to stop being so reticent in restaurants and start asking where their food comes from. It’s your right to know the origin of the food you are served and what types of farms are being used - and the mark of a good restaurant is one that is proud to tell you.”

In response to this news Freedom Food has launched a new long-term campaign called ‘Simply Ask’ which aims to get people asking about food provenance when eating out. This is in a bid to encourage restaurants, pubs and cafes to start sourcing products from higher welfare farms such as Freedom Food, free-range or organic.

Americans are questioning nutrition claims, Brits are questioning allegedly animal-friendly sources of food, maybe there’s room to ask for microbiologically safe food – the stuff that sickens up to 30 per cent of all people everywhere every year (so says the World health Organization).

Lots of companies and retailers are taking baby steps in the direction of empowering consumers to hold producers accountable, but lots aren’t.

Maple Leaf Foods, whose listeria-laden cold-cuts killed 22 Canadians last year, is continuing on its bad Journey to Food Safety Leadership by announcing today that, “Industry and government come together to make food safer for Canadians.”

Invoking the two groups shoppers distrust the most – industry and government – and proclaiming they are working together to better things may not be the best communication strategy to build trust and confidence.

Dr. Randall Huffman, Chief Food Safety Officer for Maple Leaf Foods, stated,

"The Canadian food industry is united that food safety not be used as a competitive advantage. Every member at every step in the production process is a steward of food safety. This spirit of cooperation heralds a new beginning for our industry, and together we will make Canada the gold standard for food safety. This symposium is the first in a series to ensure we share experiences and knowledge, and gain insights into emerging risks, technology advances and cutting edge science that can deliver safer food for Canadians."

That’s nice. Computer companies share technology all the time but that doesn’t stop them from marketing their individual technological advantages.

Stop pandering. Companies that are serious about food safety will go beyond the trust-me approach of faith-based food safety systems and provide public access to food safety test results, provide warnings to populations at risk, and market food safety at retail, to enhance the food safety culture back at the producer or processor level, and to build consumer confidence. May even make money.

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There’s no shortage of food safety news; there is a shortage of evidence-based, incisive approaches that challenge food safety norms and may eventually lead to fewer sick people.

The International Food Safety Network evolved into bites.ksu.edu over the past year as a way of consolidating and making food safety news delivery more efficient. In addition to the web repository, the bites-l electronic newsletter is distributed 2-3 times a day to a dedicated subscriber base of some 10,000 in 60 countries; a list that has been focused and refined by offering continuous, daily food safety news since 1994. barfblog.com – averaging well over 10,000 unique hits a day -- along with weekly food safety infosheets (available in multiple languages), and videos, are now prominent food safety resources.

Sponsorship opportunities are now available for bites.ksu.edu, barfblog.com, and the bites-l listserv (as well as the infosheets and videos; how about a movie?).

In addition to the public exposure – why not stick your company logo on the bites-l newsletter that directs electronic readers to your home site or whatever you’re flogging that week -- and reaching a desired audience, you can receive custom food safety news and analysis. We’ve also resurrected the food safety risk analysis team – assessment, management and communication – and offer 24/7 availability and insanely rapid turnaround times. If your group has a food safety issue -- short-term or long-term -- work with us, rather than having us write it up in barfblog.com, book chapters and scholarly papers as another case study of what not to do.

The money is used to support the on-going expenses of the news-gathering and distribution activities, and to develop the next generation of high school, undergraduate and graduate students who will integrate science and communication skills to deliver compelling food safety messages using a variety of media. Research, training and outreach are all connected in our food safety world.

If you have a sponsorship idea, let’s explore it. Feeling altruistic? Click on the groovy new donate button in the upper right corner of bites.ksu.edu. Want to just send a check? Make it out to:

K-State Olathe Innovation Campus, Inc.
18001 W. 106th St., Ste 130
Olathe, KS 66061
913-541-1220
913-541-1488 Fax
tbogina@kstateoic.ksu.edu
http://kstateoic.ksu.edu
and send to the attention of Terri Bogina

Here’s some additional information.

bites.ksu.edu is a unique comprehensive resource hosted at Kansas State University for all those with a personal or professional interest in food safety. We find credible, current, evidence-based information on food safety and make it accessible to domestic and international audiences through multiple media. Sources of food safety information include government regulatory agencies, international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), peer-reviewed scientific publications, academia, recognized experts in the field and other sources as appropriate.

All bites activities emphasize engaging people in dialogue about food-related risks, controls and benefits, from farm-to-fork. bites strives to provide reliable, relevant information in culturally and linguistically appropriate formats to assist people in identifying, understanding and mitigating the causes of foodborne illness.

bites LISTSERV
The bites.ksu.edu listserv is a free web-based mailing list where information about current and emerging food safety issues is provided, gathered from journalistic and scientific sources around the world and condensed into short items or stories that make up the daily postings. The listserv has been issued continuously since 1995 and is distributed daily via e-mail to thousands of individuals worldwide from academia, industry, government, the farm community, journalists and the public at large.
The listserv is designed to:
•    convey timely and current information for direction of research, diagnostic or investigative activities;
•    identify food risk trends and issues for risk management and communication activities; and
•    promote awareness of public concerns in scientific and regulatory circles.
The bites listserv functions as a food safety news aggregator, summarizing available information that can be can be useful for risk managers in proactively anticipating trends and reactively address issues. The bites editor (me – dp) does not say whether a story is right or wrong or somewhere in between, but rather that a specific story is available today for public discussion.

barblog.com
barfblog.com is where Drs. Powell, Chapman, Hubbell and assorted food safety friends offer evidence-based opinions on current food safety issues. Opinions must be evidence-based – with references – reliable, rapid and relevant. The barfblog authors edit each other – viciously.
 

TWITTER
Breaking food safety news items that eventually appear in bites or barfblog are often posted on Twitter (under barfblog or benjaminchapman) for faster public notification.

INFOSHEETS
Food safety infosheets are designed to influence food handler practices by utilizing four attributes culled from education, behavioral science and communication literature:
•    surprising and compelling messages;
•    putting actions and their consequence in context;
•    generating discussion within the target audiences’ environments; and
•    using verbal narrative, or storytelling, as a message delivery device.
Food safety infosheets are based on stories about outbreaks of foodborne illness sourced from the bites listserv. Four criteria are used to select the story: discussion of a foodborne illness outbreak; discussion of background knowledge of a pathogen (including symptoms, etiology and transmission); food handler control practices; and emerging food safety issues. Food safety infosheets also contain evidence-based prescriptive information to prevent or mitigate foodborne illness related to food handling. They are now available in French, Spanish and Portugese.

bites bistro videos
A nod to the youtube generation, but we don’t really know what we’re doing.

These are the various information products we deliver daily, in addition to research, training and outreach. If you or your group is interested in sponsoring any or all of these food safety activities, please contact me directly.
dp

Dr. Douglas Powell
associate professor, food safety
dept. diagnostic medicine/pathobiology
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS
66506
cell: 785-317-0560
fax: 785-532-4039
dpowell@ksu.edu
bites.ksu.edu
barfblog.com
 

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I am constantly annoyed with pet owners that take their little dogs to the store, especially the grocery store. Oregon is too.  The state Department of Agriculture started a public awareness campaign last month reminding Oregonians that it's illegal for dogs to enter grocery stores - unless it's a service dog. Stores like Bed, Bath & Beyond and Home Depot aren’t good places to be bringing your pet, but there can be legal consequences in stores and restaurants that serve food.

There have been some arguments made for and against patrons bringing pets to stores. Some say their personal pets are like “children” to them, as if they are another family member, but bringing pets into stores is not a good idea for public safety in a microbiological sense and also a physical sense. I hate tripping over toddlers at Walmart, and I don’t want to add tripping on leashes or small dogs to this problem.

By law, grocery stores must allow service dogs into grocery stores.  According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, business owners may ask if an animal is for service, yet they cannot require a customer to show certification or other proof that an animal is certified. In fact, legitimate service animals aren't always certified. (For more information on the law, call 1-800-514-0301.) A quick search on Google brought up Service Animal IDs for $30, no verification paperwork needed. This ID doesn’t classify the animal as a service animal, but most people aren’t able to tell the difference between the real thing and phonies. IDs such as this one could allow anyone to bring a pet into a store selling food, and most likely store managers wouldn’t do a thing about it.

Separating the true service dogs from the personal pets makes it hard for those that rely on their service animals for help with a disability.  The ADA defines a service animal as any guide dog, signal dog, or other animal individually trained to provide assistance to an individual with a disability. If they meet this definition, animals are considered service animals under the ADA regardless of whether they have been licensed or certified by a state or local government.

Most people think of service dogs as performing functions such as leading the blind and opening doors, but they are also psychiatric service dogs that help people with psychological problems. Unfortunately there is where the lines become very grey. Assistance Dogs International has three categories: guide dogs for the blind and visually impaired, hearing dogs for the deaf and hard of hearing and service dogs for people with disabilities other than those related to vision or hearing. Service dogs may be needed by people with disabilities that are not visible and perform activities such as alerting of oncoming seizures or a variety of psychiatric disabilities. While grocery store owners are allowed to ask if an animal is a service animal or pet, they are not allowed to ask what their disability is (if not visible).

This issue spins round and round. Untrained animals shouldn’t be brought into areas of food. But disabled people need service animals present to help with disabilities. But pets may not be able to be distinguished from service animals, and patrons may abuse the fact that the store owner can’t ask what their disability is. But the store owner has a right to exclude pets from areas with food for sale.

The long and the short of it is, there isn’t a federal regulatory agency that dictates how these animals are certified as service dogs. Even if we did have the regulatory agency, would that ensure resolution of all the service animal disputes? Of course not, just as the existence of the FDA and USDA doesn’t ensure the 100% safety of our food supply.

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Hockey in Raleigh is back. After a somewhat surprising playoff run in the spring, the Carolina Hurricanes took the ice last night at the RBC Center to open the 2009-10 season vs. the top-ranked Philadelphia Flyers.

The 'Canes lost 2-0, in part because of a futile powerplay (0-for-8).

I took my dad to the game (right, self-pic, exactly as shown) and we debated getting a bbq sandwich after the first period but the price tag was a bit steep ($7).

My dad asked me "So, how do you think they are doing, food safety-wise".

I told him that it's tough to say, anytime you eat you put trust in a food handler somewhere and hopefully they know somthing about risks and risk reduction. I watched for a couple of minutes and snapped the below pic of the bbq (below left, food porn shot, exactly as shown).

While sitting around today and watching some college football I started to think a bit more about my dad's question and dug up some inspection reports. I couldn't find the Carolina BBQ stand in question but was able to browse through 20 or so other RBC Center sites from the past couple of years. Temperature abuse, especially hot-holding seemed to be a common violation.

The bbq looked and smelled good, and judging by the lineups, was moved out of the pans to patrons' sandwiches pretty fast. But who knows at what temperature, and how long it was held before we came by. I hope that someone did.

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Julie, my youngest sister, started her first year at Fanshawe College in London (Ontario) this fall. Like many first years she’s staying in residence, and like many first years she’s having a great drunken time – likely followed by painful mornings hovered over the toilet.

Although many a pukey morning could be attributed to alcohol overconsumption, Courier-Journal reports ways to avoid foodborne illness while living in dorms (or residence halls).

Food-related illnesses, such as E. coli and salmonella infection, can creep into a dorm — or any setting where people gather. But students aren't always alert to the risks…

The article identifies a few problem areas for this demographic.

Eating pizza that's been left out all night: In general, perishable food shouldn't be left out more than two hours at room temperature or no more than one hour in 90-degree weather, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But as Doug explains, there are exceptions,

“If it's the kind of pizza that most people usually get, which is like cardboard and completely dry, it's probably going to be all right. But when in doubt, throw it out.”

Relying solely on a food's color or smell to tell whether it's safe to eat:

“If something smells gross, toss it,” said Doug Powell.

But while your nose and eyes may lead you right sometimes, they're not foolproof. For example, that hamburger or chicken you just cooked may look done, but you won't know for sure whether it's safe to eat unless you stick a food thermometer in it to check the temperature. You can pick one up at the nearest big-box store.

Your tongue can mislead you, too. A product can be contaminated with bacteria, such as salmonella, without tasting or looking odd.

That’s Julie, right, with the college staple food pizza.

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Every year a few outbreaks of pathogenic E. coli are traced to children visiting animal sites (and usually linked to touching, petting or feeding the ruminants). Earlier this year an outbreak occurred at the Western Stock show in Denver (see below infosheet, download it here).

UKPA reports today that 36 children are ill and 12 are hospitalized after visiting Godstone Farm in Surrey.

The farm is popular as it boasts a large range of animals which children can pet and feed. During the peak of the school holidays it receives up to 2,000 visitors a day.
The outbreak is believed to have started on August 8.
Dr Angela Iversen, director of the Surrey and Sussex Health Protection Unit, said: "This is a large outbreak of this infection.
"The farm owners are co-operating fully and we are working closely with them and with colleagues across health and local authorities to investigate the source. Our advice is that the farm should remain closed to visitors while this work goes on."

Kids and petting animals, without lots of precautions,including compelling messages for handwashing and sanitation, don't mix.

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When I first opened the Kansas State Collegian yesterday morning, the following headline popped out: “Green, pet-friendly bar opens in Aggieville.” The story started:

“Tail wagging, mouth drooling, riled up with excitement stands Tank the dog, welcoming bar patrons this Saturday to the newly renovated the Loft Bar and Grill.”

The owner added,

“We will be having many different types of animals outside the Loft — dogs, goats and even miniature Clydesdales.” Jacobson said. “Our bar is very pet-friendly.”

Actually, the Kansas Food Code prohibits animals on food establishments, unless they are assistance animals, according to code reference 6-501.115 found here.

Did Jackson read over the Food Code before opening his restaurant? Maybe he’s a rebel, or is he just playing it dumb?

The local health department inspectors would consider bringing pets to a restaurant a critical violation. Last year, Tanks Tavern, also in Aggieville, was cited two critical violations including: “live dog in bar and dog food stored under sink.”

As Amy and Doug wrote, “tripping, biting, dog fights, barking, allergies, and the transfer of dangerous microorganisms such as E. coli, salmonella and cryptosporidium” are some of the risks that come along with doggie dining.

