Chapman can keep his turkey breast — although it’s a good idea and I do something similar with whole chickens (note to self — BBQ that chicken for dinner tonight and ensure it’s done with a tip-sensitive digital thermometer reading of 165 F).
This is breakfast in Brisbane: mango, kiwi, watermelon, strawberry and passion fruit, along with some yoghurt and homemade granola.
There are benefits to living in a sub-tropical climate.
Brisbane City Council has defended its food safety credentials following criticism over its handling of breaches by the Normanby Hotel.
Brisbane sucks at food safety, I know, I live here.
Today the council marked five years of its EatSafe program which has overseen food safety standards in Brisbane, bringing 1100 businesses to reach a five star safety rating as well as handing out 1782 fines for offending businesses.
This week the council came under fire after it was revealed it took seven inspections of the popular pub before a cockroach infestation was resolved.
Lord Mayor Graham Quirk said the council had followed regular protocol.
“It’s not a case of going wrong,” Cr Quirk said.
“What we’ve done is ensure that we do follow up inspections and we work with licencees.
“Of course you can’t get into the court with a day’s notice.
“You have to make sure that you have the evidence when you go to court, we don’t want to go to court and lose.”
The Normanby Hotel, which was fined $30,000, is among 131 businesses prosecuted for food safety breaches.
Cr Quirk said it had conducted 33,000 surprise audits since 2010, with businesses measured against the 44 criteria of the EatSafe program.
Auditors look at compliance in cleanliness, food storage and handling and pest control with many following complaints from customers.
“Last year over 700 outlets received 0-2 star ratings and council worked with them through education and online training, to bring their business up to compliance standards (3 star rating),” he said.
Quick stats for 2015
– The council cancelled 15 food licences
– It issue 64 immediate suspensions to businesses in breach of food safety standards
– It issued 440 fines to businesses and pursued 28 successful prosecutions of Food Act 2006 breaches
– It raked in fines worth $622,500
Nice cash cow. But did it make food safer? Did fewer people barf?
No.
And Lord Mayor is a ridiculous title.
nhl
JoNel Aleccia of The Seattle Times writes that a 27-year-old Seattle man is suing Chipotle restaurants after he was infected with E. coli in July during an undisclosed outbreak tied to the fast-food chain. Three months later, Chipotle closed dozens of sites in the Northwest because of potential illness.
Timothy Kniffin, a cafe and bakery worker, said he fell ill starting July 25 after eating pork carnitas, white rice, salsa, peppers, guacamole and chips at a Chipotle restaurant at 1415 Broadway in Seattle. He was hospitalized from July 30 through Aug. 2 with an E. coli O157: H7 infection later tied to the restaurant, according to a complaint filed late last month in U.S. District Court in Western Washington.
Officials with Public Health — Seattle & King County confirmed the July E. coli outbreak, which sickened four other people and hospitalized two, including Kniffin. But health officials didn’t publicize the outbreak at the time.
“By the time we were able to make a connection to Chipotle, the outbreak was over,” James Apa, a health department spokesman, said in an email.
Not soon enough for Chipotle investors, who have seen their stock value plummet by 45%.
One investment firm says, long-term investors, noting the current volatility in Chipotle Mexican Grill stock, should try to see past CMG’s issues. The company still serves a quality product and strives to bring satisfaction to its customers. Value minded investors with a long-term mindset could be rewarded vastly; a recovery back to its 52 week high would represent a whopping 82% potential return. However, keep in mind this may take a couple of years to happen.
No, they don’t serve a quality product and are food safety morons.
But that won’t stop students or profs eating there, just like faculty meetings kept ordering Jimmy Johns despite numerous raw sprout outbreaks.
The best and the brightest.
Regardless of the E. coli outbreak, the Chipotle near the University of Florida on University Avenue is still thriving.
“I will still take the risk and eat there,” said Ana Ward, a UF plant science junior.
The 20-year-old said she is not worried about getting sick.
