My latest for Texas A&M University. Visit them at http://cfs.tamu.edu/2016/01/21/is-blue-bell-or-chipotle-the-food-industrys-volkswagen-or-both/

Volkswagen’s top executive apologized earlier this month for his company’s role in its ongoing emissions cheating. CEO Matthias Mueller spoke at a Detroit restaurant on the eve of the city’s annual auto show, and said, I’m sorry.

Not much else.

I’ve been to that auto show, covering it as a journalist for a computer magazine 25 years ago, and it was deeply weird.

Scantily-clad women, sales-thingies hawking their new toys, a lot of back-slapping and back-stabbing.

As they say in Kansas, always smile when you twist the knife (because a straight stab usually isn’t enough to kill).

Blue Bell Creameries says that new findings of Listeria in one of its ice cream manufacturing plants are media misstatements.

And they’re still sorry.

When your product kills three people and your food safety strategy is shown to be woefully insufficient, that’s a bad soundbite.

Instead, share Listeria test results with the public, through a website or QR codes. How much does Blue Bell have left to lose?

Probably less than Chipotle.

The diarrhea burrito is not healthy eating, but Chipotle is still getting a free pass – not so for Chipotle shareholders, who have seen their investments decline by 47 percent in the past six months.

They’re really sorry too.

For whatever reason – money – Chipotle investors and apologists are willing to look beyond the company’s many failings.

If Chipotle really wanted to be a leader, they would have embraced microbiologically safe food and internal verification long before the 2015 outbreaks.

If Chipotle really wanted to be a leader they’d stop playing to consumer fears with their advertising.

If Chipotle really wanted to be a leader, they would embrace genetically engineered foods that require fewer and far less harmful pesticides.

Chipotle is a follower, sucking up dollars wherever it can.

In its latest PR rah-rah stunt, Chipotle is going to close all of its 1,900 outlets on Feb. 8 for a few hours “for company executives to be transparent about the status of the E. coli outbreak, and what Chipotle is doing to prevent it from happening again.”

“Chipotle emphasizes fresh, locally sourced ingredients. It was the first major chain to reject genetically modified food. Chipotle has embodied the notion of doing well by doing good.”

That’s not doing anyone any good.

It’s marketing BS.

Consumers aren’t so dumb or confused. Chipotle said same-store sales dropped a greater-than-expected 14.6 percent in the last quarter, and analysts have been scrambling to downgrade their ratings.

They’re going to wait until Feb. 8 to close all its restaurants so employees can learn about the gravity of its foodborne illness outbreak.

E-mail works.

Last week, company executives appeared at an investor conference in Florida in a bid to soothe unnerved shareholders, if not customers, and acknowledged 2016 would be a “messy” year for earnings. As reported in Wired, it helped. Shares in the company, once a darling of Wall Street, rebounded more than 12 percent and appear to be holding steady.

People can be dumb.

But food safety is nothing compared to the weight of investor portfolios, so of course, Chipotle had an investor smile and shake before it had a food safety meeting.

Anything to make a buck.

“During that whole time, all of our food safety and food handling practices were within industry standards,” Chris Arnold, a Chipotle spokesman, says. “These incidents have shown us what we need to do better in that area, and that is exactly what we are doing.”

The Pinto defense – that car that had a tendency to blow up when hit from behind — should not inspire investors.

And more testing won’t stop Norovirus.

“This plan should reduce the risk of similar risks to a level as near zero as is possible,” Arnold says.

There is no such thing as zero risk, no matter, how much testing, a topic I covered almost 20 years ago in my co-authored book, Mad Cows and Mother’s Milk.

That Chipotle is just discovering this concept is an embarrassment for all the investors who have lost money.

And a blight on microbial food safety.

Stop apologizing for Chipotle just because it may be hipster.

It isn’t.

Neither is Volkswagon.