A new state law in South Dakota has state regulators adding new requirements to help ensure safety at local farmers markets.

After taking effect July 1, local food vendors that work out of their home kitchens and not commercial kitchens will now have to label their products with ingredients, contact information and submit their recipes for testing to help ensure better safety.

State Representative Jacqueline Sly, R-Rapid City, the prime sponsor of the bill that became law, said,

"In this day in age with looking at food safety and allergies, we want to protect producers and consumers. I know it's a little more work, but in the long run it would be worth it if there were people who got sick."

Joan Hegerfeld-Baker, an Extension food safety specialist in Brookings, said,

"There are a lot of people who really haven't learned properly. There are shortcuts people are starting to use that are not safe. You want people to use safe, tested methods."

We often host drum circles out on the large lawn where we beat on large animal hides and get into touch with our inner obscure jazz that NPR helps us find. Or Phish live albums.

Or not.

On December 24, 2009, a woman aged 24 years from New Hampshire was confirmed to have gastrointestinal anthrax on the basis of clinical findings and a Bacillus anthracis blood culture isolate. Her symptoms began on December 5.

One day before symptom onset, she had participated in a drumming event at a community organization's building where animal-hide drums of multiple ages and origins were played. This report describes the case and subsequent investigation, which identified 84 persons potentially exposed to anthrax, including those persons at the drumming event and those who lived or worked at the event site. Review of New Hampshire disease surveillance data and clinical microbiology records for periods before and after the event identified no additional anthrax cases. Initial qualitative environmental testing of the event site yielded three positive samples (two from drum heads and one composite sample of three electrical outlets in the main drumming room). Wider, targeted, semi-quantitative environmental testing of the site and additional drums yielded six positive samples (two from one drum and four from environmental locations in the building).

These results suggested that aerosolization of spores from drumheads had occurred. All isolates obtained from environmental and drum samples matched the patient's isolate by multiple-locus variable-number tandem repeat analysis using eight loci (MLVA-8). Public health agencies and persons with exposure to animal-hide drums should be aware of the potential, although remote, risk for anthrax exposure associated with these drums.

A total of 72 persons attended the December 4 event, and a total of 59 drums were present, including 17 drums that participants brought from home. Volunteers set up drums and prepared a vegetarian meal; participants ate dinner in the main drumming room (Figure) before beginning the drumming circle, which lasted 2 hours.

Academic publishing is like the Tina Fey flick, Mean Girls. Reviewers are catty, bitchy, and snarly, all because the nerds are in power and can hide behind the cloak of anonymity.

For some reason, I usually get called in to review lousy papers, probably because I have no hesitation saying, ‘this work sucks; I could write a better paper with my butt cheeks’ or something like that.

There are so many bad papers out there.

Some geniuses at Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency decided that after 23 people died of listeria in Maple Leaf cold colds in 2008, rather than write a paper about all the mistakes that were made, they would write a paper entitled, Changing Regulation: Canada’s New Thinking on Listeria.

I have a problem with anyone who says they speak on behalf of all Canadian women, or Canadians, or other groups. Industry, don’t pay attention to this – go above and beyond because you’re going to lose money when the outbreak happens, not the bureaucrats.

The Health Canada and CFIA types proudly proclaim they’d never heard of listeria in Sara Lee hot dogs in 1998, or any other outbreak, until it happened in Canada. Now the government types have introduced what they call enhanced testing requirements.

The authors find it necessary to say that,

“Consumers also have an important role to play in the farm-to-fork continuum. That role calls for Canadians to learn and adopt safe food handling, avoidance of certain high-risk foods, and preparation practices. To this effect, Health Canada has and will continue to undertake the development of science-based consumer education material which will help create an understanding of food safety issues within the context of the public’s right to know about the potential dangers in food, and industry’s responsibility for producing a safe food. A combination of all these approaches are currently being adopted and/or developed to improve the control of L. monocytogenes in RTE foods sold in Canada.”

Wow. Guess it was the consumers’ fault that 23 died from eating crappy Maple Leaf deli meat. Or the dieticians at the aged home facilities who though it would be a bright idea to serve unheated cold-cuts to immunocomprimised old people.