Restaurants in Florida can apply for permits to allow dogs on their patio, if they meet certain conditions. Employees must not touch pets while handling food, and if they do, they must wash their hands. Customers should also wash their hands before eating and keep their pets off tables, chairs, and tables.

As far as I know, we are still in Kansas, where doggie dining is clearly prohibited.

These are my puppies:

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People often say to me, Doug, I get 10 e-mails from you each day. How can I get more of the Doug?

The talk I taped for the Australian HACCP conference a few weeks ago is now available on-line.

Be kind.

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"If it provides more safety, then I'm all for it," says the New York Mets' All-Star third baseman, David Wright, of his new Rawlings S100 batting helmet. Wright was clocked with a pitch two weeks ago (see video here) that left him on the disabled list with post-concussion symptoms until tomorrow's opener in Denver, where he hopes to try out the new helmet.

It has a thick Polypropelene liner and an additional composite insert. "We're confident that it will withstand a pitch up to 100 mph," said Mike Thompson, Rawlings senior vice president for sports marketing and business development.

The AP reports that all Minor League Baseball players will be required to use these helmets next season, as beanballs and subsequent concussions are inherent risks to America's pastime.

"It's one of those things that happens," said Scott Rolen of the Cincinnati Reds, who recently landed on the Major League's DL with a concussion. "Nobody's out there trying to throw at guys' heads - that's the idea. We'll go out there and compete. I mean, we drive home every day, too, and that's not real safe."

It's true: people accept risks everyday. But they do so trusting that everyone involved is controlling the risks to the best of their ability - from pitchers to helmet manufacturers, from fellow drivers to auto makers, and from cooks (at home or elsewhere) to food producers.

When eating, it's the culture of food safety of everyone from farm to fork that will determine the level of risk an individual is accepting. They should all adopt the attitude: "If it provides more safety, then I'm all for it."

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The Los Angeles Times reports today about a crackdown on mobile food trucks on the streets of Southern California. Met with some resistance and conspiracy theories about whistle-blowing from competitors, police officials said the blitz was part of a one-day operation to clear the area of illegal vendors.

"They don't have city and health department permits," said Lt. Dan Hudson, watch commander at the Los Angeles Police Department Wilshire Division. "Restaurants complain because the lunch trucks are taking their business, and they don't have [proper] permits."

With more complex foods (other than just reheating cooked meats) comes more complicated (and potentially risky) preparation and handling steps. Multiple raw ingredients need to be kept at the right temperature, operators have to avoid cross-contamination and, keep bacteria and viruses off of their hands. All within the confines of a cart or trailer.

Operators must know (and care) about the risks associated with the products they sell. Health inspectors are part of the solution, but a good street vendor manages the risks before the inspector points them out.

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ConAgra CEO thingy Gary Rodkin is on a quest

A quest to find what he calls "the big, singular insight that will drive behavior change." If he can do that, he can boost the bottom line (which was $978 million on revenue of $12.7 billion in the fiscal year ended May 31). Rodkin is using theories about buying habits--backed by $399 million a year in advertising, marketing and in-store promotions--to convince grocery stores to provide ample shelves for its 45 consumer brands, which include Chef Boyardee, Healthy Choice, Hebrew National, Wesson and Swiss Miss.

I have a suggestion. Don’t make people barf, with your Banquet pot pies and your peanut butter. Seriously, $399 million in advertising, and you can’t promise people they won’t barf?

And the best guest speaker you can get is me naked in New Zealand (cost to ConAgra bottom line – nothing).

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Food safety culture is miniscule compared to food porn culture.

How is it that Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant was rated as a perfect 10 in the new edition of the Good Food Guide 2010, despite being closed for a norovirus outbreak?

Making customers barf doesn’t seem to count in the scoring system.

Good Food Guide editor and food porn aficionado Elizabeth Carter, said

"It is the most extraordinary restaurant in Britain. … It’s a destination restaurant, a place you save up to go to, and you will remember it forever."

Especially the barfing.

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Being an Office fan, "That's what she said" has not jumped the shark for me; but being an iPhone owner, "There's an app for that" has.

I'm not all loaded up with apps, and tend to stick with the low risk free ones. Today I splurged and spent $.99 on Poop the World (thanx Gonzo for the suggestion).

I just downloaded it and the opening screen says "Get started! Track your bowel movements in real-time, share with friends, and strive for recognition in a fun and civilized manner!"

Okay. You had me at bowel movements.

This app is a bit like playing Tony Hawk, there are achievement levels like "The Daily Quad" (4 poops in a day) and "Sir Deuce-a-lot" (20 poops in a week).

The poop database is also sortable. So I've got that going for me. If you wish to follow, I'm at Defender of the can.

It appears that you can follow the poops at pooptheworld.com. While it's all fun, maybe there is a google analytics/flu tracking aspect to this. Poop the world might be an early indicator of a national foodborne illness outbreak.

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From cream soup to cancer treatment, I discovered many interesting uses for surplus breast milk after learning that PETA requested Ben & Jerry's use it to replace cow's milk in ice cream products.

"Whatever floats your boat," I said, "as long as it’s pasteurized for the kiddos."

Probably, the most widely-accepted use for extra breast milk is as a supplement for nursing infants whose mothers are unable to produce enough safe breast milk to sufficiently feed them. Several human milk banks exist in the US for this purpose.

One such bank opened this week at the Portland Adventist Medical Center and has a plan in place to ensure the safety of all donations before use.

"We'll do a blood screen on the moms who are going to donate," said Angel Pyles, a lactation nurse. "The milk is pasteurized and rescreened before given to babies who are in need of it."

Young children are one group whose health and well-being are most greatly affected by the culture around them. Those babies are lucky this organization recognizes that even a woman's breast milk has risks that should be controlled.

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This morning, I watched the live coverage of the return of American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee from North Korea with a grateful heart.

Ling and Lee were arrested while on assignment at the Chinese-North Korean border in March and sentenced to 12 years hard labor for "hostilities against the Korean nation and illegal entry."

"The past 140 days have been the most difficult, heart-wrenching days of our lives," Ling said at their homecoming, her voice cracking.

Lisa Ling said of her sister, "She's really, really anxious to have fresh fruit and fresh food. She said there were rocks in her rice. Obviously, it's a country that has a lot of economic problems."

I've heard it said that food safety sometimes has to take a backseat to food security. However, the agreed-upon WHO definition of food security is "when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life."

All food producers should recognize their responsibility to the world's food security.

Those who don't share my dream of feeding the world can at least recognize the value of safe food to paying customers, like the home and free Laura Ling. 

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While the websphere, blogsphere and twittersphere were ejaculating electrons about the potential passage of new food safety legislation by the U.S. House– it passed -- I was hanging out with some food safety dudes at Publix supermarkets HQ in Lakeland, Florida.

And I saw far more in Lakeland that would impact daily food safety than anything the politicians, bureaucrats, hangers-on and chatting classes could ever come up with.

When it comes to the safety of the food supply, I generally ignore the chatter from Washington, as well as the wasted Internet commentaries and conspiracy theories. If a proposal does emerge, such as the creation of a single food inspection agency, or the bill that passed the House today – and just the House -- I ask, Will it actually make food safer? Will fewer people get sick?

As the General Accounting Office pointed out in a report a year ago,

“The burden for food safety in most of the selected countries lies primarily with food producers, rather than with inspectors, although inspectors play an active role in overseeing compliance. This principle applies to both domestic and imported products.”

Publix, with over 1,000 supermarkets, its own processing plants, and thousands of food products moving through its shelves, can’t afford the luxury of chatter.

After my visit, I went to the local Publix in St. Pete Beach to check out what the food safety type said – sure, the boss knows food safety, but do the front-line staff?

I ordered some shaved smoked turkey breast from the deli, and the sealable bag the meat was delivered in contained the following:

“Publix Deli
The Publix Deli is committed to the highest quality fresh cold cuts & cheeses
Therefore we recommend all cold cuts are best if used within three days of purchase
And all cheese items are best if used within four days of purchase”

(The picture isn’t very good. Note to Publix: The label warning about shelf-life is a great idea, but can’t read it if the price sticker gets slapped over some of the text.)

This is the first time I’ve seen a retailer provide information to consumers on the accurate shelf-life of sliced deli meats. It didn’t require Congressional hearings; it didn’t require some hopelessly-flawed consumer education campaign; it required a food safety type to say, this is important, let’s do it.

I also went looking for some bread for turkey sandwiches tomorrow as we move down to Sarasota, and then Venice Beach. I asked an employee in the bakery for some whole wheat rolls, and she pointed out what was available, said packages of six were pre-packaged, but she could get me whatever number I wanted. I asked for four. There was no bin for me to stick my who-knows-where-they-have-been hands in to and retrieve a few rolls. The bins were turned so that only staff had access. The employee said it had been that way since she started three years ago, and that “there’s just too much stuff going around” to let consumers stick their hands into bun bins (most commonly found item in communal bun bins? False fingernails).

It’s nice that food safety is once again a Presidential priority and that politicians are trying to set a tone. But chatting doesn’t mean fewer sick people – actions do.

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Half-price cream cheese? And the brand name, no less! I saw they were getting close to their expiration dates, but I bought three, anyway. They'll keep just fine in the freezer until I'm ready to bake another pumpkin cheesecake.

Lots of shoppers buy groceries with this money-saving mentality, which has opened the market for expired food sold at discounts. It has also sparked an increase in grocery auctions for the sale of damaged, dented or surplus foodstuffs that are often close to passing their expiration dates.

At Big Harry's Auction in New Jersey, regular runs to regional food distribution centers and a wholesale food auction provide an ever-changing variety of food items for the public to bid on.

"And while Big Harry's is subject to health department inspections and offers a money-back guarantee on food purchases," writes an Asbury Park Press staff writer, "buying frozen food at auction requires something of a leap of faith. [Auction operator Vince] Iacono says he'd never sell perishable frozen food that was thawed and then refrozen, which can cause spoilage, but all he can do is trust that his haulers will abide by the same policy."

That's true for all food businesses: they have to rely on everyone before them in the farm-to-fork food chain to handle products as safely as they do. It's always important to know your suppliers.

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I’ve been hanging out with the visiting Egyptians since Thurs.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has this Cochran Fellows program that provides U.S.-based agricultural training opportunities for senior and mid-level specialists and administrators from public and private sectors who are concerned with agricultural trade, agribusiness development, management, policy, and marketing.

After spending over 30 hours to reach Kansas from Egypt, with a variety of travel headaches, the three food scientists and one professor have been taking in the best Manhattan has to offer: dinner at the Little Apple Brewing Company, viewing the animals at the Riley County Fair, shopping, taking in the Kaw Valley Rodeo Saturday night, and my lectures.

Sunday, the Fellows came to our house for some American-style BBQ and hospitality. I showed them how to cook a hamburger with a tip-sensitive digital thermometer, they told me about cooking and hospitality in Egypt.

Baby Sorenne was the star attraction.

And it's been a huge honor hanging out with the accomplished gentlemen and learning.

 

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On Aug. 23, 2008, Maple Leaf CEO Michael McCain took to the Intertubes to apologize for an expanding outbreak of listeriosis that would eventually kill 22 people. As part of his speech, McCain said that Maple Leaf has “a strong culture of food safety.”

On Aug. 27, 2008, McCain told a press conference,

“As I've said before, Maple Leaf Foods is 23,000 people who live in a culture of food safety. We have an unwavering commitment to keep our food safe, and we have excellent systems and processes in place.”

As laid bare in the Weatherill report on the 2008 listeria shit-fest, McCain’s invocation of food safety culture was as credible as the politicians and bureaucrats who lauded the workings of Canada’s food safety surveillance system, when it didn’t actually work at all.

Andre Picard, the long-time health reporter for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, picked up on this theme today when he wrote,

“the root of the listeriosis outbreak in Canada in 2008 was not two dirty meat slicers but rather a culture – in government and private enterprise alike – in which food safety was not a priority but an afterthought.”

Picard says Ms. Weatherill's most important recommendation – one that has been largely glossed over in media coverage of the report – is for a culture of safety or, as is stated bluntly in the report: “Actions, not words.”

Really, Canada, this is nothing new. There is a long history in developed countries of negligence, followed by remorse, promises to do better and … minimal changes. Didn’t Canada go through all this after E. coli O157:H7 entered the municipal water supply in Walkerton, Ontario in 2000, killing 7 and sickening 2,500 in a town of 5,000?

In 1985, 19 of 55 affected people at a London, Ontario, nursing home died after eating sandwiches infected with E. coli O157:H7.  On Oct. 12, 1985, in response to an inquest, the Ontario government announced a training program for food-handlers in health-care institutions, “stressing cleaning and sanitizing procedures and hygienic practices in food preparation.” That training apparently didn’t include the food safety basic – don’t give unheated cold cuts to vulnerable populations, like old people, ‘cause they may die from listeria.

These days, food safety culture is the buzz. The same recommendation – to embrace and enhance food safety culture --  was embraced by the U.K. Food Standards Agency last week following an inquiry into the death of 5-year-old Mason Jones and the illness of 160 other schoolchildren who consumed E. coli O157:H7 contaminated cold cuts in Wales in 2005.

Sixteen years after E. coli O157:H7 killed four and sickened hundreds who ate hamburgers at the Jack-in-the-Box chain, the challenge remains: how to get people to take food safety seriously? 

Lots of companies do take food safety seriously and the bulk of Western meals are microbiologically safe. But recent food safety failures have been so extravagant, so insidious and so continual that consumers must feel betrayed.



Culture encompasses the shared values, mores, customary practices, inherited traditions, and prevailing habits of communities. The culture of today’s food system (including its farms, food processing facilities, domestic and international distribution channels, retail outlets, restaurants, and domestic kitchens) is saturated with information but short on behavioral-change insights. Creating a culture of food safety requires application of the best science with the best management and communication systems, including compelling, rapid, relevant, reliable and repeated, multi-linguistic and culturally-sensitive messages.

Frank Yiannas, the vice-president of food safety at Wal-Mart writes in his 2008 book, Food Safety Culture: Creating a Behavior-based Food Safety Management System, that an organization’s food safety systems need to be an integral part of its culture.

The other guru of food safety culture, Chris Griffith of the University of Wales, features prominently in the report by Professor Hugh Pennington into the 2005 E.coli outbreak in Wales.