“I feel like the chance is really small, and you would take that risk with any restaurant,” she said.
Keith Schneider, a UF food science and human nutrition professor, said it would be rare to contract E. coli from the Chipotle near campus.
“The fact that we haven’t seen any foodborne illnesses in Florida, let alone the entire Southeast, probably would lead me to believe that there is no greater risk eating at a Chipotle in the Southeast than there is in any other fast food type restaurant,” Schneider said.
It is not unusual to find E. coli in low numbers when food is being produced organically, he said.
“The widespread nature of (Chipotle E. coli outbreaks), leads you to believe that it is some environmental source for the contamination,” Schneider said.
The contamination of Chipotle food is likely a result of improperly composted fertilizer or wild animals tracking the bacteria through the supplier’s fields, he said.
There are hundreds of different strains of E. coli, some more severe than others, Schneider said. The most common strain heard about in the news is E. coli O157:H7.
And for no particular reason, Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue was released yesterday, in 1957.
He was an innovator.
David Bowie was OK in Zoolander
CBS News reports that the U.S. Department of Justice has started an investigation into Blue Bell after their ice cream was linked to a deadly Listeria outbreak earlier this year that killed three people.
An FDA investigation found Listeria in all three of Blue Bell’s production plants located in Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas. Records indicated that the company knew one plant was contaminated at least as early as 2013.
The FDA investigation uncovered other troubling problems, including condensation dripping directly into ice cream and unsanitary equipment. Last April, Blue Bell shut down all three production facilities, and all ice cream was recalled.
Sources tell CBS News that the Department of Justice is trying to determine what Blue Bell management knew about potentially deadly hazards in their plants, and when they knew it.
The most extensive violations were found in Oklahoma, where the FDA released 16 separate positive tests for listeria on equipment and in ice cream from March 2013 through January 2015.
Last October, Gerald Bland who worked at the Blue Bell factory in Brenham, Texas, described to CBS News, unsanitary conditions on the factory floor.
“On the wall by the 3-gallon machine, if it had rained real hard and water sat on the roof, it would just trickle down,” Bland said.
Rain water from the roof would leak into the factory.
Another worker, Terry Schultz, told us that his complaints to management about unclean conditions went nowhere.
“The response I got at one point [from management] was, ‘is that all you’re going to do is come here and bitch every afternoon?'”
The message Schultz took management’s response was, “Production is probably more important than cleanliness.”
All three of Blue Bell’s plants are now back up and running, and by the end next month, its ice cream will be back on the shelves in 15 states.
Today, I am 53-years-old, been married to Amy for nine years, and it’s my mom’s birthday.
That’s a lot for one day.
I’ve been looking back, only with an eye to going forward (that’s the lab in Guelph, about early 2005, right; I’ve since been told it was summer 2001; first lesson of professoring — surround yourself with good people).
Three years ago, about this time, I submitted a proposal to my employer, Kansas State University, to take a 20 per cent cut in pay, develop a MOOC in food safety risk analysis (and three other courses), and continue with research and outreach.
I also wrote that “I have promoted K-State and collaborations throughout many countries, particularly New Zealand, Australia, Canada, France, UK, Egypt and Afghanistan. Regarding the latter, I have provided several food safety training sessions for the U.S. military for troops being deployed to that region. Through the bites-l listserv, barfblog.com and media coverage, I have attracted significant attention to the food safety activities at Kansas State University.”
The bosses at Kansas State University determined I had to be on campus, so I was dumped.
Full professors can get dumped for bad attendance.
Like a breakup with someone you really loved, it was messy and takes time, about three years.
But I’m over it.
Irony being ironic, or karma being karma-like, the Manhattan (Kansas) paper re-ran a story today, my birthday and anniversary and my mom’s birthday, from the Topeka paper about my global activities, billing me as a former and retired K-State prof.
I’m not dead yet.
