Something that came out of the food safety infosheet video observation evaluation work we did a few years ago was that time pressures lead to risky practices. Poor handwashing and cross-contamination occurred when the kitchens were busy during breakfast and lunch rushes.
Maybe taking out the spikes in production demand and going to a commissary system is a safer one, we said.
Tim Carmen of The Washington Post posted an in-depth interview with food porn purveyor Greg Galy of Fig & Olive following last weeks Washington Daily investigative interview and talked about going away from a commissary system (which was linked to a 150+ case outbreak of Salmonella). But not for food safety reasons.
Galy clarifies what types of foods were made in a New York commissary and shipped to their outlets in DC and California (and elsewhere) as well as avoiding actually apologizing for making patrons sick. And doesn’t say much about the outbreak at all.
There hasn’t been anything related to salmonella in the ingredients. [Note: Investigators haven’t been able to trace the salmonella to any Fig & Olive ingredient.] They haven’t been able to find traces definitively. We still don’t know to this day exactly what happened. We took all measures and precaution at the time, I believe, to resolve what needed to be done. Again, I can’t really expand my comments on anything related to the process, the timing, the salmonella cases.
But he does touch on why they chose to use commercially prepared mayonnaise:
In regards to the comments that was made on the Hellmann’s mayonnaise, the mayonnaise made in-house [uses Hellmann’s] because of the safety concerns of utilizing raw eggs. That’s why they’re using a commercial mayonnaise. It’s actually recommended by safety consultants.
I once had a lab with about 20 employees and graduate students.
Some worked out, some didn’t.
I was starting to realize my first marriage was falling apart and masked that failure with other accomplishments.
But I didn’t really pay attention.
I’ve always been interested in science policy, and even started a Masters degree in philosophy of science until I realized that philosophical debates about how color is perceived and trees falling in an imaginary forest weren’t my thing.
However, I remain convinced that science advances in weird ways that we can’t always comprehend and that collaboration is a code-word for, I suck.
A new working paper by economics-types evaluates science and death.
We study the extent to which eminent scientists shape the vitality of their fields by examining entry rates into the fields of 452 academic life scientists who pass away while at the peak of their scientific abilities.
Key to our analyses is a novel way to delineate boundaries around scientific fields by appealing solely to intellectual linkages between scientists and their publications, rather than collaboration or co-citation patterns.
Consistent with previous research, the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases precipitously after the death of a star scientist (relative to control fields).
In contrast, we find that the flow of articles by non-collaborators increases by 8% on average. These additional contributions are disproportionately likely to be highly cited. They are also more likely to be authored by scientists who were not previously active in the deceased superstar’s field.
Overall, these results suggest that outsiders are reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive and that a number of barriers may constrain entry even after she is gone. Intellectual, social, and resource barriers all impede entry, with outsiders only entering subfields that offer a less hostile landscape for the support and acceptance of “foreign” ideas.
Food Safety Talk, a bi-weekly podcast for food safety nerds, by food safety nerds. The podcast is hosted by Ben Chapman and barfblog contributor Don Schaffner, Extension Specialist in Food Science and Professor at Rutgers University. Every two weeks or so, Ben and Don get together virtually and talk for about an hour. They talk about what’s on their minds or in the news regarding food safety, and popular culture. They strive to be relevant, funny and informative — sometimes they succeed. You can download the audio recordings right from the website, or subscribe using iTunes.
Ben and Don host a special guest, Dan Benjamin, podcasting pioneer and founder of 5by5, the inspiration for Food Safety Talk. After sharing what they were eating (because that makes for a good podcast) and Ben and Don tell the Food Safety Talk origin story about Episode Zero as part of the IAFP 100 year anniversary StoryCorps project. The guys talk with Dan about the podcast content niche, who the community of listeners are (both inside and outside the food safety world).
The conversation moves into how Don is food safety expert to the podcasting stars and the guys talk about some of the risk assessment questions Dan and Haddie text Don that usually start with ‘Can she eat this?’
