Author Archives: Robert Mancini

Robert Mancini

About Robert Mancini

Robert Mancini hosted and provided research for the television series “Kitchen Crimes” for Food Network Canada, H.G. T.V. (U.S.) and Discovery Asia. He is currently a certified Public Health Inspector in Manitoba and the health protection coordinator/specialist in food safety for Manitoba Health. He holds a Master’s Degree in Food Safety through Kansas State University. He enjoys playing with his 3-year old boy, violin, and running.

The Australian Institute of Food Safety identifies five high risk food items for poisoning

Posted on by
Reply

In the UK each year roughly 20,000 people are hospitalised with food poisoning and 500 people die.
Symptoms are unpleasant and include vomiting, diarrhoea and a high temperature, according to the NHS.
There are a number of causes, including chemicals, toxins and bacteria.
While it’s almost always an accident, food poisoning tends to affect people after they’ve eaten particular foods.
According to the Australian Institute of Food Safety, this is because certain foods are more at risk of bacterial growth than others.
Poultry
Raw and undercooked poultry can be contaminated with campylobacter bacteria and salmonella.
According to the Australian Institute of Food Safety, the bacteria can survive up until cooking kills them – so make sure you cook it thoroughly and don’t contaminate surfaces with raw chicken.

Cook poultry to an internal temperature of 74C (165F) to ensure safety, forget the jargon “cook thoroughly,”doesn’t tell me anything.

Eggs
Last week it was revealed that Dutch eggs contaminated with insecticide may have entered the UK.
They can also sometimes be contaminated with salmonella.
You can avoid being affected by cooking eggs thoroughly, and avoiding foods that purposely contain undercooked eggs, like mayonnaises and salad dressings, according to the Australian Institute of Food Safety.

Leafy greens
Because they are often eaten raw with no cooking process, bacteria like E.coli can easily affect you.
However, according to the Australian Institute of Food Safety, washing them can reduce risk of harmful bacteria as well as chemical pesticides.

Well this all depends if the salad is pre-washed and labelled accordingly, if so, washing lettuce at home will only increase the risk of cross-contamination. Reducing the food safety risk with leafy greens begins well before it arrives in your home.

Raw milk
This is where milk is unpasteurised, meaning it has not been heated up to kill harmful bacteria.
It leaves you at a higher risk than regular milk of consuming bacteria like E.coli, salmonella and listeria.

Raw milk has always left an impression on me ever since I was a food tech in Alberta. The health department submitted a sample of raw milk from a community in Alberta where a significant number of kids became ill. I was responsible in analyzing the milk to determine the etiologic agent and I remember vividly looking at this black, overgrown agar plate, completely taken over by Campylobacter jejuni, poor kids.

Cheese
A bacteria commonly found in cheese is staphylococcus aureus.
It’s heat resistant, so the best way of avoiding cheese becoming contaminated is to store it at or under 5 degrees.

 

BBQ food safety

Posted on by
Reply

BBQ food safety tips….in August…a little late in the game for us in Canada, then I realized this story stems from Australia.

Food safety tips for parties and BBQs
Storage:
Ensure you have enough fridge and freezer space
Keep cold foods in the fridge until they are ready to serve e.g. salads
Temperature controls:
The bacteria that cause food poisoning grow rapidly between 5°C and 60°C (also known as the temperature danger zone)
Hot food should be served steaming hot – at least 60°C
Food should be thoroughly cooked before consuming. It is recommended that poultry, minced meats and sausages be cooked until well done right through to the centre. No pink should be visible and the juices should run clear. Alternately, you can use a meat thermometer to check if the meat is properly cooked.

Nope. Always use a thermometer to ensure safety of foods, never rely on color alone. This will also prevent over-cooking meats/fish that would otherwise lend to formation of heterocyclic amines (HCA’s), potent mutagens formed when meats/fish are cooked using high temperature methods. One way to reduce the formation of HCA’s is to marinate your meat/fish before grilling. Studies have shown that marinated meats and fish contained lower levels HCA’s than non-marinated samples with the exception of pan-fried salmon(1). 