It’s a wonder of the electronic world that journalists from anywhere can find me, but a university that aspires to – something – can’t.
barfblog.com now consists of about 11,580 posts and 60,100 subscribers in over 70 countries. Chapman refers to barfblog.com as a repository of food safety stories.
I like that.
barfblog daily has 4,855 subscribers in over 70 countries.
The barfblog twitter feed has 3,601 subscribers, and Chapman has a bunch more.
In October, website analytics showed that barfblog.com was visited 573,000 so far in 2015, by 413,000 unique users resulting in over 813,000 page views. This represents a 6% increase in visits, 4% increase in visitors and 6% increase in page views over last year.
Chapman also produced and posted 14 Food Safety Talk (www.foodsafetytalk.com) Podcasts during this past year
Food Safety Talk podcasts have been downloaded over 4300 times in the past year (with an average download rate of 340 per episode).
I love what I do, and I love that Amy kicked me out of complacency – nothing would have been easier than to stay at K-State.
And she’s got me playing hockey again, just like she said she would in our self-written wedding vows at City Hall.
In Manhattan (Kansas).
What is the most effective way to provide information about how food was grown and prepared?
I’ve been touting the same approach to food safety information for over 20 years: figure out the best and most meaningful way to provide open access; embrace new technology, and no one wants to be the politician who tells constituents, no, you don’t deserve to know.
Restaurant inspection results should be disclosed as local communities are discovering around the world; but what’s the best way? We do research on that.
People say they want to know if something is genetically modified; I prefer genetic engineering, because all food is genetically modified in some manner, and sold sweet corn as GE 16 years ago.
No biggie.
Technology seems to have caught up with my democratic dreams and food information is about to flood the mainstream.
The UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) has agreed with the food industry to publish the results of industry testing of meat products, to provide a clearer picture of standards in the food chain. The results will also be made publicly available.
UK Nestle is preparing to give people instant access to information about the nutritional profile and environmental and social impacts of its products. Anyone who buys a multi-pack of two-finger Kit Kat chocolate bars in the U.K. and Ireland will be able to find out more about what they are made of, how they fit into a balanced diet and lifestyle, and how they were produced, just by scanning the packaging with a smartphone.
And Food Quality News reports that bakery manufacturers who want to differentiate themselves in a competitive market should consider communicating safety and quality efforts to consumers.
We do research on that too.
But Hershey’s Kisses?
Why not.
Dan Charles of NPR asks, can big food win friends by revealing its secrets?
The special holiday version of Hershey’s Kisses, now on sale nationwide, is an icon of the food industry’s past, and perhaps also a harbinger of its future.
Back when Milton Hershey started making this product, more than a century ago, it was a simpler time. He ran the factory and the sales campaigns — although, for decades, he refused to advertise.
Today, The Hershey Company is a giant enterprise with factories around the globe. It owns food companies in China, Brazil and India.
That’s typical for the food industry, of course. Lots of food companies are huge. And with vastly increased scale comes growing skepticism about what those companies are up to.
Amanda Hitt may be an extreme case. She’s director of the Food Integrity Campaign for an activist organization called the Government Accountability Project, which tries to expose the food industry’s darkest secrets: dangerous slaughterhouses, contaminated meat and exploited workers. “This industry is almost always wrong, and always doing something messed up,” she says. “So yeah, when I look at anything they do, there’s a certain level of skepticism.”
Charlie Arnot, who has studied consumer attitudes as a consultant to big food companies, says consumers have lots of questions: How is this food made? Is it good for me? And they tend not to trust answers from big companies.
“There is a significant bias against Big Food,” says Arnot, who is also CEO of the nonprofit Center for Food Integrity in Kansas City. “In fact, the larger the company, the more likely it is that people will believe that it will put profit ahead of the public interest.”
Companies can’t change that with marketing campaigns, he says. The one thing that they can do — and the only thing that works, according to Arnot’s research — is open up, and reveal details of their operations.
Which brings us back to those Hershey’s Kisses.