The discussion goes into kids getting sick, spurred by Dan’s children coming home with gastro illnesses. Don and Ben each have stories about taking care of vomiting children. The guys talk about Immunity, resistance and probabilities of feces being positive, transfer and introduction into the body. Don describes how risk modeling calculations work taking all the factors into account. Dan tells an analogous story about immunity and his grandfather’s metallurgy job. The guys use a hypothetical situation of a child projectile vomiting into someones mouth to help explain acquired immunity and vaccinations. Dan’s child illness discussion pushes the guys into CDC’s Infection control guidelines and restaurant food handlers and glove use. Dan tells a detailed story of his son’s vomiting event which includes norovirus, rotavirus, oatmeal, sink disposal, aerosolization, infection control, clean-up and incubation. A norovirus outbreak at Chipotle becomes a topic and the guys talk about brand impacts of an outbreak.
Dan describes Ben as the jerky police which goes back to an interview Ben did on 5by5 where they talked about risks associated with drying beef without heat treating. Dan gives hints on his super special recipe. The guys talk dehydrating manufacturers instructions(which may or may not be validated), water activity, Shigatoxin-producing E. coil and marinades. Don and Ben come up with a plan for a jerky how-to podcast and website fusing some of the validation studies (including one from our friends Harrison and Harrison).
In the summer of 1994, Intel types discovered a flaw with their Pentium computer chip, but thought the matter trivial; it was not publicly disclosed until Oct. 30, 1994, when a mathematician at Lynchburg College in Virginia, Thomas Nicely, posted a warning on the Internet.
As perceived problems and complaints rose through the weekend Andrew S. Grove, Intel’s chairman and CEO, composed an apology to be posted on an Internet bulletin board—actually a web, but because he was at home with no direct Internet access, he asked Intel scientist Richard Wirt to post the message from his home account; But because it bore Mr. Wirt’s electronic address, the note’s authenticity was challenged, which only added to the fury of the Internet attacks on Intel.
At 8 a.m. the following Monday inside the company’s Santa Clara, Calif. headquarters, Intel officials set to work on the crisis the way they attacked a large problems—like an engineering problem. Said Paul Otellini, senior vice-president for worldwide sales, “It was a classic Intellian approach to solving any big problem. We broke it down into smaller parts; that was comforting.”
By the end of week two, the crisis looked to be subsiding; Then on Monday, Nov. 12, 1994, the International Business Machines Corp. abruptly announced that its own researchers had determined that the Pentium flaw would lead to division errors much more frequently than Intel said. IBM said it was suspending shipments of personal computers containing the Pentium chip
Mr. Grove was stunned. The head of IBM’s PC division, Richard Thoman, had given no advance warning. A fax from Thoman arrived at Intel’s HQ on Monday morning after the IBM announcement, saying he had been unable to find Grove’s number during the weekend. Mr. Grove, whose number is listed, called directory assistance twice to ask for his own number to ensure he was listed.
After the IBM announcement, the number of calls to Santa Clara overwhelmed the capacity of AT&T’s West Coast long-distance telephone switching centres, blocking calls. Intel stock fell 6.5 per cent.
As John Markoff of the N.Y. Times wrote on the front-page in Dec. 1994, the reluctance of Intel to act earlier, according to Wall Street analysts, was the result of a corporate culture accustomed to handling technical issues rather than addressing customers’ hopes and fears.
Only then, Mr. Grove said, did he begin to realize that an engineer’s approach was inappropriate for a consumer problem.
According to one op-ed writer, Intel’s initial approach to the problem—prove you are doing sophisticated calculations if you want a replacement chip—was like saying “until you get to be cardinal, any internal doubts about the meaning of life are your own problem, a debate tha has been going on since before Martin Luther.
Intel’s doctrine of infallibility was facing an old-fashioned Protestant revolt.” (John Hockenberry, Pentium and our Crisis of Faith, N.Y. Times, Dec. 28, 1994, A11; this is how things were referenced before hot links)
Why and how did Intel go wrong? The answer is rooted in Intel’s distinctive corporate culture, and suggests that Intel went wrong in much the same way as other big and unresponsive companies before it.
Intel has traditionally valued engineering over product marketing. Inward-looking and wary of competitors (from experience with the Japanese) it developed a bunker mentality, a go-for-the-juglar attitude and reputation for arrogance.
According to one former engineer, Federico Faggin, a co-inventor of Intel’s first microprocessor, “The attitude at Intel is, ‘We’re better than everyone else and what we do is right and we never make mistakes.’”
Finally, on Dec. 20, Grove apparently realized that he and his company were standing at Ground Zero for an incoming consumer relations meteor. Intel announced that it would replace the defective chips—and pay for the labor—no questions asked, for the life of the original PC.
