Spent yesterday driving to Oklahoma City and back to speak at the Food Industry Trends conference put on by Oklahoma State University. At one point, our contractor, Russell, called to review some plans and I asked him to tell me a story to pass the time. He did.

Rod Walton reports in the Tulsa World this morning that I, Kansas State University professor Douglas Powell, told the meeting that,

"You’ve still got people out there who have no clue. It’s mind-numbing."

The context of that quote is I was talking about the butcher using the same vac-pac for raw and cooked product which led to the death of 5-year-old Mason Jones in Wales.

Armia Tawadrous, a regulatory executive for the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was quoted as telling the group that,

"We have succeeded a great deal. We still have a long way to go. … You cannot run an unclean operation and expect to get away with it."

The story says that Joseph Baca, compliance director for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was cited as providing an overview of the 2006 spinach E. coli O157:H7 outbreak, adding, "We did have a rapid response."

The story also says that Powell is  head of the International Food Safety Network, which combines scientific information and, sometimes, celebrity reports to inform its audience about foodborne illnesses. For instance, his Web site has linked stories about famous people — from Beyonce Knowles to My Chemical Romance — getting food poisoning. Those links drive up the number of hits to Powell’s food safety web sites.

Powell is passionate about reaching the MTV generation and thinks that way is better than government press releases and old-fashioned posters about washing hands, adding, "If you want to get a kid’s attention, you have to put it on Facebook. They’re likely the ones who are going to make your lunch."