Deb Arcoleo, who carries the freshly minted title of director of Product Transparency for The Hershey Company, has brought a bag of them along to our meeting, because there’s something new on that package. Printed on the bag, so small that you’d easily miss it, is a little square QR code. These are the codes that you now see in lots of places, like airline boarding passes.
Arcoleo takes my smartphone, aims it at the code, and I hear a beep. Suddenly, the screen of my phone is filled with information about these Hershey’s Kisses: nutrition facts, allergens in this product and details about all the ingredients. Lecithin, for instance.
“Let’s say I don’t really know what lecithin is,” says Arcoleo. “I can click on ‘lecithin,’ and I will get a definition.”
Tap another tab, and we see a note about whether this product contains ingredients from genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
Hershey’s created this system, called SmartLabel, but other companies are now adopting it, too. Very soon, Arcoleo says, there will be tens of thousands of products on supermarket shelves with SmartLabel codes.
Charlie Arnot, the food industry consultant, thinks that some companies may, in fact, be willing to do this. Consumers are forcing them to do it.
“Consumers are interested in the good, the bad and the ugly,” he says. They are saying, “Give me the information, treat me like an adult, and allow me to make an informed choice.”
Arnot is telling big food companies that “transparency builds trust,” and advising them to post on their websites documents that may contain bad news, such as outside audits of their food safety procedures.
But outside audits and inspections can suck; more of a corporate gladhanding to move product out the door.
There are good companies and there are bad companies: Hard to tell the difference when the same soundbites are manufactured in a factory somewhere that has probably been outsourced.
The best farmers, processors, retailers and restaurants should brag about their superior food safety and whatever technology they use to make safe, wholesome food.
Brag about it; embrace it, make it your own.
It’s a line I use frequently, from our Christmas movie tradition, Mystery, Alaska, or second fave, Trailer Park Boys Christmas:
The only fun things to do in cold weather are fornicate and play hockey.
If you are eating turkey this Christmas out of some sense of tradition, food historian Ivan Day says, put down that drumstick. After studying English cookbooks hundreds of years old, Day says the giant bird isn’t even that traditional. Besides, he says, “It’s a dry wasteland of flavorless meat.”
Sure, the first turkey came to England in the 1600s. It was an exotic “treat” from the New World. But a time traveler from Shakespeare’s time wouldn’t understand why everyone in the modern world was having the same dull bird on Christmas night.
At his farmhouse in northern England, Day collects old cookbooks and food illustrations. He says in olden days, Christmas celebrations were all about novelty and variety. The tables of the rich might include a turkey and a goose, but also peacocks, swans, partridges and plovers. A rack of venison would sit beside a giant turtle. The eating would go on for days.
Christmas used to be a 12-day drunken festival. Imagine Mardi Gras with snow. Cooks were always trying to top one another in outrageousness, from the traditional presentation of the boar’s head to the array of sickeningly sweet puddings. Day shows me a 19th-century illustration of a pie that took a crowd of servants to carry. It was filled with boned geese, woodcocks, hares and any other game they had around.
“This was the original turducken,” he says.
Ivan Day will be having beef roasted in front of an open fire for Christmas, and he says you really should stop and appreciate how Christmas must have felt to people, say, 400 years ago. They might have gone months eating the same thing every day, bacon and bread. The Christmas meal, with its exotic fruits and endless variety, must have felt like a miracle. “It was a moment of sunshine in a dreary year of grayness,” he says.
With six outbreaks now associated with Chipotle since July, the burrito chain is under scrutiny from the public and food safety folks for being heavy on promises to be 20 years ahead of everyone else and light on details. A couple of weeks ago they talked about switching their tomato handling from largely an in-store process to a centralized commissary with controls.
According to AP, here are some of the other specifics:
Onions will be dipped in boiling water to kill germs before they’re chopped. Raw chicken will be marinated in re-sealable plastic bags, rather than in bowls. Cilantro will be added to freshly cooked rice so the heat gets rid of microbes in the garnish.