Discussing Intel’s previous position, Grove said, “To some people, this seemed arrogant and uncaring. We apologize for that.”
So what does a consumer with a Pentium do? Teach Intel that this isn’t about white paper. It’s about green paper—the money you paid and the performance you didn’t get. Replace that chip. After all, consumers deserve to be treated with respect, courtesy and a little common sense.
Now apply all of that Intel stuff to Chipotle.
They even took out a full-page ad to apologize, just like Intel, but people still read newspapers 20 years ago. Today, the strategy seems hopelessly out of touch for a tragically hipster company.
Chipotle is the opposite, focusing too much on consumer whims and not enough on food science, and now it’s going to get worse.
The County’s chronology includes detailed tracking of the complaints as they came in and as the illnesses were confirmed as Norovirus victims. From that first report through Sept. 25, 2015, the chronology comes to this conclusion: ”the total number of reportedly ill customers and employees at this Chipotle outbreak investigation is 234.”
The number of victims was being reported in other media as recently as this week as just 98.
And, the internal document says the real number of victims of Chipotle’s Simi Valley outbreak could be higher still. “In reviewing the food logs provided by Chipotle for both 8/18/15 and 8/19/15, it is estimated at least 1500+ entrees were sold each day.” Sandy Murray, who did the analysis for the division, wrote: “Thus, the actual number of customers and employees ill from this outbreak is likely to be substantially higher than the reported number of 234.”
This week Chipotle ran print advertisements in 60 newspaper markets Wednesday with an apology from Steve Ells, the burrito chain’s founder and co-chief executive. His apology though only went to the victims of the current nine state E. coli 026 outbreak and the Boston College outbreak.
“From the beginning, all of our food safety programs have met or exceeded industry standards, “ Ells says (Pinto defense). “But recent incidents, an E. coli outbreak that sickened 52 people and a Norovirus outbreak that sickened approximately 140 people at a single Chipotle restaurant in Boston, have shown us that we need to do better, much better.”
No mention was made of the other foodborne outbreaks.
The publicly traded Chipotle also had one of its better days since its troubles began. CMG stock was up 2.49 percent or $13.79 per share, closing at $568.65 per share.
CNBC, where business analysts who look like Louis C.K. like to yell like Lewis Black, asked Chipotle executives how they will change their business after five recent outbreaks. Their answer was: food safety is really, really important to us now.
“We want to show all of our customers that the industry standards that we had been employing before — which are considered great standards — were not good enough. They were not good enough because something like this could happen,” said founder and co-CEO Steve Ells.
“I will say though, that we can assure you today that there is no E. coli in Chipotle,” Ells said. “We have thoroughly tested our food, we have thoroughly tested our surfaces and we are confident that Chipotle is a safe place to eat.” He also confirmed that the company’s new safety measures will put Chipotle well ahead of industry standards.
To find out of the company has been punished enough, Cramer spoke with Ells and co-CEO Monty Moran.
To implement a rigorous safety protocol, the executive said the company is working with a leading epidemiology team to develop new safety systems. Chipotle is widely known for its integrity in food selection and culture. Cramer asked the Chipotle leaders whether eating with integrity comes at the price of safety?
“We do not believe there is anything less safe about eating that way, and we believe that what we need to do now is put that same innovation that we put toward food with integrity and that we put toward our very special people culture — we’ve got to put that same kind of innovation into food safety now,” Moran said.
There are three important things in my life: my family and friends, hockey, and food safety.
In that order.
A few weeks ago Doug and I had a conversation about the hockey rink being our church; we share fellowship, care about our community and want to share our joy with others; the hours we spend on the ice playing, coaching and skating are unlike anything else we do.
Or as one of my friends put it, ‘The nice thing about hockey is for an hour I tend to forget about all the other crap that’s going on and hang out with folks that share my passion for the game.’
And enjoy the company of people we care about.
A teammate had a shocking tragedy in his family this week and while our team debated cancelling our game, we decided to play tonight. It gives us a place to go to talk about how our community can support our close friend.
I guess that’s what church is all about, too.
Some people have that same feeling about food brands, I guess.
Jack Stalling of the Longview News-Journal writes, Blue Bell Ice Cream is sort of a church and he’s rejoicing that it is back on the market.
Shortly after I married my lovely wife back in February of 1998, Rachel and I treated ourselves to a night out that included dinner and a movie.
