In an attempt to be topical and current, I’m getting together every couple of weeks with Don Schaffner via Skype to talk about what strikes our food safety fancy.

The tagline is: Don and Ben on the interwebs and talk food safety. Sometimes there are guests (we’ll get Doug on to talk about throwing up before hockey games and stealing toilet paper in a few weeks).

In this episode, which is sort of the pilot for this experiment, we discover that we can indeed talk about food safety for an hour, figure out how to record our ramblings and post the podcast to the magnificent Internet. This episode we talk about why they decided to do a podcast and about restaurant inspection. And the utility of Peter Frampton’s vocoder when interviewing public health and regulatory folks.

Direct link to the podcast.

Show notes (some of the things we talked up) :

• Ben’s work homepage
• Don’s work homepage
• Governmental food safety podcast that shall remain unnamed.
• Barfblog, Where Ben and Doug mostly and Don rarely blogs.
• Don’s super secret National Academy of Sciences panel on publishing FSIS establishment specific data.
• USDA FSIS Freedom of Information Act page
• Indicator organisms background information
• The book Poisoned on the Jack-in-box-Outbreak.
• An article by Cruz et al. on the ability of routine restaurant inspections to predict food-borne outbreaks.
• Another article by Jones et al. on restaurant inspection scores and foodborne disease.
• The awesome International Association for Food Protection – IAFP
• StoryCorps, who recently interviewed folks from IAFP for our 100th anniversary.
• Mandated labels on raw meat that are perhaps not all that useful.
• Frampton Comes Alive, which came out when Don was in High School and Ben wasn’t.
• FDA Listeria risk ranking
• A food safety expert we’d like to interview.
• North Carolina’s restaurant inspection system.
• Wake county restaurant sanitation grades.
• The sort of restaurant inspection results that Don used to read back when there were newspapers.
• A popular chain, let’s call them Billi’s
• The 5by5 network, our inspiration.
• And some of our 5by5 appearances.