“When you’re given a project like this, you look at the universe of hazards,” said Mansour Samadpour, CEO of IEH Laboratories, which was hired by Chipotle to tighten its procedures.
Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold said many of changes will be implemented in coming weeks, but that the company doesn’t expect the taste of its food to suffer. Among the tweaks the company is making:
—Cheese will now arrive in restaurants shredded.
—Ingredients like onions will be macerated with lemon or lime juice to kill germs.
—60 samples of every 2,000 pounds of steak will be tested before it’s sent to stores. A similar testing program will be implemented for chicken in coming weeks. Pork and barbacoa beef are already delivered cooked in sealed bags.
—Tomatoes, cilantro and other ingredients will be chopped in centralized locations, rather than in stores, so they can be tested. Chipotle has said in the past that tomatoes taste better when freshly diced in restaurants. After the outbreak, Chipotle co-CEO Steve Ells changed tunes: “If I’m eating a burrito that had tomatoes that were chopped in a central kitchen in the salsa or one that was chopped in house, I probably couldn’t tell the difference,” he said in an interview on CNBC last week.
Not all chopping will be moved to centralized locations. Onions, for instance, would oxidize and smell bad if they were chopped days in advance, Samadpour said. So they will remain chopped in restaurants, along with lemons, limes and jalapenos. All will now be blanched to kill germs.
These are some good steps, I’d love to see the validation data that shows onions macerated with high-acid juice will take care of pathogens. Salmonella has been shown to be pretty hardy in the ceviche-type setting (resulting in a 1-2 log reduction according to some work done by barfblog friend and podcast buddy Don Schaffner).
I’d love to see the data associated with adding-cilantro-to-hot-rice – sounds like a good idea, but what is the heat transfer like and what does it do to the pathogens?
Sealed bags vs open bowls for marination is good – but those bags still need to be opened and the juices controlled.
Susan Berfield of Bloomberg Business writes in Business Week that Chris Collins is a 32-year-old Web developer and photographer who lives in Oregon, just outside Portland.
He and his wife are conscientious about their food: They eat organic, local produce and ethically raised animals. Collins liked to have a meal at Chipotle once a week. On Friday evening, Oct. 23, he ordered his regular chicken bowl at his usual Chipotle in Lake Oswego. His dinner was made of 21 ingredients, including toasted cumin, sautéed garlic, fresh organic cilantro, finely diced tomatoes, two kinds of onion, romaine lettuce, and kosher salt. It tasted as good as always.
By the next night, Collins’s body was aching and his stomach was upset. Then he began experiencing cramping and diarrhea. His stomach bloated. “Moving gave me excruciating pain,” he says, “and anytime I ate or drank it got worse.” His diarrhea turned bloody. “All I was doing was pooping blood. It was incredibly scary.” After five days, he went to an urgent-care clinic near his home; the nurse sent him to an emergency room. He feared he might have colon cancer.
On Halloween, the ER doctor called him at home: Collins had Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli 026, and he’d likely gotten it from one of those 21 ingredients in his meal at Chipotle. (This was later confirmed by public-health officials.) The doctor warned him that kidney failure was possible; intensive treatment, including dialysis, could be necessary. His kidneys held up, but it took an additional five days for the worst of Collins’s symptoms to ease and nearly six weeks for him to recover. He still doesn’t have as much physical strength as he used to, and he feels emotionally shaky, too. “Before, I was doing the P90X workouts. For a long time after, I couldn’t even walk a few blocks,” he says. “It made me feel old and weak and anxious.” On Nov. 6, Collins sued Chipotle, seeking unspecified damages.