I’ve maintained for 16 years that, despite high-profile outbreaks and unacceptable loss of life, food safety in Canada is, as Weatherill stated, an afterthought.

Forget government. Michael McCain, you want to be a leader, lead, don’t just talk about it by throwing around words like food safety culture because they are suddenly fashionable.

The best food producers, processors, retailers and restaurants will go above and beyond minimal government and auditor standards and sell food safety solutions directly to the public. The best organizations will use their own people to demand ingredients from the best suppliers; use a mixture of encouragement and enforcement to foster a food safety culture; and use technology to be transparent -- whether it's live webcams in the facility or real-time test results on the website -- to help restore the shattered trust with the buying public.

And the best cold-cut companies may stop dancing around and tell pregnant women, old people and other immunocompromised folks, don't eat this food unless it's heated.

Weatherill says, action not words.

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This is what happens when doing interviews at 6:30 a.m. while feeding Sorenne some mush of peach and pear.

After blogging about how the U.K. Food Standards Agency was embracing food safety culture, I turned the post into an opinion piece and sent it to a newspaper in Wales.

The next morning, while feeding Sorenne, a reporter e-mailed me with some questions, and I replied, “call me.”

So she did.

The article, by Abby Alford, appeared this morning in  Wales under the headline, Tragic E. coli death used to teach US students food hygiene.

The tragic story of E. coli victim Mason Jones is being used by an American professor as a graphic illustration of what unsafe food can do.

Dr Douglas Powell also shows his students at Kansas State University a picture of the five-year-old as he teaches them about food safety.

“We are always trying to come up with new ways of getting the food safety message across. We have to have a compelling story and there’s no more compelling story than Mason Jones,” he said.

I talked about food safety culture, what FSA was proposing, and questioned how they were going to measure effectiveness.

The FSA has announced a culture change is needed in all parts of the food supply chain if the UK is to avoid another E.coli outbreak.

Dr Powell also suggested UK firms could follow the example of a factory in North Dakota, USA, which uses webcams to stream its activities live on the Internet.

Apparently I dreamed that part. There is a turkey processing plant in South Dakota that uses video cameras to constantly monitor operations and the videos can be accessed by auditors or USDA inspectors at any time – but not on the Internet. And not in North Dakota.
 

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Proving there is a Council for everything, the Council to Improve Foodborne Outbreak Response released its Guidelines for Foodborne Disease Outbreak Response today.

The guidelines in this document are targeted to local, state and federal agencies and provide model practices used in foodborne disease outbreaks, including planning, detection, investigation, control and prevention. Local and state agencies vary in their approach to, experience with, and capacity to respond to foodborne disease outbreaks. The guidelines are intended to give all agencies a common foundation from which to work and to provide examples of the key activities that should occur during the response to outbreaks of foodborne disease. The guidelines were developed by a broad range of contributors from local, state and federal agencies with expertise in epidemiology, environmental health, laboratory science and communications. The document has gone through a public review and comment process.

The Guidelines document is not intended to replace current procedure manuals for responding to outbreaks. Instead, it is designed to be used as a reference document for comparison with existing procedures; to fill in gaps and update site-specific procedures; to provide models for new procedures where they do not exist; and to provide training to program staff. The document is available in electronic and hard-copy formats for state and local health departments.

 

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Amy’s father and stepmom came for a visit and yesterday we went to a local eatery for a late lunch.

When Amy’s dad ordered a burger, the server asked how he would like the burger cooked.

He said medium-well.

The server said he could get the burger as rare as he wanted.

Amy said really, and started asking, just what was a medium-rare burger.

The server said it all had to do with color, and after some back and forth with the cooks, said the beef they get has nothing bad in it anyway.

Color is a lousy indicator.

During the same meal, a reporter called to ask, why do companies – big companies, huge chains and brand names -- knowingly follow or ignore bad safety practices? (that story should appear Sunday).

It comes down to culture – the food safety culture of a restaurant, a supermarket, a butcher shop, a government agency.

Culture encompasses the shared values, mores, customary practices, inherited traditions, and prevailing habits of communities. The culture of today’s food system (including its farms, food processing facilities, domestic and international distribution channels, retail outlets, restaurants, and domestic kitchens) is saturated with information but short on behavioral-change insights. Creating a culture of food safety requires application of the best science with the best management and communication systems, including compelling, rapid, relevant, reliable and repeated, multi-linguistic and culturally-sensitive messages.

Sixteen years after E. coli O157:H7 killed four and sickened hundreds who ate hamburgers at the Jack-in-the-Box chain, the challenge remains: how to get people to take food safety seriously? 

Lots of companies do take food safety seriously and the bulk of American meals are microbiologically safe. But recent food safety failures have been so extravagant, so insidious and so continual that consumers must feel betrayed.



Frank Yiannas, the vice-president of food safety at Wal-Mart writes in his book, Food Safety Culture: Creating a Behavior-based Food Safety Management System, that an organization’s food safety systems need to be an integral part of its culture.

The other guru of food safety culture, Chris Griffith of the University of Wales, features prominently in the report by Professor Hugh Pennington into the 2005 E.coli outbreak in Wales that killed 5-year-old Mason Jones and sickened another 160 school kids.

Yesterday, the board of the U.K. Food Standards Agency (FSA), in response to Pennington’s report, approved a five-year plan that will push food businesses to adopt a food safety culture and comply with hygiene laws, and urge stricter punishments for those that do not. The FSA will also ensure health inspectors are better trained.

A report put before FSA board members in London stated “culture change in all of the relevant parts of the food supply chain” is necessary.

Mason Jones’ mum Sharon Mills said she is pleased with the action being taken by the FSA.

“This sounds promising and shows they are moving in the right direction. … Things are slowly changing and hopefully we will all see the benefits sooner rather than later.”

Maybe. I’m still not convinced FSA understands what culture is all about. And how will these changes be evaluated. Is there any evidence that social marketing is effective in creating food safety behavior change? Those issues get to the essence of food safety culture, yet are glossed over with a training session – more of the same.

And why wait for government. The best food producers, processors, retailers and restaurants should go above and beyond minimal government and auditor standards and sell food safety solutions directly to the public. The best organizations will use their own people to demand ingredients from the best suppliers; use a mixture of encouragement and enforcement to foster a food safety culture; and use technology to be transparent -- whether it's live webcams in the facility or real-time test results on the website -- to help restore the shattered trust with the buying public.

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Two days ago, the parents of 5-year-old E. coli victim Mason Jones called the Welsh government response to an inquiry into the 2005 outbreak, “a bit disappointing.”

Today, the U.K. Food Standards Agency published its own response and, it’s a bit disappointing.

After a cursory reading, the FSA folks seem to acknowledge some of the major points raised by Prof. Pennington, but in the end promised more of the same (but gosh-darnnit, a bit tougher on enforcement).

Here are a few highlights:

This understanding of ‘food safety issues’ culture and ‘what works’ are core to the Food Hygiene Delivery Programme. This will be a particular challenge as local authorities’ regulatory services are facing declining resources, and increasing demands for their services. We must push more effectively in all appropriate national forums for food safety to be given more prominence by local political bodies and their officials. Our own project-based approach to delivering responses to this Inquiry, coupled with the restructuring of the Agency’s Food Safety Group, is designed to concentrate on a coordinated set of actions to achieve the desired outcomes in a holistic rather than piecemeal way.

Culture and holistic are nice words but the FSA says:

In May 2009 the FSA announced a new training course on social marketing and behavioural change for food enforcement officers. It aims to develop skills to acquire an insight into the behaviours of food business operators and consumers in order to successfully disseminate food safety messages.

What does disseminate mean in this context? What if the messages suck? How will this be evaluated. Is there any evidence that social marketing is effective in creating food safety behavior change? Those issues get to the essence of food safety culture, yet are glossed over with a training session – more of the same.

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Maybe it was barfblog influenced, maybe not. My previous post on Mark Bittman's garlic and other stuff in oil was a letter to the editor I submitted to the New York Times on Friday night. As the Times likes to have exclusive first printing right I held off on posting the letter until last night (since I hadn't heard whether it was going to be printed).

This morning, esteemed New York Times watch-dog blogger NYTpicker, noted that the botulism-promoting Bittman article has been updated to include some safety tips:

Correction: July 1, 2009
A recipe on Page 4 today with the Minimalist column, about infused oils, corrects two errors that appeared in the recipe when it was published at nytimes.com on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The online recipe misstated the amount of time the oil should cook after it bubbles and the length of time it is safe to use after being refrigerated. The oil should be cooked five minutes, not “a minute or two,” and it should be kept in the refrigerator no more than a week, not “a month or so.” The corrected version can also be found at nytimes.com/dining.

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Eat Me Daily is fast becoming one of my go-to sites. They write today:

This illustration by Lunchbreath is basically a checklist for corporate greenwashing: Earth tones, sans serif type, unbleached paper, and emotional messaging are essential components of the deceptive marketing techniques employed by corporations that rebrand their products.
We liked the customer benefit: "Be selfish while appearing progressive."

Market food safety instead. People are interested in not barfing.

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In part two of the Toronto Star's investigation of soft-serve ice cream safety reporters have stumbled upon a snack bar with an extraordinary amount of coliform in the treats. The biggest offender found during the blitz was the Kew Gardens snack bar (with coliform above 1000000 cfu/gram). When I was growing up, I probably visited that snack bar 10-15 times a summer.

When asked about the 1000000 cfu/g measure, Rick Holley, microbiologist from U of Manitoba responded:

"Oh my God. This is not good," With results this high, "the product is hazardous," said Holley, adding the spectre of serious health implications is also magnified.

"The real concern here is listeria," he said. "And it's going to happen."

 After learning of the result on Thursday, [Kew Gardens snack bar] manager Danny Foulidis ordered the machine shut down and sanitized.

"We've always been a clean establishment. We've never had an issue. If there's something we need to change to make things better, it's not a problem on our part."

During the past week, Gerry Lawrence, food safety manager at Toronto Public Health, has fielded calls from worried residents asking how to tell if soft ice cream is safe.

His advice: "If I'm buying ice cream for a youngster, I don't think I want to buy it from somebody that has greasy hands or isn't wearing a clean smock or even a baseball cap."

 Holley, a member of a federal advisory panel struck in response to the Maple Leaf Foods listeria crisis, chuckles at the suggestion that protection comes down to gauging the cleanliness of an operator. "That's not the complete picture. You might have one person of that kind of appearance who plays a very minor role in handling products that are risky, such as these are.

Great quote by Holley after a poor suggestion from Lawrence. Visual cleanliness isn't a good indicator of anything, especially whether someone is going to get sick. 

"It really does require that the folks who are responsible for making sure that all of the licence requirements of these people are met are conscientious in what they do and look at the whole picture. Whether or not they have time to do that is another issue."

The Star goes on to report on one of the factors that could lead to soft-serve contamination, the infamous O-ring.

Health inspectors generally do not check the inner mechanisms of machines, and experts warn that's where the danger lies, particularly in a $1.85 rubber O-ring that seals an area around a drive shaft that spins the ice cream. Michael Minor, former president of the Ontario branch of the Canadian Institute of Public Health Inspectors, said a worn ring can cause contamination to seep into the ice cream.

"Product that leaks from the refrigerated mixing vat into the back of the machine because of a faulty O-ring can be pulled back in to the soft-serve mix through reverse flow," Minor said.

Manufacturers suggest the rings be replaced every three months.

Minor is concerned some operators lack the knowledge or will to maintain their machines, which is central to assuring a safe product.

"This is not rocket science. It's not statistical analysis. This is a machine that needs attention and you need to understand it."

Holley and Minor both touch on one of the tenets of food safety culture: Operators need to know the risks associated with their products and how to manage them. Good operators know about sanitation, equipment maintenance and selecting good suppliers.

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A 48-year-old teaching assistant from Crayford, and a family from Broadstairs are among more than 500 British tourists who won compensation for a nightmare Caribbean holiday at the Bahia Principe Hotel in the Dominican Republic (below, left) in 2007.

According to media accounts, the holiday companies continued sending guests to the hotel despite a major outbreak of Shigella and Salmonella which lasted for months.

"My husband couldn't reach the toilet when we were there. I went down to reception to tell them to call a doctor and they said put a nappy on him to take him to the medical centre. … Some people had to have new mattresses because they hadn't made it to the toilet in time. There were children screaming all over the place and pregnant women."

Tracey Chambers, 43, said,

“People were being sick in the swimming pool and the toilets were all blocked up. Lots of people were being sick. We were told to watch what we ate because there was bug going round. …  My dad had to be put on a drip because he was dehydrated and couldn’t take on enough water. They were charging 40 dollars for a trip to the hospital.”

Other guests were diagnosed with shigella, giardia, salmonella and E coli, thought to have come from food dressings.

A spokesperson for Thomas Cook said,

"We are pleased that the majority of legal cases have now been settled and we want to be able to reassure all our customers that we work with our hotel partners to continually monitor the hygiene standards in their properties."

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When Katie Filion lived with us for a few months before setting off for graduate work in New Zealand, Amy and I would tell the 22-year-old, "‘oh, you should see this movie" – insert Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Wonderboys, or even more modern fare like Napoleon Dynamite – at which point she would politely recoil. Maybe she found our movies … old.

However, Katie did confess she now misses my homemade-from-scratch buckwheat pancakes with berries.

Have I got a movie for Katie.

Woody Allen’s 1973 classic, Sleeper, when the director was at a more, uh, slapstick stage of his career, features Allen as Miles Monroe, a jazz musician and health-food store owner living in Manhattan in 1973, who is cryogenically frozen without his consent, and not revived for 200 years. When Miles is arrested as a counterrevolutionary, he escapes by disguising himself as a robot, the kind frequently used in the future for mundane chores like cooking.

Maybe the Japanese like Woody Allen more than the French like Jerry Lewis because various prototype robo-chefs showed off their cooking skills at the International Food Machinery and Technology Expo in Tokyo last week, flipping Japanese pancakes, serving sushi and slicing vegetables.

Narito Hosomi, president of Toyo Riki, manufacturers of the pancake-cooking robot, which was apparently based on me, said,

"We all know that robots can be very useful. We want to take that utility out of the factory so that they can be used elsewhere.”

