Food hucksters sell nostalgia. See Michael Pollan on The Colbert Report for a fine example (video only works in the U.S.).

Biking home with Sorenne yesterday from school, a 20-something was walking a Brisbane sidewalk with pallets of strawberries and yelled out, “Want to buy some strawberries?”

“No.”

He then sold a pallet to the owner of a shoe store.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that some 2,100 Utahns – people who live in Utah, I guess -- have been sickened with salmonella from homemade queso fresco.

The Salt Lake Valley Health Department has tracked down one source of the outbreak — an unnamed man dubbed "Mr. Cheese" who was making the product with raw milk and selling it to a Salt Lake City restaurant/deli.

The health department has confirmed that 73 people were sickened with the illness that causes diarrhea, fever and abdominal pain. But they estimate that hundreds more were ill and never reported it to the health department.

"They should not be purchasing food products in shopping center parking lots, [from people] distributing it out of their trunks or door to door," said Royal DeLegge, director of environmental health at the health department. "When you go into a retail setting, a deli or a store, you’re looking for labeling on the products."

The cheese probe took three years, involved a criminal investigator and extended to a fast-food franchise where Mr. Cheese’s wife worked.

People began to get sick in 2009 with Salmonella Newport, and the health department warned people not to buy the Mexican-style soft cheese from unapproved sources. Another 22 Newport cases popped up in 2010. The health department couldn’t find a common cause but heard of a woman selling cheese in a parking lot.

By June this year, another 32 people were sick with the strain. They commonly identified four restaurants and a market, where the local and state health department took samples of their queso fresco and samples from preparation areas. It found a positive DNA match from the cheese in the restaurant/deli.

That’s when the police got involved.

The Utah Department of Agriculture and Food had a name of a potential manufacturer of the cheese, who had a criminal past.

A criminal investigator for the county’s District Attorney’s Office put together a photo lineup for the restaurant owner, who identified his queso fresco source and called him "Mr. Cheese."

The health department later learned the man — whom they aren’t naming — made the cheese in his home using raw milk from a Midway dairy that is not authorized to sell raw milk. The man also is not licensed to manufacture cheese.
Food manufacturers are not allowed to produce products in their home because of the risk of contamination from sources such as pets and children.

Mr. Cheese’s wife may have contaminated her workplace with the queso fresco. Four customers and a food handler at four locations of a fast-food chain were sickened this year.

Last week, a west Australian egg wholesaler was fined $50,000 in federal court for misleading the public by labeling cartons of eggs as "free range" when they knew a substantial proportion of the eggs were not free range.

Last month, two Arizona residents plead guilty to 13 felony offenses for their roles in purchasing and then re-selling farm-raised Asian catfish and Lake Victoria perch falsely labeled as grouper, sole or snapper; selling foreign farm-raised shrimp falsely labeled as U.S. wild caught shrimp and selling shrimp that falsely claimed to be larger and more expensive than they actually were; and for buying fish they knew had been illegally imported into the United States. Some of the fish tested positive for malachite green and Enrofloxin, both of which are considered health hazards and banned from U.S. food products.

Last fall, the Washington Post reported expensive sheep's milk cheese in a Manhattan market was really made from cow's milk, a jar of "Sturgeon caviar" was Mississippi paddlefish, and some honey is diluted with sugar beets or corn syrup, but still market as 100 percent pure at a premium price.

Last year, an NBCLA undercover investigation revealed that some farmers at southern California markets are making false claims and flat-out lies about the produce they're selling.

NBCLA's investigation began this summer, when we bought produce at farmers markets across the LA area, and then made surprise visits to farms where we were told the produce was being grown.

We found farms full of weeds, or dry dirt, instead of rows of the vegetables that were being sold at the markets. In fact, farmers markets are closely regulated by state law. Farmers who sell at these markets are supposed to sell produce they've grown themselves, and they can't make false claims about their produce.

We did find plenty of vendors doing just that, like Underwood Farms, which sells produce at 14 markets, all grown on a family farm in Moorpark.

But our investigation also uncovered vendors who are selling stuff they didn't grow, like Frutos Farms, which sells at seven different farmers markets in LA and Orange counties.

Frutos Farm's state permit to sell produce at farmers markets says their farm is in Cypress.

