For the second straight year I’m hanging out in Dubai for food safety week. Between an international conference, workshops and technical meetings, the annual Dubai Municipality-run food safety happenings attract close to 1300 participants from all over the middle east and North Africa. I was invited to speak a bit about food safety culture and a paper I co-wrote with Doug and Casey earlier this year. Sometimes I get bored of saying the same stuff from talk to talk and figured I’d switch it up a bit and revisit some older food safety infosheets stories to illustrate food safety culture issues. You can download my slides here.

I led off the talk with Dirty Finger Al, a story we used in the the Zappa-graced food safety infosheet in 2007. What’s phenomenal about that story is that there was a dude who had a reputation in the Central Florida food service industry as being "grotesque in his hygiene because of filthy hands and fingers and open oozing sores while cooking".  And he went from job to job. He kept getting hired.

A dude known as being gross, not knowing much about food safety and who had Dirty Finger Al as a nickname had no problem getting a job. And he ended up working at the NASA-run Kennedy Space Center. That’s some bad food safety culture.

The newest food safety infosheet, not as heinous as Dirty Finger Al, focuses on an outbreak of foodborne illness associated with a banquet for volunteer firefighters. At least 30 illnesses have been linked to the event so far. You can download the infosheet here.