I have to agree, Katie. While clever, Sleeper is slow.

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As someone with experience in microbiology, I have high standards for sanitation. (I always wash my hands after picking up a bag of raw chicken—even if it’s frozen—and I wipe down the counter, too.) My mother, on the other hand, focuses on visual cleanliness. Since she’s on her way for a visit, I’m doing all the things that I don’t find quite so important, like dusting and putting my husband's toys away. While, despite my efforts, her house will always look better than mine, I’m content to think my family will get less diarrhea.

Michael McCain is the president and CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, which allowed an undetected build-up of pathogenic listeria deep inside its slicing machines to contaminate deli meats that eventually killed 22 Canadians and sickened 57 more.

He stated yesterday that, despite concerns by the media and a meat inspectors’ labor union that overworked inspectors spend most of their time doing paperwork, more visual inspections would not have made a difference. Inspectors, without the aid of listeria-vision goggles, could not have seen the bacteria that contaminated the meats.

While regulators play an important role in persuading food producers to make safe products, it’s the culture of each organization that primarily determines whether they produce safe food.

In the case of Maple Leaf Foods, communication with consumers during the outbreak (as discussed by Doug and Ben) demonstrated that it was an organization that recognized the value of producing safe food. Their failure to detect L. monocytogenes in product samples led to a $50 million recall, settlements to victims totaling $27 million, and a loss of business that suggested they could do more to act out the food safety culture they had fostered.

No scrap of such a culture could be found at Peanut Corporation of America when the peanut products it was shipping sickened 714 people across the US. As of yesterday, claims totaling $202 million have been filed against PCA in U.S. Bankruptcy Court on behalf of the people who were sickened and families who lost loved ones in its salmonella outbreak, in addition to companies that bought contaminated PCA products for use in their own food products.

Smart food producers and preparers know that it pays to take responsibility for the safety of your products, no matter how closely an inspector (governmental or parental) is watching.

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A couple of weeks ago I was watching the local 11pm news and a story about a pretty nasty event  linked to Raleigh restaurant popped on. WRAL reported that one paramedic unit was dispatched and called for backup when 10 patrons of EVOO (which I drive by on my way to campus)  suddenly became ill on April 17th, 2009. At least three patrons were taken to hospital with stomach cramps, vomiting and dizziness.

When I first heard about how violent and sudden the outbreak was I was reminded of an a couple of scombrotoxin outbreaks that occurred in Washington State in 2004.  My favorite part about that outbreak report was what diarrhea associated with escolar looks like:

Diarrhea associated with consumption of escolar is caused by an indigestible waxy ester (gempylotoxin) that is naturally present in the fish; the diarrhea is often described as oily and/or unusually colored, and may be accompanied by abdominal discomfort and fecal incontinence.

Mmmm.

Although the true cause may never be known the epidemiology reports point to salad consumption as a common food. One of the working theories for this outbreak is cross-contamination of scombrotoxin poison from fish on the menu or high-histamine containing anchovies used in Caesar salad dressing.

Here's this week's food safety infosheet on EVOO and scombrotoxin.

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It has been almost three months now that my diet has been more or less dairy free. Shortly after Sorenne turned two months old, she became plagued with eczema. Her pediatrician never recommended I change my diet, as he was satisfied that she continued to gain weight, but I couldn’t stand watching her turn red and try to scratch herself with little hands that she could barely control. A friend of mine, and many articles I read, suggested cutting dairy. My first reaction was – that will be the end of nursing. I am a cheese addict, I love butter, and really, dairy is one of my main sources of protein. Soy is fine – but giving up cheese? How cruel can life be?

I eventually decided that cutting dairy for a couple of days would not kill me, and Sorenne did seem to get a little better. But Doug and I were really not sure if it was the dairy or any number of other variables in our daily life that could be affecting her. I had changed detergents and soaps and made sure she wore only 100% cotton material in the meantime.

The first two weeks of avoiding dairy were very difficult. Giving up cheesecake was almost painful, but I eventually found substitutes and cheated a little here and there when necessary. Sorenne had flare ups that I attributed to a dairy allergy, but we really have no way of knowing for sure. Sorenne doesn’t complain – neither does Doug – and I brought this challenge entirely on myself. After I discovered tofutti cream cheese and (yes it’s gross) veggie cheddar, quitting milk no longer seemed like such a big deal. I noticed I’m generally less gassy (pleasant for everyone around me) and Sorenne vomits significantly less.

For the past week Sorenne’s skin has been almost entirely clear. Today, while contemplating the dairy-free brownies I was about to make, I realized that living dairy free is a challenge I enjoy. I still salivate thinking about Roquefort, but I lived without most of my favorite cheese throughout my pregnancy due to the risk of listeria. (At least now I can eat pâté without much worry.) Finding substitutes has been somewhat enjoyable with some pleasant side effects. For those who cannot enjoy dairy due to serious allergies or lactose intolerance, the diet may feel more like a burden. Worse yet, it’s scary to not know if an allergen has contaminated your food when you’ve been careful to protect yourself or your child. I’m fortunate to have a choice and a knowledgeable partner tolerant of my neurotic parenting.
 

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I’ve been writing and talking for a couple of years about the importance of food safety culture from farm-to-fork, and that companies should become more aggressive about marketing their food safety efforts.

Turns out, the two ideas can feed each other, in a synergistic manner (Chapman made the pic).

Those companies that promote food safety culture can market their activities, and then consumers have a way to choose at the check-out aisle, providing feedback to those companies that make food safety a public priority.

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At what point did the language of sustainability get co-opted by organo-local business types?

I ride my bike around town (which is a health hazard in Manhattan), we had a fabulous salad of greens grown in our own garden last night for dinner along with the tuna steak (which wasn’t grown in Kansas), yet when I speak at a local panel or read something, it’s all these folks falling over themselves to be declared green.

Chipotle Mexican Grill will expand its local produce program this summer, purchasing at least 35 percent of at least one bulk produce item in all of its restaurants from local farmers when it is seasonally available. This represents a 10 percent increase over last year's program, the first of its kind for any national restaurant chain.

"Our commitment to cooking and preparing food with more sustainable ingredients has always been about doing the right thing; the right thing for better tasting food, the right thing for the environment, and the right thing for farmers," says Steve Ells, founder, chairman, and co-CEO of Chipotle.

As a lowly consumer, I can only hope that Chipotle holds its local suppliers to some sort of microbiological standards for food safety – maybe they cook the poop out of everything.

I don’t want to hear about how sustainable it is – unless Chipotle or anyone else is going to provide data on water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and microbiological loads on local produce versus the produce provided by the big ‘ole big guys. Do farmers get pissed that anyone thinks they can grow food to feed a bunch of people? Or do they just smirk, bemused?

Once again, Chipotle is the douchebag of fast food.

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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) maintains a list of Food Action Defect Levels in the Code of Federal Regulations "to establish maximum levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods for human use that present no health hazard."

A local news station in Michigan got hold of this list and started asking people on the street how they felt about the number of bug parts allowed in their coffee and the amount of rodent "excreta" tolerated in their chocolate.

My local news station in Wichita, Kansas, broadcast their story Tuesday while I shook my head and chuckled. There were a lot of interesting faces as people looked from their cup to the list and back again.

In the end, I got the impression that the public is okay with a few bug parts (and laugh about getting the extra protein), but won't stand for the poop.

We here at barfblog.com continually advocate keeping as much poop out of food as possible, and proudly wear our t-shirts that declare, "don't eat poop" with a message about handwashing on the back.

But I'm not crazy. I realize, like the FDA (not the USDA, as asserted in the story, which primarily regulates only meat and poultry products), that it's virtually impossible to keep the entire (non-meat and -poultry) food supply 100% poop-free. Therefore, I'm glad there are regulations in place to reduce the microbial risks associated with that poop. (The poop that got into the peanuts at the Peanut Corp. of America plant violated those regs.)

I'm just saying... some poop happens. Risks that cannot be eliminated can, and should, be controlled. Responsible, informed producers and consumers do this every day with tools like the FDA Defect Action Level Handbook and tip-sensitive digital meat thermometers.

Do your part: wash your hands and stick it in.

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Julie Schmit of USA Today has written another excellent overview documenting the multiple failures – bad inspections, bad audits, bad people -- that led to the peanut paste crapola that sickened 700 and killed nine.

Below are just a few of the highlights:

•Deibel Labs, which ran more than 1,600 salmonella tests for PCA's Blakely plant from 2004 through 2008, found almost 6% positive. It was so many that Deibel sent PCA's samples to a separate part of its Chicago lab to lessen chances that they'd contaminate other products, Charles Deibel, the firm's president, said in an interview. For roasted products such as peanuts, a positive rate above 1 in 10,000 would be high, Deibel said. Proper roasting kills salmonella with heat. PCA never asked Deibel to look into the issue, Deibel said.

•Nestlé audited the Blakely plant in 2002 and rejected it as a supplier. Nestlé's audit report said the plant needed a "better understanding of the concept of deep cleaning" and failed to adequately separate unroasted raw peanuts from roasted ones. Having them in the same area could allow bacteria on raw nuts to contaminate roasted ones, a risk known as cross-contamination. The plant wasn't even close to Nestlé's standards, auditor Richard Hutson said in an interview. Hutson, who now heads quality assurance for several Nestlé divisions, said he shared his concerns with PCA officials at the time, but "they didn't pursue it" further with Nestlé, he says.

• To win customers, Parnell "extolled" the fact that an auditor, AIB International, had rated the plant as "superior," said King Nut CEO Martin Kanan at a congressional hearing. King Nut sold peanut butter under its name that was made by PCA. That rating also satisfied Kellogg, which began buying PCA's peanut paste for sandwich crackers in 2007.

• AIB also draws criticism from a former food-industry official. Its audit of PCA was "superficial," said Jim Lugg, former food-safety chief for bagged salad maker Fresh Express, who reviewed AIB's audit of PCA at USA TODAY's request. One example of "shallow treatment of a big issue," Lugg says, is that the audit notes that PCA had a written program to evaluate suppliers and had an approved list. But AIB did no further checking of the suppliers. Years ago, Fresh Express stopped using AIB audits because it found them inadequate, he adds.
 

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The New York Times reported this morning on the California leafy greens industry’s hiring of government inspectors in lieu of government-imposed visits by inspectors.

The almond industry and the Florida tomato industry have also instituted their own safety measures that invited oversight by federal agencies when the government did not independently provide it.

“It’s an understandable response when the federal government has left a vacuum,” said Michael R. Taylor, a former officer in two federal food-safety agencies and now a professor at George Washington University. But, he added, “it’s not a substitute” for serious federal regulation.

Is it the government’s responsibility to ensure that food is safe to eat, or is it the responsibility of those producing, processing, and selling it? Both, of course, in addition to those choosing to consume it and feed it to their loved ones.

Then, what’s so great about government-imposed inspections as opposed to inspections the food industry asks for? After devastating outbreaks in each industry awakened them to their invested interest in food safety, these three have been vigilant about minimizing the microbial risks to their commodities. Would the feds do a better job?

According to the Washington Post, a report by Taylor and his colleagues at George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services determined that federal regulation of the inspection system and others is necessary to provide cohesion (and presumably increase efficacy) among safety-assuring efforts. In the report the authors urged Congress to “create a single cohesive food safety network composed of local, state and federal agencies and accountable to the secretary of health and human services.”

Some coordination certainly might move the country toward reducing the number of people who get sick from the food they eat. But each link in the food supply chain must remain proactive in their role in assuring food is safe to consume—regardless of who’s the boss.

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Amy’s a French professor so I get to hang out with a bunch of folks in Modern Languages. And she speaks French to baby Sorenne, who probably understands more than I do. I’ve taught Amy how to use a digital, tip-sensitive thermometer when cooking all kinds of meat, and she’s taught me to be more sensitive to the cultural nuances of communication.

The intersections of food safety, language and culture are ripe for study. And action. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, yesterday launched a Spanish language Food Safety at Home podcast series. That’s good. But what’s going on in Oregon is better.

There is an outbreak of Salmonella associated with white pepper that has so far sickened at least 42, including 33 in California, four in Oregon, four in Nevada and one in Washington state. Some excellent epi work led William Keene, senior epidemiologist for the Oregon state Public Health Division, and colleagues to test ground white pepper from an Asian restaurant on the east side of Portland. Sure enough, it was positive for salmonella.

According to a report in this morning’s Oregonian, the spice was imported as peppercorns from Vietnam and then ground, packaged and distributed by Union International Food to distributors and manufacturers in the West. It was packaged under the Lian How and Uncle Chen brands.

The Food and Drug Administration has printed warnings about the recall in both English and Mandarin while Oregon's Public Health Division has added an additional Vietnamese version.

Dr. David Acheson, the FDA’s associate commissioner for foods, said,

"This issue illustrates an important area for food safety in that we are dealing with a relatively small facility. Getting the appropriate information out to small facilities who may not necessarily have English as their first language" is a challenge.

USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service invites consumers to subscribe to the free podcast service by visiting http://www.fsis.usda.gov/News_&_Events/Feeds/index.asp. Once subscribed to the RSS feed, new broadcasts will be downloaded automatically to the feed reader used by the subscriber.
 

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With Doug and Amy on the Bite Me ’09 tour, it’s just me and the pets here in Manhattan (Kansas). Having never lived with pets before it took me a while to warm up to the cats and dogs, but with the humans gone they’ve quickly become my only friends.

Today The Boston Globe reports that both cats and dogs are safe to live with. Phew.

Many of the germs carried by pets are far more likely to be transmitted through contaminated food or water than from a pet, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the benefits of pet ownership are legion - lower blood pressure, reduced stress, even better social lives.

Dr. Lisa Moses at MSPCA Angell Animal Medical Centre in Boston, continues,

"The reality, fortunately, is that transmission of infectious diseases from pets to people is a relatively rare event.”

Neither cats or dogs are completely risk free, and pet owners should wash hands after cleaning up after pets or handling pet food.
 

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Do more inspectors make food safer?

No.

The latest evidence is from Professor Hugh Pennington, who concluded in a report last week that serious failings at every step in the food chain allowed butcher William Tudor to start the 2005 E. coli O157 outbreak, and that while the responsibility for the outbreak, “falls squarely on the shoulders of Tudor,” there was no shortage of errors.

Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan picked up on that theme yesterday and pledged to do everything possible to prevent a repeat of the E.coli outbreak of 2005 – for the sake of the families affected.

“Poor hygiene practices at the abattoir and the butcher’s premises” caused the outbreak, but he added,

“These failings were not dealt with effectively by the Meat Hygiene Service or local authority environmental health officers. …” Environmental health inspectors need to “sharpen up” and “drill down beyond the box-ticking part of the inspection process to the potential danger of the reality beyond.”

In his report Pennington said an inspector who made four pre-arranged visits to Tudor’s in the run-up to the outbreak, should not have allowed him to continue using one vacuum-packing machine for both raw and cooked meat because of the risk of cross contamination.

Among his 24 recommendations, Pennington said all checks should be unannounced, unless there were exceptional circumstances.

Don’t tell mom the babysitter’s dead.
 

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Charges are pending against two employees of the Wendy's drive-through in Moundsville, West Virginia after a sheriff's deputy said he found pubic hair on his sandwich.

According to the Marshall County Sheriff's Department, the deputy went through the Sunday night before heading to work.

He finished his chili and opened his sandwich. It was then he said he spotted the ball of pubic hair.

Later, two Wendy's employees confessed to the crime and said they purposely targeted an officer.

Deputies are waiting for Bender's blood test results. If he has any diseases, the misdemeanor charge will be escalated to a felony.
 

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During an inquiry last year, Prof Hugh Pennington heard how John Tudor and Son, known on barfblog as the Butcher of Wales, used the same machine to vacuum package both raw and cooked meats, leading to an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak beginning in Sept. 2005, which sickened some150 children in 44 schools in southern Wales and killed five-year-old Mason Jones.

Sharon Mills, Mason's mother and vocal food safety activist, was quoted in the Western Mail today as saying,

“There should be zero tolerance of rogue traders like Tudor.
“Health inspectors should not give people so many chances. Tudor fobbed them off so many times.
“Some meat producers could be dicing with death and they shouldn’t be given a second chance or allowed a few weeks to make things better because it can have a devastating effect. The inspectors should shut them down until they get it right.”

Ms Mills, also mum to Chandler, 11, and Cavan, four, said she hopes Professor Pennington will also recommend a change in the law to force butchers to have entirely separate areas for the processing of raw and cooked meat with separate sets of equipment for each.

“I would also like to see better training for GPs and hospitals, so they become more aware of the bacterium and more aware of the signs of infection so they can hospitalise people as soon as possible,”

“My little boy is lying in a cemetery. He died for nothing, so some good has got to come out of it. We also need to be looking at the health inspectors themselves and asking if they have the right training and if they are the right people to do the job. Are they strong enough to stand up to the people who break the rules?”

Inspection is part of the solution, but is only one factor in safe food production. Lowering the incidents of foodborne illness is not going to happen with increased inspection alone -- what Mills suggests about the quality of inspection, and looking for the right indicators is more important.  Having inspectors, auditors, coaches, etc. who know the production, processing and preparation systems and who can be the bug is the key to risk reduction.

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The American Mushroom Institute has announced,

“On December 18, 2008, Kaolin Mushroom Farms, the growing division of South Mill Mushroom Sales, was the first mushroom farm to pass the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Mushroom Good Agricultural Practices audit.”

Previously, South Mill had implemented HACCP plans at all its farms and processing facilities, which were (and still are) continuously self-monitored and regularly audited and approved by the AIB (American Institute of Baking).

South Mill’s website currently brags,

“We are proud of our record of consistently scoring in the 97 percentile or above in all our facility AIB Audits,” though AIB was the third-party auditor that gave Peanut Corp. of America superior ratings before it sickened 683 people in 46 states.

The USDA-approved Mushroom GAPs—in line with the FDA’s Guide to Minimize Microbial Food Safety Hazards for Fresh Fruits and Vegetables—provide standards for growers to implement and document, which can then be audited by outsiders. Dr. Luke LaBorde of Penn State University started putting together the science for the standards 10 years ago. That may have more teeth than AIB audits.

Auditors, like restaurant inspectors, only get a glimpse of what’s going on--in one area at one point in time. A framework of science-based practices, that are thoroughly documented and supported by a culture of food safety, has the capacity to inspire far more confidence than a third-party audit ever could.

John Pia of South Mill Mushroom Sales knows that food safety sells.

"Mushroom growers who do not embrace this inevitable industry direction will find themselves with no place to sell their product. While the cost of compliance is significant, the cost of non-compliance is devastating," he said.

Only two other commodities—leafy greens and tomatoes—have such commodity-specific GAP audit plans. To that end, the president of American Mushroom Institute, Laura Phelps, was quoted as saying,

"The mushroom industry can be proud of its pro-active approach to food safety by developing this program as a good business practice instead of as a response to pressure by regulators following a food safety incident."

That’s what a culture of food safety is all about. Now they just have to update their website.

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Farmers Weekly Interactive reports that while farmers fight for their livelihoods, the entire UK Animal Health workforce of about 1700 staff will have to undergo workplace training, which includes learning how to play the drums and playing games.

One vet spoke of management’s attempt at Diversity Day (from The Office, right and below) by saying,

"… we wasted an entire day playing games, mucking about and banging drums.I am appalled that taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill for this when we are supposed to be fighting disease.”

A spokeswoman for Animal Health said,

"As well as strategy, aspects of the day focus on effective teamwork and how it can help Animal Health deliver better outcomes in the future.

"This was done in a fun and interesting way which involved staff doing activities together.”
 

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The New York Times continues the fascination with all things Obama this morning as it reports on First Lady Michelle’s focus on fresh produce.

“You know, we want to make sure our guests here and across the nation are eating nutritious items. Collect some fruits and vegetables; bring by some good healthy food. We can provide this kind of healthy food for communities across the country, and we can do it by each of us lending a hand.”

In a speech at the Department of Agriculture last month, Mrs. Obama described herself as “a big believer” in community gardens that provide “fresh fruits and vegetables for so many communities across this nation and world.”

I am too. Brought the seedlings in yesterday as a temporary cold snap hit Kansas, but the greens and asparagus will soon be sprouting from the family garden. I also know fresh produce is also the biggest source of foodborne illness today in the U.S. That’s because it’s fresh, and anything that comes into contact has the potential to contaminate.

So, yeah Michelle, promote the produce, but organic and local do not mean safe. Play up those producers who responsibly manage microbial risks. And if you’re going to put your kids dining habits front and center, you really don’t want them barfing.

Kristen Schaal, otherwise known as Mel from Flight of the Conchords, offered her take on First Lady Michelle last night on the Daily Show.
 

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At barfblog we're all about community-generated content. It's fun when someone emails with a food safety-related story or a picture for us to share.  Today's content comes from a colleague and avid barfblog groupie who was driving through southern Georgia this morning and snapped the picture at right.

The pictured sign is posted at the entrance of a pecan and peanut company's roadside market/shop. All I know about this unidentified business is that it distributes stuff like raw, roasted and nut products all over the U.S. 

Sure, it's a good idea to keep dogs out of the food area of a store, but suggesting to take a walk in the orchard, an equally important food area, is kind of weird.

To me, it seems like the producer should be thinking their orchard is a food area as well. Sure, it's really tough to control birds, deer and feral pigs, but inviting dogs to take a dump in the orchard (something that is controllable) probably isn't a good idea.  In the climate of uncertainty around the effectiveness of pathogen reduction strategies in the nut industry, it's an especially bad idea.

Keep the dog poop out of the orchard.

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eatmedaily.com reports that UCLA French professor Laure Murat will present, “Queering Ratatouille: A Rat Reclaiming French Cuisine” this afternoon. Having just returned from the NeMLA (which Doug lovingly calls NAMBLA) annual meeting in Boston, my first thought was ratatouille is the perfect dish to represent queering. Then I realized this is a talk about a gay rat in a cartoon.

Ratatouille is a relatively safe dish from a food safety perspective. It’s a combination of vegetables like eggplant, zucchini, green bell peppers, tomatoes, garlic, onions and the like, simmered or roasted together until the flavors meld into a gorgeous Mediterranean flavor. Any unsavory microorganisms should be amply cooked out by the time it is ready to serve.
 

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Do you remember how you first heard about the latest round of Salmonella in the peanut butter?  Was it on the evening news, in the paper, or did you hear about it through Facebook or Twitter?  If you’re in the under 30 crowd you might fit into the latter category.  Social networking sites, like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are increasingly being utilized for up-to-the-minute recall information.

During the recent Salmonella outbreak, the United States Department of Health and Human Services - specifically the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - engaged in a heavy social media push to inform citizens about the health risks and product recalls.  As a result, the CDC Social Media Center was created as a central hub for harnessing the power of social networking to spread recall information.

Twitter is one of the sites currently used in the assortment of links.   Twitter allows users to “follow” one another’s “tweets” about what they do during the day.  The website is on the rise among medical professionals and there are accounts for all ranges of industry available.  Why not food safety?

Federal health agencies have been experimenting with new Internet tools, dubbed Web 2.0, that make it easier to deliver information directly to the public. The "Health 2.0" movement got a big boost with the arrival of President Barack Obama, who is pushing federal agencies to use the tools to make the federal government more transparent and participatory.

Current news about FDA recalls can be found @FDArecalls and public health updates from the CDC can be found @CDCemergency. The only snag is you have to sign up in order to receive tweets from the FDA, but hey, its free.  After all, you’re no one if you’re not on Twitter.

 

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An editorial in Tuesday’s N.Y. Times about the now bankrupt Peanut Corporation of America and its Salmonella shitfest is long on outrage but short on imagination.

“While most successful food producers are far more diligent — big name-brand peanut butter is considered safe, for example — American consumers have faced far too many food-supply emergencies in the last few years.”

Is ConAgra a big food company? Wasn’t Peter Pan peanut butter the source of a huge Samonella outbreak in 2007?

“Congress needs to find more money for inspectors, especially at the Food and Drug Administration.”

Maybe, but lots of federal and state inspectors, along with the best and brightest the Ponzi scheme of food safety auditing had to offer all seemed to miss the problems at PCA. If someone wants to break the law and ship Salmonella-contaminated product, it’s going to happen.

“President Obama promised during the campaign to create a government that does a better job of protecting the American consumer. The nation’s vulnerable food supply is a healthy place to start.”

Government has a role. But nowhere did the Times editorial mention the power of consumer choice that would be unleashed if food producers would truthfully market their microbial food safety programs, coupled with behavioral-based food safety systems that foster food safety culture from farm-to-fork. The best producers and processors will go far beyond the lowest common denominator of government and should be rewarded in the marketplace.
 

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In an op-ed published on Marler Blog today titled, The market for peanuts: Why food in the U.S. may never be safe, Denis W. Stearns seemed to list three reasons why there is little economic incentive for producers to make food that is safer than that of any other producer.

Stearns argued that the culture pervading Peanut Corporation of America was a perfect example of those ideas at work.

1. To begin with, there is no such thing as a “free” market for food…

Consumers want safe food, but cannot tell if a food is hazard-free before purchase and therefore cannot discriminately buy only safe brands.

Stearns referred to a New York Times article that described “the array of poor work conditions and safety flaws” hidden behind the plant’s walls that was not perceived in its products until hundreds were sickened.

2. [R]egulations can impose a predictable cost that companies can meet, but need not exceed.

An incident/outbreak linked to one producer can turn consumers off the entire product-category, regardless of how far above and beyond regulations unassociated producers go to ensure safety.

In the same vein, George Akerlof was quoted as saying “there is an incentive for sellers to market poor quality merchandise since the returns for good quality accrue mainly to the entire group…rather than to the individual seller.”

3. Finally, there is the important issue of traceability—or, in the case of the United States, the stunning lack of it.

If it is not likely that an incident/outbreak will be traced back to the producer responsible, the possibility of making a profit from a contaminated food may be greater than the chance they’ll get caught.

Stearns cited e-mails by Peanut Corp. president Stewart Parnell in which he directed that contaminated produce be shipped: "I go thru this about once a week. I will hold my breath .... again."

Stearns closed with this:

[A]t this point, after outbreak after outbreak after outbreak, is it possible that finally, once and for all, the case for the effective regulation of the food industry has been incontestably made?

I can only hope so.

Because until the market for peanuts—and other food—is made to work for the benefit of the public health, the big profits will continue to go to the companies that cheat, cut corners, and do not care.
 

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It’s as bad as it gets.

Early reporting from today’s U.S. Congressional oversight and investigation subcommittee hearing where Peanut Corp. of America President Stewart Parnell was forced to appear and is expected to take the Fifth Amendment and not testify, depicts a company focused on profits rather than food safety.

E-mails between Parnell and Sammy Lightsey, manager of the company’s Blakely plant, were released as part of a congressional hearing that started at 10 a.m. Wednesday.

• In one e-mail, Lightsey wrote Parnell discussing positive salmonella tests on its products, but Parnell gave instructions to nonetheless “turn them loose” after getting a negative test result from another testing company.

• In another e-mail, Parnell expressed his concerns over the losing “$$$$$$” due to delays in shipment and costs of testing.

• Parnell in another company-wide e-mail told employees there was no salmonella in its plants, instead accusing the news media of “looking for a news story where there currently isn’t one.”

On Jan. 19, Parnell sent an e-mail to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, pleading with the agency to let it stay in business.

He wrote that company executives “desperately at least need to turn the raw peanuts on our floor into money.”

Other revelations underpinning the Salmonella outbreak:

• The Georgia Department of Agriculture conducted two inspections of the company’s Blakely, Ga. plant in 2008, but did not test for salmonella on its own on either occasion — despite an internal agency goal to conduct such tests once a year.

• The company’s largest customers, including Kellogg’s, engaged contractors to conduct audits, but they did not conduct their own salmonella tests.

*The FDA did not test for salmonella at the plant, despite the 2007 salmonella outbreak traced to the Con-Agra plant about 70 miles from Peanut Corp. of America’s Blakely plant.

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The news this morning is full of features and editorials seeking to explain the shit storm of Salmonella produced by Peanut Corporation of America.

Chapman and I tried to take it a step further and focus on effective, long-term steps to reduce the incidence of foodborne illness from farm-to-fork. At this point in time, promoting food safety culture coupled with marketing and a series of carrots and sticks is the best we can come up with.