This is Health Canada, the agency that still recommends whole poultry be cooked to 180F, while the U.S. recommends 165F. Are the laws of physics somehow different north of the 49th parallel? We’ve asked, and no one at Health Canada will explain, So why should they be believed on anything else?

And instead of writing crappy papers about collaborations devoid of fact, why isn’t Health Canada and the food safety types at CFIA cracking down on the BS emanating from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Kids, which says that cold-cuts are fine for expectant moms despite a treasure-trove of scientific evidence to the contrary.

The paper concludes,

“We feel that we have learned valuable lessons from the Maple Leaf listeriosis outbreak, which occurred in 2008. We have used these lessons to help us develop CFIA Directives for federally registered meat and poultry plants. We are also learning from industry and we will use their “Best Practices” document to further develop our policies on Listeria control. By all parties working together in a non-competitive and trusting manner, we feel that we can make great strides in Listeria control and continue along a path to reducing the burden of foodborne listeriosis in Canada.”

OMG This made it into a scientific paper? I feel lots of things, but I don’t ’write them in journal articles. Here’s some tips. None of which were discussed in the so-called scientific paper:

• put warning labels on cold-cuts and other high-risk foods for expectant moms
• make listeria testing results public
• make food safety training mandatory (and then we’ll work on making it better).

And the paper is below, with the catty comments from reviewers.

I could write a better paper with my butt cheeks.
sites/default/files/Farber et al 2010_listeria.pdf

No, I wouldn’t. Wives are to be cherished, not treated like cows. I have five daughters and they were all breast-fed.

Breast milk is for babies, not food porn.

Daniel Angerer disagrees.

Gael Greene reported back in March how Angerer (sounds like a name Stephen Colbert made up) was serving customers cheese made from his wife’s breast milk.

Although the New York Health Department forbade the sale of Angerer’s breasty cheese, Greene secured and sampled some of the wares.

“Surprise. It’s not the flavor that shocks me—indeed, it is quite bland, slightly sweet, the mild taste overwhelmed by the accompanying apricot preserves and a sprinkle of paprika. It’s the unexpected texture that’s so off-putting. Strangely soft, bouncy, like panna cotta.”
 

When someone says Australian boarding school, all I can think of is the highlarious television show, Summer Heights High.

Some researchers from Canberra report in the current issue of Foodborne Pathogens and Disease about an outbreak of Campylobacter jejuni gastroenteritis at an Australian boarding school.

Thirty-five cases of gastroenteritis were recorded among 58 questionnaire respondents, with 14 of 18 persons submitting fecal samples having confirmed C. jejuni infections. Attendance at one evening meal was statistically associated with illness (ratio of proportions of 3.09; 95% confidence intervals: 1.21, 14.09; p = 0.02). There was no statistically significant association between any single food provided at the implicated evening meal and illness, suggesting that the potential cause of the outbreak was a cross-contamination event.

The study highlights the potential of cross-contamination as a cause of epidemic campylobacteriosis. The application of molecular techniques to aid epidemiological investigation of recognized C. jejuni outbreaks is illustrated.
 

The TV chef who Gordon Ramsey once called a Teletubby, Antony Worrall Thompson, blames bureaucrats for the one-star-out-of-five for hygiene at his Oxfordshire gastro pub.

Worrall Thompson said failing to fill out "bits of paper" led to the low score at The Greyhound, in Henley-on-Thames.

Worrall Thompson admitted food had been found beneath his fridge and oven during the inspection, but that people would need to be on their "hands and knees with a torch" to find it, adding,

"All [the public] want to know is if they're going to be poisoned. The public don't care if the paperwork isn't done. It's treating everyone as if they haven't got a brain. It's got absurd, the amount of paperwork you have to do. There's this inbuilt hatred between Environmental Health Officers and chefs. We should be working together."

Council cabinet member for health, Dorothy Brown, said,

"Mr Worrall Thompson is mistaken that our Scores on the Doors scheme is overly bureaucratic and driven by paperwork, when it is in fact driven by the need to improve food hygiene standards.”

Worrall Thompson has shown up in barfblog.com before. He was a signatory to a open letter calling on the British public to ask where their food comes from (from under the fridge?), he published a recipe in Healthy & Organic Living that included a toxic plant as an ingredient, and has run afoul of public health types for using paving stones as a kitchen counter at a public BBQ.