Dinner was outstanding, and both of us claimed to be way too stuffed to even consider having dessert.
When I noticed that the restaurant offered Blue Bell homemade vanilla ice cream on apple pie as one of its dessert choices, I undid another notch on my belt and asked the nice waitress to bring it as fast as her tired legs would carry her.
I could tell Rachel was confused, so I explained one of my fundamental beliefs to my new bride.
“Never pass up the opportunity to eat Blue Bell,” I told her. “Even if you don’t want it right then, some day you might really want some Blue Bell, and if it’s not available, you will remember the time you passed up the opportunity to eat Blue Bell. Do you want that sort of thing creeping into your dreams at night and haunting you?”
As I was deciding what to order, Depeche Mode’s cover of Route 66 came on the radio. This turned out to the absolute perfect soundtrack for my experience. Its cold, clean synth beat was a perfect match for the sterile and antiseptic decor, while David Gahan’s slightly evil baritone voice spoke of infection and the dangers of travel in our modern age – of the danger of seeking “kicks”, and a deal with the devil. Was I gambling with my life, with my eternal soul, by eating Chipotle?
I went ahead anyway, and ordered a barbacoa steak bowl, with white cilantro/lime rice, black beans, sour cream and lettuce. (Guacamole was extra, and I don’t appreciate when restaurants charge extra for things that other restaurants provide gratis, so I skipped it.) I asked for the hottest salsa available, imagining the acid in the habanero peppers might kill any virus or bacteria hiding in my food. Also, I like spicy food.
At the cash register, I found an even better safety precaution. Chipotle serves margaritas! This was a surprise. It felt like going to a McDonald’s and getting to order a martini with your Happy Meal. Whatever E coli or salmonella or norovirus the salsa didn’t burn into oblivion, I figured, would be pickled to anodyne by tequila.
The lady at the cash register was friendly. I asked her if she’d noticed a drop-off in business in the wake of the outbreaks.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “There are way less people coming in lately.”
“But then we’ve got our regulars,” she added, nodding to the people at the tables. “We got people that come every day. They say, ‘I don’t care!’”
I’m enjoying the new Daily Show with Trevor Noah. And this piece by Jordan Klepper on Dec. 2, 2015, beautifully skewers the vanities of foodies (I’m told that’s not a word anymore) everywhere.
“This is a cost that we will bear,” Ells told The Associated Press at the beginning of a day stopping by Seattle restaurants to talk to employees about new food safety rules.
Suppliers who are unwilling to meet the new “high resolution testing” requirements, which Ells said are years ahead of testing procedures at other restaurant chains, will no longer do business with Chipotle.
Um, McDonald’s has been imposing such food safety metrics on its suppliers since the mid-1980s.
Ells said the company’s approach to food safety is similar to its focus on food quality and none of the new procedures are impossible or very difficult to follow. It’s easier at some other chains to meet the highest food safety standards because everything is cooked, processed or frozen, which Ells said is not the Chipotle way.
Ells doesn’t understand food safety.
Chipotle is now focused on getting the chance of foodborne illness as close to zero percent as possible, Ells said. But, he added, “it is impossible to insure that there is a zero percent chance of any kind of foodborne illness anytime anyone eats anywhere.”
Um, I wrote a book in 1996 that said zero-risk was a food safety fallacy, echoing the work of many before me.
It would be better to say, this is how we’re reducing the risk, Mr.-5-outbreaks-in-6-months Ells, explain it, and then when ready, market it.
Henry I. Miller wrote in Forbes yesterday — The long defeat of doing nothing well — inspired by a line from poet John Masefield, seems apt: Chipotle, the once-popular Mexican restaurant chain, is experiencing a well-deserved downward spiral.
The company found it could pass off a fast-food menu stacked with high-calorie, sodium-rich options as higher quality and more nutritious because the meals were made with locally grown, genetic engineering-free ingredients. And to set the tone for the kind of New Age-y image the company wanted, Chipotle adopted slogans like, “We source from farms rather than factories” and, “With every burrito we roll or bowl we fill, we’re working to cultivate a better world.”
Outbreaks of food poisoning have become something of a Chipotle trademark; the recent ones are the fourth and fifth this year, one of which was not disclosed to the public. A particularly worrisome aspect of the company’s serial deficiencies is that there have been at least three unrelated pathogens in the outbreaks–Salmonella and E. coli bacteria and norovirus. In other words, there has been more than a single glitch; suppliers and employees have found a variety of ways to contaminate what Chipotle cavalierly sells (at premium prices) to its customers.