In 1204 in Montpellier, France, a butcher selling a substitute meat in place of the advertized beast was required by statute to reimburse the customer twice the amount paid. In Narbonne, regulations dictated a whipping “with sheep tripe” in front of the food stall for unscrupulous sellers. China routinely executes its biggest food frauds.

During a hearing before the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee looking into a salmonella outbreak linked to a Georgia peanut processing plant, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont said Thursday that food producers responsible for widespread, deadly outbreaks of disease should face jail time, not just fines, to get food makers to take food safety seriously.

Sixteen years after E. coli O157:H7 killed four and sickened hundreds who ate hamburgers at the Jack-in-the-Box chain, the challenge remains: how to get people to take food safety seriously?
Lots of companies do take food safety seriously and the bulk of American meals are microbiologically safe. But recent food safety failures have been so extravagant, so insidious and so continual that consumers must feel betrayed.

The politicos in Washington are focused on legislative fixes, maybe creating a single-food inspection agency, maybe increasing inspections, insisting microbiological test results be submitted to government, maybe mandating jail time for the most audacious executives. Such moves may send a signal of hope and change, but will do little to reduce the carnage contaminated food and water wreak on the American public each year – 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths.

Industry – the folks that process peanuts and all those companies that make some of the 1,550 different peanut butter crackers, ice cream, energy bars and dog treats that have been recalled – is equally void of ideas. The system to ensure safe food relies largely on so-called third-party audits of suppliers, a system that glowingly approved Peanut Corporation of America and its leaky roof, filthy floors and rat-infested storage areas.

Other peanut butter manufacturers like Unilever and ConAgra Foods say they have “stringent food safety and quality control standards.” But neither will say what it is they do better than PCA; neither will say how often the plants test their finished product for foodborne illnesses or other contamination. Maple Leaf Foods in Canada, whose deli meats killed at least 20 Canadians last fall, says it has done 42,000 tests for listeria across 24 packaged meat plants in the past three months, but will not make the results publicly available for scrutiny.

Even Whole Foods, where consumers pay a hefty premium for basic foodstuffs, said the company carefully checks the paperwork for all the products it sells, but can do no better than the minimal standard of government.  “For the thousands of products we sell, that’s the extent we can go to. The rest of it is up to the F.D.A. and to the manufacturer.”

Like a fiscal house of cards, the Ponzi scheme of inspection and verification for food safety is collapsing with merely the mention of consumer scrutiny. Sort of like an eighth grade party with chaperones -- just pop and chips. But when the inspector or auditors leaves, the party turns exciting (read all about it on Facebook).

A cultural shift is required for everyone, from the farm through to the fork, to take food safety seriously. Frank Yiannas, the vice-president of food safety at Wal-Mart has taken an initial stab in his new book, Food Safety Culture: Creating a Behavior-based Food Safety Management System.

Yiannas says that an organization’s food safety systems need to be an integral part of its culture. At Peanut Corporation of America, former employees are now coming forward to tell of filthy conditions in the Blakely, Georgia, processing plant. A company with a strong food safety culture would have encouraged those employees to speak up while they were employed, not because the manager or auditor or inspector was watching, but because it was the right thing to do.

The best food producers, processors, retailers and restaurants should go above and beyond minimal government and auditor standards and sell food safety solutions directly to the public. The best organizations will use their own people to demand ingredients from the best suppliers; use a mixture of encouragement and enforcement to foster a food safety culture; and use technology to be transparent -- whether it's live webcams in the facility or real-time test results on the website -- to help restore the shattered trust with the buying public.

Here’s what consumers can do: at the local market, the stop-n-shop or the supermarket, ask someone, how do I know this food won’t make me barf? While such talk may be socially frowned upon, it’s time to put aside the niceties and bureau-speak and talk directly about safe food.

The more customers ask, the more food providers will be encouraged to market their food safety efforts.

Just like in 13th century France.

Doug Powell is an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University and the publisher of barfblog.com. Ben Chapman is a food safety extension specialist at North Carolina State University.

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I love living in North Carolina. The weather is awesome (it's going to be 70 on Sunday), the BBQ is awesome and, today, we have the best Hooters kitchen crew in the U.S.

Hooters Corporate put out a press release congratulating the Concord, NC franchise on having the 2008 Kitchen Crew of the year.  The press release says that the selection criterion was based on more than their ability to shake chicken wings. The crew was also evaluated on food safety awareness, performance and productivity.

Cool, positive consequences for food safety awareness. Although awareness doesn't always translate into practice, it's a start. It demonstrates to the staff in the organization that food safety is something they should all value (and a prize is a nice incentive).

The prize?  Some cash, a title belt and ....... custom belt buckles.  Awesome. 

The kitchen crew was presented with $10,000 cash, (to divide among the kitchen staff by tenure) as well as custom belt buckles and a HKCY title belt which will hang in the restaurant until next year's winner is announced. The crew will also receive a feature in Hooters Magazine. In total the Concord Hooters kitchen crew received $20,000 in cash and prizes between the annual and quarterly winnings.

"We have an amazing kitchen crew in Concord," said Skip Pray, Regional Manager for Hooters of America, Inc. "It is nice to see them share the limelight with the Hooters Girls and be recognized and rewarded for their hard work."

I've been to Hooters a few times. I've never really liked the food, but I guess that's not the point.  While I explore the state, I'm going to make sure I stop in Concord, NC and snap a pic of the title belt (and a pic of their inspection score).
 

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Green bean casserole is one of my favorite dishes.  Lots of people serve it as a side dish, but it always ends up being the main course for me.  It’s a typical staple at our family Thanksgiving dinners, so much so that I decided to bring my own GB casserole to Doug’s Canadian Thanksgiving.  I’ve never had any food safety problems (that I know of) with my casseroles, but unfortunately a woman in Utah had quite a nasty surprise when she went to make her GB casserole.  A dead rat head in the green beans ruined a Super Bowl green bean casserole in Texas.  Even more disturbingly, the company that produced the green beans is a repeat offender.  A can of Allen’s Italian Green Beans was found to contain a rat head back in June, along with another report in 2007 from Utah.

But don’t worry about the rat head.  It’s “commercially sterile.”  Though high temperatures for cooking (265 degrees) ensure that the product is free from bacteria, the appearance of rat heads in a vegetable product is unsettling for most consumers.  The fact that there have been three reports of rat heads in this particular brand of green beans should cause a big blip to appear in anyone’s food safety radar.

Unless Allen’s Canned Vegetables wants to start listing “dead rat” on it’s ingredient list, a thorough cleaning and inspection of the packing facility is in order.

 

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Deciphering recall information is tough for the regular consumer.

Automated phone calls to shoppers have been appreciated. Pictures of products have also helped to clear things up.

But it seems that retailers need some assistance accessing and utilizing recall information to better aide consumers.

Recalled products were found on grocery and convenience store shelves after:
- Salmonella bacteria were discovered in Veggie Booty snacks,
- botulinum toxin was found in Castleberry’s chili,
- Topps meat was recalled due to E. coli contamination,
- Listeria monocytogenes was detected in Maple Leaf deli meats, and
- dairy products were found to contain melamine.

Growing up, my brother Skyler had an awesome Batman alarm clock. When it was time to get up, the Bat-Signal would shine on the ceiling and a voice would say, “Gotham City is in trouble; call for Batman!” It was a great call to action.

I think the citizens need another hero: The Recaller.

Along with a handful of producers, some grocery retailers have specialized personnel on staff to manage food safety issues.

Barry Parsons fills that role for the three Stauffers supermarkets in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

When he gets news of a recall, Parsons says,

"Twenty minutes to a half an hour and it's off the shelf."

POW. BAM. WHAP. The threat is negated.

My bother Jesse (currently a third grader) found a hero in Spiderman.

All the aforementioned recalls have shown that the production and distribution of food today has the power to reach and—positively or adversely—affect many, many people. And you know what Uncle Ben says about great power….

"There's a lot of responsibility being in the food business," Parsons said. "I really care about this.

"Because it could be a child. I've had children myself. Imagine if your child got sick. How would you feel as a parent? The elderly — they're susceptible. My parents are in their 80s. That really hits me."

That’s what I see as a culture of food safety.

The superhero I favored was a good guy from Kansas: Superman.

(At right: Dean Cain's costume from 'Lois and Clark' was on display alongside old mining equipment and [representative] boxes of stored film reels at the  Kansas Underground Salt Museum when Bret took me last year.)

The Pennsylvania Recaller says of his position,

"You've really got to be dedicated to it, and you've really got to have a sense of caring.

"You've got to say, 'No matter what's going to happen, I'm going to make sure my customers are safe, my employers are safe.'

"This is not something I do as a job. It's just what I do. It's who I am."
 

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Multiple outlets are reporting tonight that every peanut, every ounce of peanut oil and all peanut butter and paste products produced by Peanut Corporation of America in its Blakely, Georgia plant since January 2007 has been recalled.

From the FDA website:

PCA sells its products to institutional and industrial users for service in large institutions or for sale and further processing by other companies. PCA does not sell peanuts or peanut products directly to consumers in stores.

The expanded recall includes all peanuts (dry and oil roasted), granulated peanuts, peanut meal, peanut butter and peanut paste. All of the recalled peanuts and peanut products were made only at the company’s Blakely, Georgia facility; the lot numbers and a description of the products being recalled are listed at the end of this release. The Blakely, Georgia facility has stopped producing all peanut products.

Peanut Corporation of American released a statement tonight that includes the following:

“The goal of Peanut Corporation of America over the past 33 years has always been to
follow the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s good manufacturing practices in order to provide a safe product for consumers. It is because of our commitment to our customers and consumers that PCA has taken extraordinary measures to identify and recall all products that have been identified as presenting a potential risk."

"PCA uses only two highly reputable labs for product testing and they are widely used by the industry and employ good laboratory practices. PCA categorically denies any allegations that the Company sought favorable results from any lab in order to ship its products."

"We want our customers and consumers to know that we are continuing to work day and night with the FDA and other officials to determine the source of the problem and ensure that it never happens again.”

Being proactive and keeping food that has tested positive for a pathogen off of the plates of consumers is good for public health.  Waiting until illnesses are reported is irresponsible and demonstrates a lack of concern for customers. PCA's words say that they place the utmost importance in food safety, but their reported actions suggest that investigating and fixing a pathogen problem is only important when there are illnesses, not before they occur.

As for PCA's customers, knowing the food safety practices of a supplier, no matter whether it's at a farmers market or a multi-national is really important. If they're in China or around the corner, they need to follow the rules and know how to reduce risks. This goes beyond relying on third-party audit results. Tracking where product goes and knowing what inputs went into it is the cornerstone of a good culture of food safety.

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I always wanted a pet turtle. When I was 10, I was really into comics (nerd alert). There was a comic book store in between my school and house, that I used to spend lots of time at, and all of my allowance. Right around that time, an underground comic book from creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird made its debut: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. What a ridiculous concept, but the coolest thing to this 10-year-old comic nerd. This was before the really cheesy cartoon, and even cheesier movies. When the Ninja Turtles were cool.

I made nunchaku and a bo staff out of broomsticks and chains from the hardware store.  I was a 10-year-old blonde-haired Canadian Napoleon Dynamite.

All of this background to set this up: I also begged my parents for a pet turtle. I was going to keep him in my room, and call him Leonardo. My parents refused and got me a cat instead.

I know it had little to do with pathogen concerns, and lots to do with the potential smell.  However, I'm grateful they shielded me from Salmonellosis.

This week's food safety infosheet is all about reptile-related food safety concerns.

Download the infosheet here.

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Five bridges, six schools, 78 roads, and 2,225 rai (880 acres) of farmland are under water in Thailand’s deep South.

Victims of the flooding have been given relief kits that included cans of fish that TOC News described as “rotten.”

Several residents dumped the cans in front of their City Hall in protest.

Thailand’s The Nation reported hundreds of flood victims became sick from apparent food poisoning linked to the donated fish.

The Nation explains that Thailand’s FDA “is studying the legal process on whether to charge the company for violating the law by illegally producing canned fish and other canned food items after its factory was closed by the local public health office due to a substandard production process and producing poor quality products.”

America’s Good Samaritan law protects people that donate food to those in the event it accidentally makes someone sick.

Of course, the law stipulates that the donor cannot consciously and voluntarily offer any food that is “likely to be harmful to the health and well-being of another person.”

The manufacturer of the assumedly improperly canned fish “could face a fine of up to Bt30,000 and see bosses jailed for up to three years due to the substandard factory. It could also face a fine of Bt50,000 to Bt100,000, plus jail terms of six months to 10 years for the firm's bosses for fraudulent food production or fake labeling.”

Nice try, guys. Flood victims deserve safe food, too.
 

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I expect there are some Pittsburgh Steelers fans up preparing for a day of tailgating, even though the kick-off in the American Football Conference Championship game is not for another 12 hours.

Amy will be cheering for the underdog Baltimore Ravens, because back-up wide receiver and special teams specialist Yamon Figurs played ball at Kansas State.

Amy never really followed football, except for the band. I started taking her to Kansas State games, more for the spectacle than the sport, and Amy became a fan.

Those purchasing food at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh may want to be wary. Like tailgaters, perhaps people need to take their own digital, tip-sensitive thermometer.

ThePittsburghChannel.Com reports that three-quarters of all food vendors at the stadium have been cited for critical violations in the past two years.

“Inspectors cited the Steel City Grill for serving chicken, chipped beef and hot dogs as much as 40 degrees below the required temperature. …

“The Steel City Grill was cited for serving meat at lukewarm temperatures in 2007 and again in 2008.

The 2008 inspection also said the "cook does not know the proper cooking temperature for chicken."

As far as K-State football alumni in the three years I’ve been in Kansas, I prefer Zac Diles, who now plays for the Houston Texans. Unassuming, hard-hitting linebacker at Kansas State, just like I was in my own mind back in high school. We even wore the same number – #52.
 

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While working at the hometown grocery store in high school, I spent one summer cleaning the shelves. As I removed and dusted each item and shelf, I would put the goods I found had expired in a grocery cart up front for half off.

That cart cleared out about as fast as I could fill it.

Even at that time (pre-Food Science degree and Barfblogger status), the huge demand for those products baffled me. Weren’t the dates there for a reason: to protect consumers from bad product?