NBCLA asked owner Jesse Frutos, "Everything you sell at farmers markets is grown in your Cypress field?"

Jesse responded, "Correct...everything."

But when NBCLA made a surprise visit to the Cypress field listed on its permit, Frutos couldn't show us most of the produce he was selling, such as celery, garlic, and avocados.

So NBCLA asked, "Do you grow avocados here?"

"Avocados? No, not here on the lot. … That I'll be honest. That stuff came from somewhere else," Frutos said.

Somewhere else? NBCLA's undercover cameras followed Jesse's trucks on farmers market days, and saw him going to the big wholesale produce warehouses in downtown LA.

We saw him loading up his truck, with boxes of produce from big commercial farms as far away as Mexico. He bought many of the types of items we saw him selling at the farmers markets.

After documenting this, NBCLA asked Jesse, "You are selling some things at farmers markets that you didn't grow, that you got at wholesale produce markets?"

Jesse admitted, "Yes."

By the end of our investigation, we found vendors who make false claims selling at more than two dozen farmers markets.

Food fraud has been around a long time.

A recent paper in the British Food Journal reinforces the idea despite scientific sophistication, rules to control food fraud are only as good as the enforcement that backs them up.

In the egg case, Justice Tony North found the conduct involved a high level of dishonesty and was very difficult to detect because once the eggs were in the cartons it was impossible to determine if they were free range or not.

As today's society grapples with how best to validate that food is indeed what it says it is -- and safe -- and as the huskers and buskers emerge with cure-alls, I turn to the words of Madeleine Ferrières a professor of social history at the University of Avignon, France, in Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, first published in French in 2002, but translated into English in 2006:

"All human beings before us questioned the contents of their plates. … And we are often too blinded by this amnesia to view our present food situation clearly. This amnesia is very convenient. It allows us to reinvent the past and construct a complaisant, retrospective mythology."

View more videos at: http://www.nbclosangeles.com.

“No other retailer has the ability to make more of a difference than Wal-Mart.”

That’s what Wal-Mart president and chief executive Michael T. Duke said at a meeting Thursday morning, according to prepared remarks, as he announced a program that would focus on sustainable agriculture among its food suppliers, as the retail giant tries to expand its efforts to improve environmental efficiency.

The program is intended to put more locally grown food in Wal-Mart stores in the United States, invest in training and infrastructure for small and medium-sized farmers particularly in emerging markets and begin to measure the efficiently of large suppliers in growing and getting their produce to market.

The New York Times reports that given Wal-Mart is the world’s largest grocer, with one of the biggest food supply chains, any changes that it makes would have wide reaching implications. Wal-Mart’s decision five years ago to set sustainability goals that, among other things, increased its reliance on renewable energy and reduced packaging waste among its supplies, send broad ripples through product manufacturers. Large companies like Procter & Gamble redesigned packages that are now also carried by other retailers, while Wal-Mart’s measurements of environmental efficiency among its suppliers helped define how they needed to change.

I don’t know anything other than what I’ve read in the media, but it’s a fair guess that food safety culture Frank is going to have a lot to do with making sure any sustainability gains are coupled with enhanced food safety.

Michelle Mauthe Harvey, project manager for the corporate partnerships program at Environmental Defense Fund, said,

“This is huge. Once people are asked those questions, if they haven’t been measuring, they measure more.”

Go big or go home.

The reporters at the Rockford Register Star in Illinois probably meant well, with a feature about the important role of local food inspectors, but they sorta ruin it by beginning the story with:

If you haven’t grown it, cleaned it and cooked your food yourself, you’re eating at your own risk.

It is entirely possible to grow food, and clean it and cook it all by yourself – and completely mess things up and make people barf.

Back to the story, Winnebago County Health Department sanitarians Gail Goldman and Karen Hobbs and four colleagues work to cut the risk of foodborne illness by checking out more than 1,600 establishments such as restaurants, grocery stores, schools, hospitals, nursing homes, gas stations, concession stands and other places offering food and drinks for public consumption.

In 2009, the Health Department’s sanitarians performed 5,109 inspections the most important part of which, Goldman and Hobbs said, was education.

Hobbs said the last thing that made her think she has seen everything on the job was “a towel used to wipe a cutting board and then used to wipe a face. There was quite a bit of education going on that day.”