An Alberta farmer will serve 37 days in jail for contempt of court after he refused to stop selling filthy, low-grade eggs on Calgary street corners despite repeatedly being ordered to stop.

Elmar Augart, 75, has already paid $14,000 in fines and served two weeks in jail for ignoring a decade’s worth of orders from the courts and health inspectors that he stop selling eggs without a permit.

“What will it take to finally get Mr. Augart to obey health and safety legislation, or court orders?” Rob O’Neill, a prosecutor for Alberta Health Services, asked court. “It’s clear he needs to go back to jail for a longer time to get the message across.”

Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Stephen Hillier did not hesitate to agree to a jail sentence.

“It is clear that prior penalties have not engaged the attention of Mr. Augart,” Hillier said.

Augart’s trouble with illegal eggs began in September 2002 when he was convicted of selling them without a permit. That was followed by a second conviction in March 2003. He paid a total of $14,000 in fines.

Then in August 2003, Augart was caught selling eggs out of cardboard boxes on a street corner in Calgary’s Chinatown. He used no refrigeration and the eggs he sold were reaching 31 C while waiting to be sold. In that incident, health officials seized and destroyed 2,000 eggs.

O’Neill said that the eggs Augart sold were discoloured, misshapen and covered with feathers and bird feces. They were low-grade eggs rejected from other sources and sold as “farm-fresh” by Augart.

In November 2010, he was again caught selling eggs in Calgary’s Chinatown. He was also found to be selling eggs to restaurants, cafes and catering companies.

Augart’s eggs were linked to a salmonella outbreak in Calgary in late 2010. More than 4,000 eggs were seized from four catering companies and traced back to him.

He was caught twice more, in December 2010 and March 2011. His truck was seized and impounded. Augart was asked where the eggs came from and where he planned to deliver them.

In a recent affidavit to court, Augart tried to explain himself.

“I estimate I’ve broken even selling eggs,” he wrote. “I have continued for pleasure because I have sold eggs in and around Calgary since 1957.”

"Right now you can sicken and kill your customers, and [companies] have no consequences other than embarrassment in the marketplace."

That’s what I told My Health News Daily. Jail time may help – it’s that embarrassment thing – but, "The biggest thing that can be done is that anyone producing or selling food needs to adopt a culture of food safety that puts not making your customers sick as your first priority. If your customers are dead or dying, it's not easy to make money.

"It's not up to government to produce safe food. It's up to producers to know how to produce safe food," Powell said.

Fifteen years ago this month, an outbreak of E. coli from unpasteurized apple juice sickened 60 to 70 people, killed a 16-month-old girl from Denver and caused 14 children to develop a serious kidney condition that can require lifelong dialysis treatments.

The federal case brought against juice maker Odwalla resulted in the first criminal conviction for foodborne illness, although no one in the company served time in jail. The company was fined $1.5 million for distributing contaminated juice — the largest fine ever issued in the United States for food poisoning.

James Dickson, a food safety expert and professor at Iowa State University said, "Food isn't sterile. The only way you would ever get away from foodborne disease outbreaks is if you refused to allow the sale of any raw product in the marketplace.”

The Xinhua News Agency reports a total of 248 people were arrested in China last year for involvement in food safety cases.

The country dealt with 130,000 cases involving food safety last year, including 115 criminal cases, according to a statement of the National Food Safety Regulating Work Office.

The cases touched upon such areas as production of edible agricultural produce, food production, food circulation, catering services and food exports and imports.

"No major incident occurred last year, and the overall food safety situation maintained stable," said the statement.

Last year also saw a nationwide crackdown on "gutter oil", usually made from discarded kitchen waste that has been refined, after media reports that it was commonly used by small restaurants.

A total of 191 officials were punished for failing to do their duty in food safety enforcement, with 26 of them fired, it said.

China’s government vowed on Tuesday to make more information available to the public regarding food safety, while sentencing a consumer activist who tried to make more information public about the melamine scandal to 2.5 years in jail.

The whole mess sounds overtly Orwellian.

Deng Haihua, spokesman for the Ministry of Truth Health, the main government agency in charge of overseeing food safety, said the new regulations define exactly what information should be publicized and under which government departments.

Zhang Jian, a food safety researcher with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said,

"Only in that way can consumers get credible and scientific guidance."

Michael Taylor, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Deputy Commissioner for Foods, told reporters in Shanghai today that China's implementation of food safety standards is the country's biggest hindrance in exporting high quality, trusted food products overseas,

"An important development is the new food safety law that was passed here in 2009 with a very high-level food safety committee. It just shows a forthright approach to making food safety an important priority, to creating more transparency in the food safety system."

Incarcerating people who set up web sites to help consumers doesn’t help.