The FDA says,

“Selling food past the expiration date [on most products] is not a violation of FDA's regulations or law.”

and

“When storage conditions have been optimal, many foods are acceptable in terms of taste and other quality characteristics for periods of time beyond the expiration date printed on the label, and also are safe to eat.”

Shoppers at the local grocery told me they were never afraid of getting sick. They said some things had less flavor or color, but the savings was always worth the sacrifice.

A USDA FSIS fact sheet explains,

“Except for infant formula and some baby food, product dating is not generally required by Federal regulations.”

and

“…even if the date expires during home storage, a product should be safe, wholesome and of good quality — if handled properly and kept at 40° F or below.”

So, wait... what is the purpose of providing expiration dates? Perhaps they only serve to make good food affordable in tough economic times.

The UK Telegraph reported recently that online retailer Approved Food is doing big business with the expired cart idea.

As the self-proclaimed “BIGGEST online sellers of clearance, short-dated and out-of-date food & drink” in the UK, Approved Food can’t even keep up with their demand.

A notice on Approved Food’s website today said,

“We currently have a 7-day backlog of orders that are to be processed… We strongly recommend that you place your order next week when we will have more items [for sale]."

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I got my start on barfblog more than a year ago as a senior in Food Science at K-State when I went to a club picnic with my boyfriend and gasped at an offensive tub of tater salad.

Two days later I gasped again…  this time at an Associated Press story in which a Chinese buffet worker was spied stomping garlic with his boots behind the restaurant. Aghast, I asked,

“Could a fellow eater like myself be so distracted from the bacterial ramifications of using one’s shoes as a culinary instrument?”

Pretty soon I was a regular. Then I was graduated, married, and working with Doug full-time… and far too busy to formulate a blog (or some such nonsense).

So, today you’re privy to my second debut on barfblog.

This jaw-dropping tale is set at another get-together with my husband (same great guy, just a new title). And, interestingly, another use of inappropriate instruments. This one was a little closer to home:

As our hostess busied herself preparing desserts and planning her meal, she realized the spiral ham she purchased was too large for her Crock Pot. It would have to be cut to fit (finished product shown at left).
 

Lacking your standard bone saw, she enlisted the help of her husband… and his reciprocating saw.

She carefully washed the blade in hot, soapy water and assured her husband’s hands were clean. (He had been in the garage, after all.) Then he set to work.

She saw my eyes widen in disbelief and started to apologize, explaining she had no other choice. I quickly smiled and said,

“Oh, I understand. But don’t think for a second I won’t blog about this!”

The moral of the story is: Invest in some appropriate instruments for use with food, if you want to ensure your cooking won’t cause dinner guests to barf.

But don’t eat poop, folks. Wash your hands. And your reciprocating saw, if necessary.


 

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Chuck Dodd, a veterinarian and PhD student at Kansas State University, writes:

I grew up in rural Missouri eating meat and potatoes, mostly meat, and quite a bit of it.

But my carnivorous mantra doesn’t match the advice of Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food—An Eaters Manifesto (right). He says:

“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

Most of the world already follows Michael Pollan’s advice—out of necessity.

Approximately 4.7 billion people, or over two-thirds of the world’s population, live in lower income countries where safe food and water is limited. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) now reports that rising food prices have contributed to a global increase in malnourishment and hunger. For people living in areas of poverty or conflict, it isn’t about food choices, it’s about simply eating. My wife, Lisa (with neighbor, left), and I lived among the poor in East Africa for six years. We’ve seen hunger, malnourishment, and the effects of diarrheal disease in children--not from the safe distance of a TV screen, but among our friends.  We strived to help transform lives in difficult places.       

Many of us who live in affluent societies enjoy abundant food choices. In the U.S., we have the luxury of being able to pick our diet based upon personal preference, individual nutrients, food production systems, origin, brand, and price. For those of us who have these abundant food choices, Pollan provides additional advice:

●don’t eat anything that your great grand-mother wouldn’t recognize as food;

●avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup;

●avoid food products that make health claims;

●shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle. (processed food products dominate the center aisles); and,

●get out of the supermarket whenever possible.

Pollan’s recommendations are clever. But some of his other recommendations, like “pay more, eat less,” would offend our African friends, like Olendorrop (right).  Olendorrop faces daily challenges in feeding his family.  In the semi-arid savannah of the Rift Valley in northern Tanzania, he struggles to raise sheep and goats, grow corn, and survive.  He has learned how to use dewormers to keep his livestock healthy.  When he uses an antibiotic to treat a sick animal, he doesn’t care about organic food.  All of his animals are grass-fed because corn is people food.  He can’t go to the supermarket because there isn’t one.  He isn’t worried about health claims and ingredients because his food doesn’t have labels.  If Olendorrop paid more and ate less, his family wouldn’t survive.

My advice: if you can afford to choose what you eat, be thankful. Being able to consider what you eat is a luxury in itself. 

Our eater’s manifesto should be to help others simply eat.  Have we, the affluent with abundant food choices, finally arrived, or have we lost touch with global reality?  Do we really need to defend our food from food science and food production systems, as Pollan writes, or do we need to defend the 923 million undernourished people in the world  who don’t have food and help transform their lives?

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Arnold A. Villatico, the owner of Periwinkles & Giorgios Italian Pub and Restaurant in Oxford, Massachusetts, faces criminal charges of larceny over $250, conspiracy, and unlicensed possession of shellfish after dozens of condemned lobsters from an overturned truck allegedly appeared on customers' dinner plates.

The Boston Globe reports that on July 27, a tractor trailer carrying 11,000 pounds of fresh lobster from Canada crashed on I-395 in Webster. The wreck tore the refrigerated container carrying the lobsters and spewed 150 gallons of diesel fuel across the load and roadway, which was closed for 12 hours.

A Webster health inspector declared the toppled load unsalvageable. And although local health inspectors are required by the state to witness the destruction of condemned food, that never happened.

Town manager Joseph M. Zeneski said Villatico began selling lobsters from a refrigerated truck behind his restaurant, and the restaurant reportedly offered $19.99 lobster specials. Police found crates of lobster inside the restaurant and plucked lobsters from boiling pots as evidence, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported.

"He had a sign out, two for one," Zeneski said in an interview.

There were no reports of illness associated with the lobsters, and Villatico's restaurant remains open.

Approximately 2,070 surviving lobsters were loaded and transported to Boston. Then officers hauled them onto a boat and released them just outside Boston Harbor, a half mile east of the North Channel buoy. Officials said they unbanded the lobster claws first.

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I'm a total food safety nerd. I even use big food safety events to remember when things in my life happen.  Had I not emailed Doug in the winter of 2000 looking for an on-campus summer job at Guelph, I'm sure I wouldn't be doing that.

The story would be a lot cooler if I had sought out Powell as a potential employer because I was interested in the stuff he did, but I didn't. I had no idea what he did -- and being a bit of an idiot, I didn't bother to look it up. I emailed Doug on the advice of a friend, and former Powell Lab-ite, Lindsay Core. Lindsay knew I was desperately looking for a job, and didn't tell me much else about the dude or what he filled his days with. Lindsay just said "I think you two will get along".  I didn't really know what that meant, but really had no other prospects.  So I emailed him. And he hired me to pull news.

Pulling news meant that I surfed through the tubes of the interweb for anything food risk-y (food safety, GE crops, animal disease, etc) and the stories I found (along with the other news pullers) become the content for FSnet and the other listserv postings Doug puts together every day.  Doug's philosophy fit in with what I was looking for -- he never really cared where I was as long as I could be found with an email and that I would get something to him when he needed it.

About three weeks in, I fell in love with the content and became hooked on food safety communication. That's when an E.coli O157 outbreak linked to Walkerton Ontario's town water system hit. I was already interested in disease (maybe it was because of Outbreak or the Hot Zone?), but the coverage and discussion within the Powell lab around Walkerton (how the outbreak was handled and communicated to the folks drinking the water) drew me in. I knew it was time to move from molecular biology and genetics to food safety. So finding what I really liked is linked in my mind to the 2000 Walkerton outbreak.

That's where it all started.

I equate a May 2003 trip to Dani's graduation from Dalhousie in Halifax with the news of the first Canadian BSE case. On the way home, I saw Doug on the in-flight CBC newscast talking about how CFIA has handled things (and thought, even when I'm away from Guelph for three days Powell and food safety follow me).

In 2006 I was about to leave for a trip to Kansas to visit Doug, and begin the initial evaluation of the food safety infosheets, when the E.coli O157:H7/spinach outbreak broke. When I arrived in Manhattan it was all E.coli O157 and spinach for us. The picture that Christian created with the skull and leafy greens (right) became a signature picture amongst the food safety infosheet pilot participants. Those pilots, and conversations with Doug and Amy in their living room, evolved into video observation of food safety practices -- one of the things I've spent the past couple of years on.

I'll always remember 2008 for a bunch of personal things (having a kid, getting hitched, getting a position at NC State and moving to North Carolina) -- and will probably equate it to Maple Leaf Foods, Listeria monocytogenes and Michael McCain (who was just named Canadian Business Newsmaker of the Year -- kind of like OJ being named US Sports Newsmaker of the Year?).

In my time spent in the various incarnations of FSN/iFSN/barfblog/Powell's lab, I've seen Doug's hair catch on fire; been accosted in a hot-tub (not by him) while in Phoenix with him; got lost on a trip with him in snowy, -20C Montreal without my coat; threw up in his backyard; talked about a ridiculous amount of pop culture with him; started a company with him and Katija; translated Kiwi accents for him; and, maybe most importantly, went to see Neil Young with him.

We've golfed, played squash and hockey together. Each of which he beat me at, and often reminds me of it. He also likes to point out, and I never argue with him, that I owe him. I do; although it's a bit like owing something to Tony Soprano.

There's lots of stuff I've left out of the post because it's hard to write about 8 years in 750 or so words, but through all the fun stuff and late-night emails, Doug has shown me how to create a lifestyle around food safety where working and vacations blend together.

Doug's got lots of friends, former friends and never-friends. The ratio is probably about 1:1:1. Some food safety folks have told me that they wish he was nicer. I'm glad he's not. His skepticism and cynicism (and sometimes lack of tact) makes him great at what he does, and have made him the perfect mentor for me.

So enough of this post being about Doug, it's really about me. On Monday I start a faculty position in the Department of 4-H Youth Development and Family & Consumer Sciences at NC State University as food safety extension specialist.  I'm excited as I get to support extension agents throughout North Carolina; develop food safety programs to be delivered from farm-to-fork; and, conduct applied research on food safety. It doesn't sound like a job to me. $550 for season tickets to the Hurricanes, and about three hours to Myrtle Beach are added bonuses.

Dani, Jack and I left Canada a week ago for the USA. Our furniture will arrive sometime next week, so for now we're minimalists. We're currently camping indoors, with only an air mattress, lawn chairs and a 42" television (I guess the TV isn't really camping equipment, but whatever).

On Tuesday night we picked a whole chicken up at Target and decided we'd roast it, but forgot that in our equipment-less situation we didn't have our trusty PDT 300 to take the temp. 

The juices were running clear.  The chicken was piping hot (even a bit crispy) but after I had my first couple of bites I noticed that the meat close to the center looked pretty raw.

We went and got an interim thermometer at Target yesterday.


The Monday start date hinges on me not coming down with Campylobacter or Salmonella.

Doug sent me an email a couple of nights ago (while we were chatting about the fantastic Canada/US World Junior Hockey Tournament game) that said "you your own dude at NC State" (he's one arm typing with Sorenne lately).  Yep. That's true, but I wouldn't be my own dude here if it wasn't for him, and I'm excited to work on more great stuff together.

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Researchers at Kansas State published the results of a study of the barriers to food safety practices of food handlers.  Conducting focus groups with 159 food handlers, split into 2 groups, the researchers report that food handlers not only have a lack of food safety knowledge but also often a lack of understanding why employees should comply with food safety guidelines.

Yep. Totally.  So what do we do about it?

The recommendations the researchers provide are:
-Provide regular food safety training to their foodservice employees;
(sure, except training for knowledge change on it’s own doesn’t do much, as they state in their press release)
-Educate employees about the consequences of improper food handling to improve attitudes toward food safety; (we prefer to use “compel” instead of educate, education is too limiting).
-Place signs about consequences of improper food handling in food production areas; (kind of like our food safety infosheets?)
And three food safety culture ideas -- (at barfblog we’ve been talking about food safety culture for a while, as have Frank Yiannas and Chris Griffith):
-Encourage food safety compliance with verbal reminders and praise;
-Be good role models;
-Incorporate food safety practices into employees' daily routines to eliminate the perceptions that they do not have time to perform them.

Hey this is great -- but what’s missing is the how. Just telling managers to make more time for food handlers isn’t very realistic. Food safety communications types, us included, need to get out and start testing food safety culture and measure behavior. And share the results so everyone can build on it.

I presented some similar findings of food handler barriers at IAFP 2007 and some qualitative data on food safety practices at food service (highlighting time pressures especially) at IAFP 2008. I don’t think the solution to time pressures is telling the industry to slow down, or more "education". I think we need to engineer processes and equipment (like self sanitizing knives), look to new tools (like using sanitizer during busy times, instead of handwashing) -- and test them. If they work, and they don’t slow the kitchen down, it’s an easy sell.

Our research in food safety culture needs to move to show me, don't tell me.

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Being a food safety nerd, I’ve had a lot of fun developing food safety infosheets over the past 5 years. The idea behind the infosheets is to take stories, add some humour/shock/kitch and generate dialogue around food safety.

The turkey food safety infosheet is generating a lot of interest. I’m no Sarah Palin, but most responses have been from over-eager gotcha folks who are pointing out what appears to them to be serious food safety errors (especially around thawing, stuffing and cooling leftovers). Some have been nice; others, not so much.

Our focus in building the food safety infosheets is to provide practices based on the best available science. And sometimes what the FDA Food Code, USDA FSIS consumer education and published peer-reviewed articles say around food safety practices differ.

Go figure.

We base the food safety infosheets  on the best available science, not jurisdictional regulation. It’s our way of being consistent because recommendations changes so much from location to location (Canada and the U.S. recommend two different temperatures for endpoint temp for poultry: 165F in the U.S., and 180F in Canada -- both countries apparently looking at the same data).

