$75 million Canadian tax dollars to keep cold-cuts safe
Canadian Minister of Agriculture and wannabe listeria comedian Gerry-isn’t-my-moustache-awesome Ritz announced today the government will spend $75 million Canadian taxpayer dollars to make sure Maple Leaf Foods products don’t make people barf or kill them.
.jpg)
"The Government of Canada's highest priority is the safety of Canadians. We are making significant investments to hire more inspectors; update technologies and protocols; and, improve communication so that Canadians have the information they need to protect their families."
The government will:
• hire 166 new food safety staff with 70 focusing on ready-to-eat-meat facilities;
more inspectors with listeria-vision goggles won’t make a difference
• provide 24/7 availability of health risk assessment teams to improve support to food safety investigations;
the half-dozen people in my lab used to do that
• improve coordination among federal and provincial departments and agencies;
more meetings
• improve communications to vulnerable populations before and during a foodborne illness outbreak;
could do that now, have produced nothing
• improve tracking of potential foodborne illness outbreaks through a national surveillance system;
yawn, been saying that for years
• improve detection methods for Listeria monocytogenes and other hazards in food to reduce testing time and enable more rapid response during food safety investigations, as well as expanding the Government's ability to do additional Listeria testing; and
a few researchers get money for their testing protocols
• initiate a third-party audit to make sure Canada's food inspection system has the right resources dedicated to the right priorities.
Maybe they could hire the American Institute of Baking, from Manhattan (Kansas) the same third-party auditor geniuses who said Peanut Corporation of America was doing a bang-up job, that is until over 4,000 products were recalled.
Third party food safety audits are like mail-order diplomas
Mansour, I couldn’t have said it better myself:
“The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education,” said Mansour Samadpour, a Seattle consultant who has worked with companies nationwide to improve food safety.
The Ponzi scheme that is third-party food safety audits is starting to collapse. Watching Jon Stewart on the Daily Show last night, the questions he asked to a N.Y. Times reporter about the financial mess could have easily been mapped to the food safety mess (see video below).
The N.Y. Times will report in tomorrow’s editions that the American Institute of Baking auditor who gave the Peanut Corporation of America plant in Georgia a superior rating before the peanut-salmonella shitstorm, was an expert in fresh produce and was not aware that peanuts were readily susceptible to salmonella poisoning — which he was not required to test for anyway. Oh, and PCA paid for the audit which Kelloog’s then blindly accepted.
The auditor even wrote in a Jan. 20 e-mail after the salmonella outbreak became public, that, “I never thought that this bacteria would survive in the peanut butter type environment. What the heck is going on??”
That’s why there’s FSnet and barfblog and hundreds of other food safety resources out there; he never heard of Peter Pan and salmonella in 2007?
In 2007, Keystone Foods, the Pennsylvania plant that makes Veggie Booty, received an “excellent” rating from the American Institute of Baking. But the audit did not extend to ingredient suppliers, including a New Jersey company whose imported spices from China were tainted with salmonella.
“The only thing that matters is productivity,” said Robert A. LaBudde, a food safety expert who has consulted with food companies for 30 years, adding that “you only get in trouble if someone in the media traces it back to you, and that’s rare, like a meteor strike.”
Dr. LaBudde said a sausage plant hired him five years ago to determine the species of bacillus plaguing its meat. But the owner then refused to complete the testing. “I called them ‘anthrax sausages,’ and said they could be killing older people in the state, and still they wouldn’t do it,” he said, declining to name the company. ...
Before the salmonella outbreak, Costco had rebuffed repeated proposals by the organization to inspect all its food suppliers. “The American Institute of Baking is bakery experts,” said R. Craig Wilson, the top food safety official at Costco. “But you stick them in a peanut butter plant or in a beef plant, they are stuffed.”
Costco, Kraft Foods and Darden Restaurants are among a group of food manufacturers and other companies that use detailed plans to prevent food safety hazards. They also supplement third-party audits with their own inspections and testing of ingredients and plant surfaces for microbes.
Harmonizing food safety audits - 10 years too late
Does anyone else notice the sanitized crap that spews forth from various industry associations? I know that being in an association means striving for the lowest common denominator, but why, in 2009, 11 years after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration first proposed Good Agricultural Practices for fresh produce, and hundreds of outbreaks later, is the United Fresh Retail-Foodservice Board patting itself on the back for endorsing the importance of efforts to harmonize produce food safety audits to reduce cost and duplication of efforts, while enhancing overall safety?
Maybe I’m missing something but shouldn’t this have been initiated about 10 years ago? I’m all for exposing the Ponzi scheme that is food safety audits and the burden that repeated and replicated audits place on individual growers. I fought for audits that make sense to buyers when I chaired a Canadian Horticulture Council committee on the topic back in 2002ish. They didn’t like the recommendations of my committee because they wanted money from the federal government.
How’s that working out for ya?
At some point, the folks growers elect to represent them will ask, why would I pay hundreds of dollars to attend a conference that should have happened at least 10 years ago? How did we growers get into this mess of multiple audits? Why didn’t you tell the retailers what they needed to know, instead of the retailers imposing some stupid standard on growers?
Thanks for the leadership.