Preventing cross-contamination:
Wash and dry hands thoroughly before preparing food (and in between handling raw and cooked foods)
Keep raw and cooked food separate – don’t let raw meat juices drip onto other foods
Use different knives and cutting boards for raw and cooked foods
Ensure that benches, kitchen equipment and tableware are clean and dry
Avoid making food for others if you are sick
Leftovers:
Refrigerate any leftovers straight away
Leftovers should be consumed within 3 days
Reheat leftover food to at least 75°C or until it is steaming hot

1. Heterocyclic amines content of meat and fish cooked by Brazilian methods. 2010. J Food Compost Anal. Feb 1; 23(1): 61–69.

 

Food fraud in Canada

Posted on by
Reply

I love Canada except for the ridiculous sub-zero temperatures we get here in the winter-Powell and Chapman can attest to this having lived in Ontario.
Canada is not immune to food fraud and with increase testing of food products, we’ll see just how bad it is. A study conducted by Sylvain Charlebois, the dean of the Faculty of Management and professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University indicates that more than 40 per cent of Canadians believe to have been victims of food fraud already.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed. – Mahatma Gandhi

Liam Casey of the Globe and Mail writes

A federally funded study has found that 20 per cent of sausages sampled from grocery stores across Canada contained meats that weren’t on the label.
The study, published this week in the journal Food Control, was conducted by researchers at the University of Guelph and commissioned by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
It examined 100 sausages that were labelled as containing just one ingredient – beef, pork, chicken or turkey.
“About one in five of the sausages we tested had some off-label ingredients in them, which is alarming,” said Robert Hanner, lead author of the study and an associate professor with the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario at the University of Guelph.
The CFIA reached out to Prof. Hanner for the study after the European horse meat scandal in 2013, where food labelled as beef was found to have horse meat – in some cases beef was completely substituted by horse meat.
The goal of the study, the federal food regulator said, was to examine scientific methods used by Prof. Hanner to see if the CFIA could use them in its regulatory practices. The scientific tools showed promising results, the CFIA said.
Seven of 27 beef sausages examined in the study contained pork. One of 38 supposedly pure pork sausages contained horse meat. Of 20 chicken sausages, four also contained turkey and one also had beef. Five of the 15 turkey sausages studied contained no turkey at all – they were entirely chicken.
None of the sausages examined contained more than one other type of meat in addition to the meat the sausage was meant to contain, Prof. Hanner said, noting, however that researchers were only testing for turkey, chicken, pork, beef and horse.
“The good news is that typically beef sausages predominantly contain beef, but some of them also contain pork, so for our kosher and halal consumers, that is a bit disconcerting,” Prof. Hanner said.

The undeclared meats found weren’t trace levels, Prof. Hanner noted.
“The levels we’re seeing aren’t because the blades on a grinder aren’t perfectly clean,” he said, adding that many of the undeclared ingredients found in the sausages were recorded in the range of 1 per cent to 5 per cent.
More than one per cent of undeclared ingredients indicates a breakdown in food processing or intentional food fraud, Prof. Hanner explained.

Moscow Mule: cool drink, bad idea

Posted on by
Reply

One of the trendiest drinks of 2017 is the Moscow Mule: a refreshing mix of vodka, ginger beer and lime juice.
Much of the cocktail’s appeal is down to the fact it’s often served in very Instagram-friendly copper-coloured mugs.
But now a US state department has issued a warning that these pretty vessels could give you food poisoning if they have not been specially made for cocktails.
The stark message comes from the state of Iowa’s Alcoholic Beverages Division, which has warned that copper and copper alloys are poisonous if consumed.
When these metals come into contact with food or drink with a pH level lower than 6, copper may leak into the edible substance and can be accidentally consumed.
The warning states: ‘High concentrations of copper are poisonous and have caused foodborne illness.’
The pH level of a Moscow Mule is well below 6, which is why Iowa and several other states have issued the warning as these cocktails are often served in copper mugs.

Symptoms of copper food poisoning can occur immediately which includes nausea, vomiting (green), diarrhea and can leave a metallic taste in the mouth.
Never a good idea to dispense high acid foods with anything copper but that drink sounds good.

Health inspections are not easy

Posted on by
Reply

The field of public health inspection is not easy; it is a difficult job, yet gratifying. I remember inspecting restaurants that were notorious for non-compliance and trying to work with them to improve their food safety behaviors. I believed in quality inspections and not quantity as health inspections are essentially a snap shot in time and I wanted to make a difference.

Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t and it is frustrated when you feel like you haven’t made a difference. So I get the ideology of fines as a method to increase compliance.
But do fines actually work or is it the cost of doing business for some operators? What will the establishment look like in a month or two, did we influence change or not? I have done this in the past where I charged a facility for a number of significant non-conformance’s and they subsequently cleaned up, but a month later, they regressed to the same state that I initially found them. Our department did not have a risk-based approach at that time and so the operator wasn’t expecting me for another year…surprise…

It is all about behavior and behavior change.

The owner of an East Tilbury sandwich bar has been slapped with a fine of almost two-and-a-half thousand pounds.
The owner of Nancy’s Sandwich Bar has been ordered to pay £2,353 for failure to comply with food safety legislation.
Daniel Wood appeared at Basildon Magistrates on Monday July 24, 2017 and pleaded guilty to 11 food hygiene offences, following a visit by Thurrock Council’s food safety team in September last year.
Inspectors visited the premises and found a makeshift kitchen had been set up in a room previously used for storage without consideration to food hygiene or public safety.
As a result, the food outlet was rated with a ‘1’ on the Food Standards Agency’s food hygiene rating scheme.
But the owner has since made improvements and the bar’s rating has gone up to ‘4’.
The bar was fined £1,230 and ordered to pay £1,000 costs and £123 victim surcharge.
Portfolio Holder for Neighbourhoods, Cllr Sue MacPherson said: “During the visit, the premises and equipment were found in a filthy condition, but I am pleased to see that improvements have since been made.”

 

Food safety at fairs and festivals

Posted on by
Reply

Tanya Banuelos of the Argus Observer writes:

As the last few weeks of summer vacation dwindle down and families are taking advantage of outdoor food at barbecues, picnics and the county fair, it’s time to talk about warm weather and food safety.
With 100-degree weather expected this week, it’s important to remember how much sooner food can become perishable when it’s out in the heat.
When it comes to food safety, food handlers at the Malheur County Fair must adhere to health guidelines, and an inspector is on site throughout the week. And as with every year at the fair, for those who sell consumable goods, food safety is a priority for vendors, such as Awesome Blossom and Fiesta Guadalajara.
Rely on equipment
One of the key details to remember is the importance of temperature.
Modesto Vega, co-owner of Fiesta Guadalajara, said he is able to keep foods at the appropriate temperature during the fair with commercial equipment.

I have inspected my fair share of temporary events including festivals and fairs and not all vendors are equipped with commercial fridges, freezers, etc. If you got them, all the power to you. I would typically see a lot of residential equipment, some good and some bad. As long as cold/hot holding temperatures are maintained, I’m good.

There have been a myriad of outbreaks associated with outdoor events nationally and internationally. The ethnic nature and diversity of foods prepared coupled with extreme temperatures pose unique problems for public health types. Public health inspections of said facilities rarely assess behavioral practices; rather, they are focused on meeting Regulatory standards. Time commitment and lack of public health staff have a lot to do with this, I have experienced this personally.

Effective food safety training during these events is critical. A number of operators at fairs and festivals are typically required to take a mandatory 8- hour food safe course or variation thereof prior to the event. I would rather see on-site hands-on training during vendor set-up focusing specifically on their menu items to ensure food safety, a mini HACCP if you will. If a vendor intends on serving hamburgers, well let’s go over what you need to do to ensure that no one barfs from your hamburgers.

Therman Collins, who has been a food vendor at the fair for eight years, said the key to keeping food safe for consumption is to make it fresh and send it right on out, adding that when it comes to food safety, “we know it all.”
Time, temperature equally important
When food is already cooked, especially with warm temperatures, how long people keep their food outside is a cause for concern, according to the Oregon Health Authority.
Most picnic foods will only be safe on the table for two hours; however, if the air temperature is higher than 90 degrees Fahrenheit, then the food is only safe for an hour.
Most importantly, food should be kept out of the danger zone, where cold foods are recommended to be kept below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and hot foods above 140 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

Greed: Two men imprisoned from the horsemeat scandal

Posted on by
Reply

This story is a good segue to promote my talk on food fraud at Bug Day on October 17th, 2017 in Winnipeg Manitoba. Bug Day is hosted by Health Sciences Centre in collaboration with the University of Manitoba’s Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Medicine Program.
Bug Day is Manitoba’s largest healthcare education event and it is held every year during National Infection Prevention & Control Week. 