People seem to get especially antsy when we disagree with the regulators. Everything we put in "what you can do" section of the food safety infosheets has to have references to back it up (which sometimes the regulatory recommendations do not).

Here are the references for the 3 recommendations folks have mentioned the most (thawing, cooking stuffing to 150F and cooling leftovers)

Thawing on the counter:

Lacroix BJ, Li KW, Powell DA. 2003. Consumer food handling recommendations: is thawing of turkey a food safety issue? Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research, 64(2): 59-61. (this whole paper can be found at the bottom of this post)

Lee M. 1993. Methods and risks of defrosting turkeys. Environmental Health Review (Winter):96-100.

OP Snyder, 1999. Thawing at ambient temperature on the counter. Hospitality Institute of Technology and Management, St. Paul, MN USA.

Stuffing:

The 150F recommendation is based on a 6-7 log reduction of salmonella in stuffing at 140F for 12.7 min (pathogen destruction is time/temperature, and it will take that long to take the stuffing from 140-150. Pete Snyder's Turkey HACCP document explains it well (second paragraph on page 2).

From the doc:

As expected, no salmonellae or staphylococci was recovered.  They were killed above 130°F as the turkey was cooking.  Actually, if the stuffing had been sampled at 140 to 150°F, they would have found that these organisms would be dead, considering that 140°F for 12.7 minutes gives a  7D reduction of Salmonella in beef.

Cooling:

Turkey should be refrigerated within 2 -- and continuously cooled reaching 41F within 15 hours.  Pete Snyder also has a referenced cooling paper that explains this well.

from the doc:

In 1992, this author received an agreement from Ray Beaulieu and Jeffery Rhodehamel at the FDA that there was indeed no scientific basis for the FDA retail food cooling regimes, and that it was appropriate to do a study. With the help of Dr. Vijay K. Juneja, USDA ARS ERRC, a study was conducted using hamburger as the food item and C. perfringens as the target organism (Juneja, 1994). Clostridium perfringens was selected, because, of the three spores, C.perfringens has the shortest lag and fastest generation time.

Hamburger was selected as the media, because C. perfringens is found in hamburger, and hamburger has often been involved in C. perfringens outbreaks. Various cooling times were evaluated in order to determine the safe cooling time. One cooling time chosen arbitrarily was 15 hours to go from 130 to 45ºF, with a 38ºF temperature of coolant, in this case, air in the refrigerator. The 15-hour cooling time showed about 3 multiplications of C. perfringens. The USDA has accepted this cooling time as safe (Federal Register, January 6, 1999), because it now accepts cooling when there are 3 or less multiplications of C.perfringens.

As I replied to one interested subscriber, here are our references, show us yours.
 

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Being Canadian, I’d never really heard of White Castle, the burger joint, until I saw the 2004 film, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Much more than a stoner comedy, the film was an incisive depiction of race in America. Chapman came over to my house in Guelph in 2005 one afternoon to move some furniture and we had steaks and watched the movie.

A Canadian visiting, “beautiful Northern Kentucky, famously (mis)marketed as the South Side of Cincinnati” writes in a recent blog about dining at  Covington’s White Castle:

“I’ll tell you what: never have my sense of both food AND physical safety been so violated before 11pm. I walk in, and for a few minutes, could only stare. Back in the kitchen (fully open), I see a woman lay out maybe a hundred of White Castle’s trademarked bite-size burgers, or ‘Slyders’, on the grill, and, while still completely red, put buns over top the raw meat to warm. Once the meat turns an unnatural shade of grey, she throws them together with some cheese and onion to form a ‘burger’. I’m tempted to walk away and head to the (in my opinion) much safer McDonald’s. …
 
“I sit, take a few pictures, and prepare to savour. Oh wait, while I’m taking pictures (and getting ‘who the hell is this retard tourist and why is out after dark in such a dodgy area’) stares, I’m distracted by a small child whose mother is letting her eat fries (not hers) off the floor. …

“Well, thinking back (it has been two weeks–but don’t worry, I did jot down some notes), I can still taste the fear. The fear that I was likely going to end up spending a good portion of the night over the toilet. No part of the burgers felt or tasted safe. The cooking process, over a bed of onions, under a bed of buns, is just very, very circumspect. And the whole place was pretty dirty. But I ate them, grey and mushy as they were."
 

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Think a few small bugs won’t hurt you?  Think again. Cockroaches are one of the most commonly noted pest insects.  They can cause chaos in the food safety standards of a restaurant because they transport harmful microbes on their body surfaces and through their droppings.  Cockroaches are also found to be a common allergen for humans.

Last week, after two previous warnings about cockroaches in the kitchen, food safety inspectors returned to a Sydney, Australia Pizza Hut only to discover a cockroach in the food preparation area of the kitchen.

The store was issued with a $650 fine for not taking steps to eradicate the pests, and a second fine for not having warm running water in the kitchen for staff to wash their hands...The Pizza Hut was one of 22 premises the Food Authority fined in its blitz in recent days, in which it issued a total of 27 fines.
They will join more than 175 outlets on the authority's website, launched last year to "name and shame" businesses that do not comply with NSW hygiene laws.

The best way to deal with cockroaches is to prevent them before they become present.   Keep kitchen surfaces clean and store food off the ground.  However, if a restaurant already suffers from cockroaches, the problem should be eliminated and the reason behind the infestation should also be addressed.  There are various chemicals and traps available for cockroaches, some more traditional than others.

For more information about cockroach infestations, visit: http://www.cdc.gov/nasd/docs/d001201-d001300/d001251/d001251.html
You can also view an FSN infosheet about cockroaches at http://bp3.blogger.com/_Pzk3AzZPULs/R1cP6_KHaiI/AAAAAAAAAFA/MwcjU8l0_y0/s1600-h/iFSN-infosheet-12-5-07.jpg

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Young children should not keep hedgehogs as pets — or hamsters, baby chicks, lizards and turtles — because of risks for disease.

That’s according to the nation’s leading pediatricians group in a new report about dangers from exotic animals.

Besides evidence that they can carry dangerous and sometimes potentially deadly germs, exotic pets may be more prone than cats and dogs to bite, scratch or claw — putting children younger than 5 particularly at risk, the report says.

Young children are vulnerable because of developing immune systems plus they often put their hands in their mouths and are awkward at handling animals, the report says.

The report appears in the October edition of the American Academy of Pediatric’s medical journal, Pediatrics.

A spokesman for the International Hedgehog Association said there’s no reason to single out hedgehogs or other exotic pets.

‘‘Our recommendation is that no animal should be a pet for kids 5 and under,’’ said Z.G. Standing Bear. He runs a rescue operation near Pikes Peak, Colo. for abandoned hedgehogs, which became fad pets about 10 years ago.

Abstract

Exposure to animals can provide many benefits during the growth and development of children. However, there are potential risks associated with animal exposures, including exposure to nontraditional pets in the home and animals in public settings. Educational materials, regulations, and guidelines have been developed to minimize these risks. Pediatricians, veterinarians, and other health care professionals can provide advice on selection of appropriate pets as well as prevention of disease transmission from nontraditional pets and when children contact animals in public settings.
 

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One of my favorite books of all time is "Out of Control" by Kevin Kelley.  It's a non-fiction book that deals with understanding complex  systems.  Kelley is a bit of a polymath.  He was a hippie, who edited the hippie bible, the whole earth catalog.  He was there at the beginning of the internet with the creation of the Whole Earth 'Lectric Linkup.  I've starting reading his blog recently, and he  always has something interesting to say... like how to build foam robots.

Anyway, he recently blogged about "Looking For Ugly" where he writes "Preventing errors within extremely complicated technological systems is often elusive. The more complex the system, the more complex the pattern of error".  He's writing generally, but I immediately thought about the food system.

Kelley goes on to write specifically about the airline industry, saying "The safety of aircraft is so essential it is regulated in hopes that regulation can decrease errors. Error prevention enforced by  legal penalties presents a problem, though: severe penalties discourages disclosure of problems early
enough to be remedied.  To counter that human tendency, the US FAA has generally allowed airlines to admit errors they find without punishing them."

Hmmm.  "severe penalties discourages disclosure of problems early enough to be remedied".  Sounds to me like he's talking about a "zero tolerance" vs. regulatory limit for Listeria.

Of course the counter argument (for the airline industry) also maps well to the food industry, as Kelley writes "The general agreement in the industry is that a policy of unpunished infractions encourages quicker repairs and reduces the chances of major failures. Of course not punishing companies for
safety violations rubs some people the wrong way."

Yup.  He's nailed it.  This idea dovetails nicely with Doug's call to "make all data of Listeria testing in plants public so others in the industry can improve and consumer confidence can be enhanced with data not just words."

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PhD student Ben Chapman went and worked in a restaurant as part of his food safety research. He saw lots of things, but his most memorable description of kitchen work was that he had to listen to a lot of Pink Floyd.

There was some Tom Petty, and The Clash, but a lot of Pink Floyd. So it was with a nod and a lighter raised in the air to food service workers everywhere upon hearing the nears that founding Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright passed today.

But Pink Floyd doesn’t get much airplay in the Midwest. For a full accounting of why the Midwest is home to terrible hair metal, check out Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City, which Chapman loaned me a couple of years ago. And today, a barfblog reader e-mailed me to say,

“What I find most amusing about these Listeria posts is the album cover from the (very horrible and untalented) metal band.”
 
A few e-mails later, and she says,

“There is at least one metal band for every disease, especially those involving vomit, blood, decay, puss, gangreen or amptutation.

“I just found ascaris, a death metal band in denver.  i think this should be an ongoing theme - each post should have an accompanying death metal promotion."

But the best was when she linked me to a Strongbad post – Amy’s been a fan for years – about cliché metal bands. The comments section of barfblog.com is developing nicely.
 

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The coverage of this outbreak isn't really going away as more details came out yesterday.

Earlier in the day, Maple Leaf spokesperson Linda Smith was cited as saying that inspectors failed to detect listeria in this case, but they are constantly swabbing for the bacterium. "Did we find it? Absolutely not. We did not find that listeria," she said. "Did we let people down? Yes. But we were doing the right things."

On CBC's National tonight (clip below), Smith was quoted as saying "We would occasionally find a listeria positive swab, at which case we sanitize that complete area and swab again."

So which is it?

In legal news, and the lead story on Canada AM this morning, is that class action lawsuits in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan have been launched according to Tony Merchant, of the Merchant Law Group LLP, who says residents in each of the provinces have contacted his firm about representation.

As I wrote this post, I saw Michael McCain's Maple Leaf apology on TV three times.

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Oh, the news stories that catch the eye of one immersed in public health.  

While we spend most of our time on this blog discussing issues that have to do with what comes after toilet use (handwashing, hopefully),  the toilet facilities themselves occasionally come into the spotlight ….

The Seattle Times recently reported that  Seattle has officially “washed its hands” of their self-cleaning public toilets.  Which leaves visitors to that city without a convenient place to, uh, relieve themselves – as well as leaving them without a convenient place to wash their hands. 

Too bad Seattle did not work toward finding a way to deal with any problems these public toilets may have caused.     Finland found they could reduce/eliminate illicit behavior in their roadside toilets by allowing one to unlock the door by text messaging with a mobile phone.   The toilets have been secured, and a sign outside explains that the user just sends the word "open" (in Finish) to a short code and the door will be unlocked remotely. The company managing the service will keep a short-term record of all users’ phone numbers, simply so that if the toilet is then damaged by criminals, they can be traced by the police.   

And across the globe, even now, more than 600 cities have automatic public toilets -- Singapore alone has 750, London 678, and Athens 500.    And there are traditional facilities across the globe as well. 

So what’s a tourist in Seattle – or elsewhere -- to do? Do you ask a stranger for directions?  Advocate for conveniently located facilities?   Or map out toilet and handsink locations before you ever leave the comfort of home?   How about all three:

•    Visiting England?  The Public Toilets-Gut Trust recently began a campaign,  Can’t Wait, Won’t Wait: Public Toilet provision in the UK to educate stakeholders on need to retain or provide adequate public toilets:  

•    How about those travels down under?  Australia’s National Continence Management Strategy Project readily publishes locations of rest rooms on their searchable public toilet map:   www.toiletmap.gov.au

•    Traveling wherever the world will take you?  The Bathroom Diaries www.thebathroomdiaries.com lists, describes and rates toilet facilities in cities throughout the world. Whether you stay close to home or are planning a trip, say, to China, Turkey or Florida, you can print out a list of public facilities in the cities you plan to visit.  One can also enter search terms such as “soap” “changing table” or “don’t eat poop.”

•    Do you ever find yourself desperately looking for a clean toilet in the city? MizPee purports to find the closest, cleanest toilets in your area and sends the information to your cell phone. One can add and review rest rooms, and check their toilet paper ratings. 

•    Then there’s Diaroggle which helps one locate public toilets from a mobile phone. In addition to location, the website includes user ratings for cleanliness, the rules of gaining entrance, and occasionally even pictures snapped by users to show how good or bad the porcelain sanctuary is.  According to the site, this is  “ for the discerning, on-the-go defecator who is brave enough to use a public bathroom, but still demands a hygienic and private bathroom experience.”

In Seattle or elsewhere, we all can map our comfort breaks along with our travel itineraries.  What a wonderful resource for a discerning on-the-go handwasher.

--

Michéle Samarya-Timm is a Health Educator for the Franklin Township Health Department in New Jersey. 

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I love it when two of my favorite things, football and food safety, intersect.  Last year it was pigeon poop in stadiums.  This year it's about changing culture.   USA Today published a profile of 4 new NFL head coaches and one spoke specifically about changing the losing culture of a team.

Mike Smith of the Atlanta Falcons said:  "When you change the culture, you have to change people's behaviors. And when you change behaviors, you change their habits."

I think this philosophy should be the same in fields, packing sheds, processing facilities, retail stores and kitchens:  Leadership that values food safety should have a goal of changing the culture of an organization, resulting in behavior and habit changes on on the front-lines.  And the organization doesn't have to be complicated or large, it could be an independent restaurant with 4 staff members or a church dinner committee with 20 volunteers.

Places I want to eat at or buy food from should be able to say that handling and producing food safely is what we do.  Just like Smith wants his team to have a shared belief that winning is what they do.

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