This is what happens when doing interviews at 6:30 a.m. while feeding Sorenne some mush of peach and pear.
After blogging about how the U.K. Food Standards Agency was embracing food safety culture, I turned the post into an opinion piece and sent it to a newspaper in Wales.
The next morning, while feeding Sorenne, a reporter e-mailed me with some questions, and I replied, “call me.”
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So she did.
The article, by Abby Alford, appeared this morning in Wales under the headline, Tragic E. coli death used to teach US students food hygiene.
The tragic story of E. coli victim Mason Jones is being used by an American professor as a graphic illustration of what unsafe food can do.
Dr Douglas Powell also shows his students at Kansas State University a picture of the five-year-old as he teaches them about food safety.
“We are always trying to come up with new ways of getting the food safety message across. We have to have a compelling story and there’s no more compelling story than Mason Jones,” he said.
I talked about food safety culture, what FSA was proposing, and questioned how they were going to measure effectiveness.
The FSA has announced a culture change is needed in all parts of the food supply chain if the UK is to avoid another E.coli outbreak.
Dr Powell also suggested UK firms could follow the example of a factory in North Dakota, USA, which uses webcams to stream its activities live on the Internet.
Apparently I dreamed that part. There is a turkey processing plant in South Dakota that uses video cameras to constantly monitor operations and the videos can be accessed by auditors or USDA inspectors at any time – but not on the Internet. And not in North Dakota.