Lucy Pasha-Robinson of the Independent writes:
Andronicos Sideras, 55, and Ulrik Nielsen, 58, were jailed at Inner London Crown Court for four years and six months and three years and six months respectively.The pair were found guilty of a conspiracy to sell 30 tonnes of horsemeat as beef, most of which entered the food chain. Sideras, one of the owners of meat manufacturer Dinos & Sons, mixed the products together before selling the meat to other firms. Nielsen, the Danish owner of FlexiFoods, bought horsemeat and beef from suppliers across Europe and had it delivered to Dinos in Tottenham, north London.Nielsen’s “right-hand man”, Alex Beech, 44, arranged for the shipments to be transferred and handled the accounting.

Some of the horses acquired for meat were racehorses injected with who knows what posing a myriad of possible chemical food safety concerns to consumers.

The majority of the meat, including some from farm horses not sold for slaughter, made it into the food chain and, while the face value of the fraud was £177,869, police said the true cost had probably run into millions of pounds.
Prosecutor Jonathan Polnay said the scandal had led to a “crisis of confidence” in the food supply chain which hit sales and there were a “very, very large number of victims” in this case.

The attack of the kitchen sponge

Posted on by
1

This brings me back to my Kitchen Crimes days when we analyzed dishcloths and sponges from 13 Winnipeg homes and confirmed the presence of pathogenic microorganisms. Given that bacteria are all around us and providing a medium that is moist, porous and contains food particles left at room temperature, the following is not surprising.

Peter Dockrill of Science Alert writes

Scientists in Germany have conducted what they say is the world’s first comprehensive study of contamination in used kitchen sponges, and it backs up we already feared: these soggy, porous ‘cleaning products’ are positively teeming with living bacteria.
Researchers led by Furtwangen University ran genetic sequencing on samples from 14 different used kitchen sponges and ended up finding 362 different types of bacteria happily lounging within all that comfortable, springy foam.
Fortunately for you and me, the majority of this bacteria was in fact not harmful – but some of it was.
“What surprised us was that five of the ten [types] which we most commonly found, belong to the so-called risk group 2 (RG2),” says lead researcher, microbiologist Markus Egert, “which means they are potential pathogens.”
These included Acinetobacter johnsonii, Moraxella osloensis, and Chryseobacterium hominis – which the researchers say can lead to infections – plus Acinetobacter pittii and Acinetobacter ursingii.
Of these, bacteria in the family Moraxellaceae was the most dominant kind found, backing up previous research on sponges.
Since Moraxellaceae is also common on human skin, the researchers speculate that it might be people touching sponges that introduces this particular contamination.
It’s also that we insist on then wiping these dense bug-ridden colonies over other, potentially clean surfaces in the house, including bench tops, appliances, and kitchen sinks.

What I would find more interesting is how much of what is on the sponge actually transfers over to a dish after the application of a detergent followed by a warm water rinse.

In addition to the sequencing, the team was able to visualise the presence of bacteria in the samples in 3D using a technique called fluorescence in situ hybridisation coupled with confocal laser scanning microscopy (FISH–CLSM).
The visualisations reveal how the large surface area, moist foam, and scattered food matter within the sponge provide the perfect, incubating habitat for bacteria.
So much so, in fact, that it’s almost hard to differentiate where the sponge (blue) stops and the bugs (red) start:
“Sometimes the bacteria achieved a concentration of more than five times 1010 cells per cubic centimetre,” says Egert.
“Those are concentrations which one would normally only find in faecal samples. And levels which should never be reached in a kitchen.”

The authors recommend changing the sponge on a weekly basis. Dischloths are no better.