Collins was among 53 people in nine states who were sickened with the same strain of E. coli. “I trusted they were providing me with ‘food with integrity,’ ” Collins says, sarcastically repeating the company motto. “We fell for their branding.” Chipotle’s public stance during the outbreak irritated him, too. The company closed all 43 of its restaurants in Oregon and Washington in early November to try to identify the source of the E. coli and sanitize the spaces. Notices on restaurant doors generally referred to problems with the supply chain or equipment. But local media reported that at least one restaurant in Portland put up a note that said, “Don’t panic … order should be restored to the universe in the very near future.” “That felt so snarky,” Collins says. “People could die from this, and they were so smug.”
For a long time, smug worked pretty well for Chipotle Mexican Grill. It’s grown into a chain of more than 1,900 locations, thanks in part to marketing—including short animated films about the evils of industrial agriculture—that reminds customers that its fresh ingredients and naturally raised meat are better than rivals’ and better for the world. The implication: If you eat Chipotle, you’re doing the right thing, and maybe you’re better, too. It helped the company, charging about $7 for a burrito, reach a market valuation of nearly $24 billion. Its executives seemed to have done the impossible and made a national fast-food chain feel healthy.
Fewer people associate Chipotle with “healthy” now. Three months before Collins was infected with E. coli, five people fell ill eating at a Seattle-area restaurant. By the time local health officials had confirmed a link, the outbreak was over, so no one said anything. In August, 234 customers and employees contracted norovirus at a Chipotle in Simi Valley, Calif., where another worker was infected. Salmonella-tainted tomatoes at 22 outlets in Minnesota sickened 64 people in August and September; nine had to be hospitalized. Norovirus struck again in late November: More than 140 Boston College students picked up the highly contagious virus from a nearby Chipotle, including half of the men’s basketball team. An additional 16 students and three health-care staff picked it up from the victims. The source? A sick worker who wasn’t sent home although Chipotle began offering paid sick leave in June. In the second week of December, when Chipotle should have been on highest alert, a Seattle restaurant had to be briefly shut down after a health inspection found that cooked meat on the takeout line wasn’t being kept at a high enough temperature. And in the most recent case, on Dec. 21, the CDC announced it was investigating an outbreak of what seems to be a different and rare version of E. coli 026 that’s sickened five people in two states who ate at Chipotle in mid-November. The company says it had expected to see additional cases. It still doesn’t know which ingredients made people ill.
Almost 500 people around the country have become sick from Chipotle food since July, according to public-health officials. And those are just the ones who went to a doctor, gave a stool sample, and were properly diagnosed. Food-safety experts say they believe with any outbreak the total number of people affected is at least 10 times the reported number. The CDC estimates that 48 million Americans get sick from contaminated food every year.
At Chipotle, three different pathogens caused the five known outbreaks. That wasn’t inevitable or coincidental. “There’s a problem within the company,” says Michael Doyle, the director of the center for food safety at the University of Georgia. Chipotle has gotten big selling food that’s unprocessed, free of antibiotics and GMOs, sometimes organic, sometimes local. “Blah, blah, blah,” says Doug Powell, a retired (I’m not dead yet) food-safety professor and the publisher of barfblog.com. “They were paying attention to all that stuff, but they weren’t paying attention to microbial safety.” Whatever its provenance, if food is contaminated it can still make us sick—or even kill. Millennials may discriminate when they eat, but bacteria are agnostic.
“Food with integrity,” a promise to Chipotle’s customers and a rebuke to its competitors, has become the source of much schadenfreude among both. Chipotle’s stock has lost about 30 percent of its value since August. Sales at established stores dropped 16 percent in November, and executives expect a decline of 8 percent to 11 percent in comparable-store sales for the last three months of the year. That would be the first quarterly decline for Chipotle as a public company.
Steve Ells, Chipotle’s founder and co-chief executive, went on the Today show on Dec. 10, apologized to everyone who’d fallen ill, and announced a comprehensive food-safety program that he said would far exceed industry norms. He didn’t address why a company that had challenged quality standards with such gusto hadn’t taken on safety standards as well.