Chef Jonathan Benno visited a farm recently, a crucial stop in his yearlong quest to open a $20-million restaurant at Lincoln Center in September.

In a standard food porn piece, The New York Times reports this morning that once, farmers begged top chefs to give their produce a whirl. But with carrots, corn and tomatoes being accorded the fanatical attention once reserved for foie gras and truffles, chefs now come knocking.

Mr. Benno, 40, said,

“It’s not enough now to pick up the phone and say to a distributor: ‘What have you got? O.K., give me a case.’ Now you want to see. You want to go there. They get to know us, and they see the possibilities for us. And for them.”

Michael White, the chef and an owner of Marea, along with Alto and Convivio, all in Manhattan, said, “Our customers travel to food and wine festivals and food devotees are more and more aware of the sourcing of products.” At the table, they can even surf the Web on their iPhones to check out the provenance of the steak, the chicken and the chicory.

Benno was further quoted as saying,

“This is not about currying favor, it is about developing a relationship. In this business, it’s about the handshake — looking them in the eye.”

Look your farmer in the eye and ask what water he or she irrigated with as the crops were withering and about to die (that was my farmer, left, 10 years ago, and he engaged in frank food safety discussions). Ask about the microbial tests done on water and soil. Ask about the hand sanitation for workers in the field and in the packing shed. Trust, but verify.

Less food porn, more food safety.
 

Lindsay Lohan has been making headlines lately for the whole drunk driving and defying court thing. I miss the good old “Mean Girls” days. She looked so innocent at the beginning of that movie, when the only place she felt safe eating at was in the toilet stall.

Maybe she was on to something.

"There's more faecal bacteria in your kitchen sink than in your toilet after you flush it. People nuke their bathrooms, but not their kitchens."

The research, from the University of Arizona, also points out that the toilet is also cleaner than cutting boards in the kitchen, computer keyboards in the office and workplaces where there are children.

Ok, so maybe Lindsay did it because it was in the script and it’s not exactly a trend to follow in dining, but the point is sanitation.

Clean kitchen surfaces, use a separate cutting board for meat and wash your and your kids’ hands.
 

Terri Waller, a Master of Public Administration student at Troy University and a certified food safety manager and instructor, writes in this guest blog that,

My grandfather, James Davis, always addressed an issue immediately. All bad habits in our house were addressed and put to rest. Food safety managers should do the same -- immediately correcting a bad habit will have a positive affect on establishments, scores, and the community in which they serve.

Being a food safety professional, I see almost daily, educated food service managers fail to implement proper food safety concepts. This failure is associated with the culture of the establishment. If the culture of an establishment has always been to perform a task incorrectly or not at all, it is embedded into the DNA of that organization.

Food safety professionals must get in the habit of protecting the community from foodborne illness. I agree with Edgar Schein, social psychologist, that managers must embed correct shared values and assumptions in the organization’s culture and reinforce them in new and current members if they are to create and sustain strong cultures in their organizations (Tompkins, 2005, pg. 366).

“Organizations are not simple systems like machines or adaptive organisms; they are human systems manifesting complex patterns of cultural activity (Tompkins, 2005, pg. 361).”

Organizations are seen as extended families or clans held together by shared values and beliefs. These values and beliefs are established over time as organizations struggle with the usual problems of internal integration and external adaptation. Sometimes they are introduced into the culture by organizational founders or dynamic leaders. At other times they enter the culture unconsciously as members learn how to cope successfully with problems. Over time, these values and beliefs become embodied in myths and rituals that allow the shared culture to be internalized and transmitted from one generation to the next. Once these values and beliefs are firmly established in the dominant culture, they guide the daily decisions of organizational members and provide the glue that holds the organization together. (Tompkins, 2005, pg. 361)

“The strength of a culture is best defined in terms of the homogeneity and stability of group membership and the length and intensity of shared experience (Tompkins, 2005, pg. 365).”

As a manager if you see something wrong correct it. Correcting bad habits notifies present employees of what was wrong and how it should be made right. This way everyone moves forward on the right foot. When things are implemented right in an organization it is easy for new members to come on board knowing what to do and the right way to do it.

Resource:
Tompkins, J. (2005). Organization Theory and Public Management. Boston, MA,
Wadsworth.