Listeria in the news again

Posted on by
Reply

 

Food company Ready to Eat has announced a Listeria outbreak in several of their pre-packaged meals.
Ready to Eat, which produces ‘Muscle Fuel’ pre-made meals, said the meals affected are the ‘Vegetarian Chickpea and Pumpkin Rosti on Spinach Salad’ and the ‘Turkish Style Chicken & Rice’ with best before dates of August 4th, August 5th, August 6th, 2017.
Other meals are unaffected, the company says.
Any customers in possession of one of the affected meals are being urged to discard it immediately.
In a statement, Ready to Eat CEO Hamish Coulter said they were horrified when they received the news.
“To learn that one of our trusted produce suppliers has let us down is extremely disappointing.”
The Hamilton-based company was informed on Friday afternoon that its supplier Vegeez had returned a positive result for Listeria in one of its recent batches of cabbage.
On Friday evening the company contacted the 139 customers affected.
Vegeez general manager Glen Reid said it had taken full responsibility for the “very rare” event.
Mr Reid said in total there were 15 companies supplied with the affected cabbage, but all other companies managed to dump the product before using it.
Mr Coulter apologised to the company’s customers and said they were putting in measures to ensure this did not happen again.
The company has discontinued the use of coleslaw for the foreseeable future.
If any customer has consumed what they believe to be a contaminated meal they are advised to seek medical advice.
All customers will be contacted again this week with refunds issued.

I stumbled across an interested paper published in the Journal of Food Protection in February 2017 investigating the fate of Listeria monocytogenes , pathogenic Yersinia enterocolitica , and Escherichia coli O157:H7 gfp+inoculated in low numbers into ready-to-eat baby spinach and mixed-ingredient salad (baby spinach with chicken meat).

A quick synopsis of the study showed that when mixed-ingredient salad was stored at 8°C during shelf life, only L. monocytogenes increased significantly, reaching 3.0 log CFU/g within 3 days. The 8°C reflects maximum refrigerator temperature storage in Sweden.

In plain baby spinach, only pathogenic Y. enterocolitica populations increased significantly during storage for 7 days, and this was exclusively at an abuse temperature (15°C). Thus, mixing ready-to-eat leafy vegetables with chicken meat strongly influenced levels of inoculated strains during storage. 

The authors then translated the numbers into risks of infection. The risk of listeriosis (measured as probability of infection) was 16 times higher when consuming a mixed-ingredient salad stored at 8°C at the end of shelf life, or 200,000 times higher when stored at 15°C, compared with when consuming it on the day of inoculation. They conclude that efforts should focus on preventing temperature abuse during storage to mitigate the risk of listeriosis.

Söderqvist K1, Lambertz ST1,2, Vågsholm I1, Fernström LL1, Alsanius B3, Mogren L3, Boqvist S1. Fate of Listeria monocytogenes , Pathogenic Yersinia enterocolitica , and Escherichia coli O157:H7 gfp+ in Ready-to-Eat Salad during Cold Storage: What Is the Risk to Consumers? J Food Prot. 2017 Feb;80(2):204-212. doi: 10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-16-308.

Supplier Food Safety- Frog in Salad

Posted on by
Reply

Health inspection of the implicated premise reveals no food safety infractions one week after an incident involving a frog in a woman’s salad. That really doesn’t tell us much, what about the suppliers? Was an investigation conducted, if so, what happened? This is not the first time people have found extraneous things like frogs in their salads and may not be the last.

Anastasios Manaras of the The Weekly Observer writes

A woman from California was shocked and angry when she found a frog inside her salad in a well-known restaurant.
Shawna Cepeda wrote a review of her restaurant experience on July 22, saying her salad was bitter. “I had eaten 4 spoons when I noticed it had a strange taste and I thought maybe the sauce was bitter and mixed the salad when I discovered a little frog.
He warned the restaurant manager, who brought her another salad. Customer satisfaction and quality control are our highest priorities. We take incidents like this very seriously, “said Gabriel Levin, head of the BJ restaurant chain.
He added that the company is conducting an internal investigation and will contact the suppliers “to make sure that something similar will not happen again in the future. Cepeda said she did not have to pay for her meal, but the restaurant asked her to pay for her drinks. The restaurant also gave her a $ 50 gift card.
“It seems inconceivable to me that it has passed through the suppliers and reached the final customer without any notice,” says Cepeda. Cepeda also bothered that the restaurant staff did not notify other customers that lettuce in their salads might be contaminated. 

“The restaurant was full. There were many children and I think that bothered me more. ” She added that after her meal in the restaurant she felt sick. On July 25, she visited a doctor who confirmed that she did not had salmonella, but she may had some bacterial infection and take antibiotics.