On Dec. 17, speaking by phone in New York, he’s still on message, describing the Seattle restaurants he visited as clean and organized. “I ate delicious food there,” he says. “Traffic was slow, but we’re ready for people to come back. There is no E. coli in Chipotle. ” To hear Ells tell it, the company is witnessing an outbreak of excitement. He says the chain’s suppliers are excited to participate in the new safety programs; employees at headquarters in Denver are excited to contribute however they can; it’s “a very, very exciting time for us to be pushing the boundaries” on food safety. “We’re embracing this as an opportunity.”
Ells studied art history in college, trained as a chef at the Culinary Institute of America, and opened the first Chipotle in Denver in 1993 with a loan from his father. He set up a model—open kitchen, fresh ingredients, real cooking in the back, and an assembly line in front, allowing customization and speed—that’s become its own industry standard. Chipotle grew from 489 restaurants and revenue of $628 million in 2006, when it went public, to about 1,800 restaurants and $4.1 billion in revenue in 2014. Net profit increased 60 percent from 2012 to 2014. Ells and his co-CEO, Montgomery Moran, together earned more than $140 million in total compensation during that time. And Michael Pollan, the good-food arbiter, said that Chipotle was his favorite fast-food chain and that he didn’t have a second.
The company was influenced in ways it doesn’t always admit by the biggest, most industrialized chain of them all: McDonald’s. The company invested about $340 million in Chipotle from 1998, when it had 13 restaurants in Colorado, until 2006, when the two parted ways. McDonald’s taught Chipotle supply-chain economics. Chipotle often derides fast-food chains and their factory farms, enlisting the likes of Willie Nelson to make plaintive music videos about crop chemicals and steroidal cattle. But Ells respects McDonald’s size. In an interview with Bloomberg in 2014, he said Chipotle could one day be “bigger than McDonald’s in the U.S. I mean, that’s not an unreasonable way to think about this.”
And so much more. Great story
.
A few years ago an outbreak linked to a Denver homeless shelter made it into the barfblog new and notable category. Forty folks who depended on the emergency food were affected by violent foodborne illness symptoms after eating donated turkey. Fourteen ambulances showed up and took those most affected to area hospitals.
Volunteering as a food handler at a mission, shelter or soup kitchen and having a good heart and intentions doesn’t automatically lead to safe meals. An understanding of risks and having systems how to reduce them may.
Around the same time as the Denver outbreak, colleague, friend and STEC CAP collaborator Christine Bruhn created a set of food safety materials for folks volunteering with food in their communities. Ashley Chaifetz, a former graduate student in the department of public policy at UNC-Chapel Hill took Christine’s content foundation and went out to the food pantry community to assess infrastructure and current food safety practices to tailor materials to the audience.
Martha Waggoner of the Associated Press wrote about Ashley’s work this week,
[A] study by researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill finds that pantry procedures are often informal, although they do a good job in many areas, including provided hand-washing facilities.
“Generally, we found they were doing things pretty well,” said Ben Chapman, senior author of a paper about pantries and food handling published in the Journal of Food Protection. “They were in line with what you see in at commercial entities.”
Safety was likely to be more formal at pantries were associated with a food bank, said Chapman, associate professor of youth, family and consumer sciences at N.C. State.
Chapman and a researcher from UNC-Chapel Hill (Ashley Chaifetz -ben) visited 105 pantries in 12 counties. They then developed protocols for food pantry volunteers, such as a flow chart for when canned food should be tossed.
The researchers learned that some pantries get large cuts of fresh meat that their volunteers must cut, while almost 10 percent were accepting and distributing home-canned items, which can be risky because of the chance of botulism.
“From a hunger standpoint, that’s fantastic,” he said. “Just relying on canned foods and dried foods doesn’t give you a lot of choices … It’s really good for the hunger world, but there’s an increase in safety risks.”
The paper, Evaluating North Carolina Food Pantry Food Safety–Related Operating Procedures, was published online Nov. 1 in the Journal of Food Protection. The work was supported by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative grant 2012-68003-30155 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.