When you order truffle risotto at an upscale restaurant—the kind that lists local farms at the top of its menu—you might expect that the dish is prepared fresh, from-scratch in the kitchen. But at Fig & Olive, the $26 truffle risotto (no longer on the menu) was pre-cooked and frozen at a central commissary in Long Island City, New York, then shipped to restaurants around the country, where it was reheated with cheese and garnished.
In fact, the commissary supplies Fig & Olive restaurants with nearly 200 dish components, including soups, sauces, purees, dressings, desserts, breads, ratatouille, ravioli, crab cakes, pre-cooked chicken tagine, pre-cooked paella, and more.
Fig & Olive representatives declined to comment, but a Freedom of Information Act request to the D.C. Department of Health by Washington City Paper reveals new details about how the restaurant sourced and prepared food linked to a salmonella outbreak this fall. Fig & Olive diners from D.C. to California suffered from the potentially fatal bacterial infection, which forced DOH to shut down the new CityCenter, DC restaurant for six days in September.
The D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences tested 84 environmental and food samples from Fig & Olive, but none tested positive for salmonella. That said, DOH Director LaQuandra Nesbitt stated that it’s rare to isolate a particular ingredient in an outbreak. DOH did, however, home in on truffle oil as a common ingredient among many who got sick, and the restaurant removed all dishes with truffle oil from its menu after it reopened.
Fig & Olive’s brand centers around the 30 olive oils (including truffle oil) carrying its name and sold at retail. Emails between Fig & Olive representatives and DOH reveal the restaurant chain’s truffle oil supplier was Veronica Foods, but they have reportedly since switched to International Gourmet Foods.
In addition to testing samples from the D.C. restaurant, investigators had hoped to collect food samples at Fig & Olive’s New York commissary. Unfortunately, they never got the chance. On Oct. 6, the Centers for Disease Control, leading a multi-state investigation, shared the following update from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration with health officials:
New York District Office initiated an inspection at the Fig and Olive Commissary on 10/1/15 jointly with an investigator from New York State Department of Agriculture & Markets. Currently, no product is available for sampling. The Firm stated they’re currently not in production and haven’t been since “on or about 09/18/2015.” There has been no indication of when production will resume. The Firm does not have any pertinent products on premise. There are no mushrooms readily available for sampling. The firm also serves as a storage facility for a variety of private label “Fig & Olive Retail Collection” olive oils, to which they ship to their 8 locations to be sold.
Even investigators seemed surprised by some recipe shortcuts. In conversations attempting to identify a possible contamination point, a CDC epidemiologist asked a DOH epidemiologist if she know whether Fig & Olive’s truffle olive oil aioli was made with raw or pasteurized eggs. The answer was neither. The DOH epidemiologist noted the chef told her he uses Hellmann’s mayonnaise instead.
“Ha. So I guess even fancy restaurants use name brand mayo for their aioli,” the CDC epidemiologist wrote in an email.
“It was a bit of a surprise!” her DOH counterpart remarked.
Outbreaks happen all the time. The majority are avoidable and can be linked to a few factors or bad decisions. While I’m a self-described outbreak junkie, it’s not the gore of vomit and barf associated with tragic incidents that I’m interested in. While the stories are important, I’m not into embellishment to scare folks into behavior change.
The philosophy I subscribe to is to present folks who make decisions, from the teenage produce stock boy to the CEO of a food company, with the risks and consequences of their actions. And let them make a decision. Hopefully they choose to avoid making people sick.
I’m an outbreak junkie because the sick and the dead are real people with families; individuals whose lives changed because they ate something. Something, for the most part, that wasn’t supposed to make them ill.
And if nothing is learned from those illnesses, and changes made, food doesn’t get any safer.
Sam Wood of Philly.com reports today that less than a year after being linked to an outbreak that sickened over 100 lawyers and law students, Joy Tsin Lau is still having trouble managing food safety.
Five pounds of raw duck feet and another five pounds of seaweed were tossed into the garbage last week after a city health inspector returned to Joy Tsin Lau.
The inspector took the temperature of the feet and found they weren’t cold enough. At 44 degrees Fahrenheit, they were in what the USDA considers the “danger zone,” where dangerous bacteria can double every 20 minutes.
Inspector Thomas Kolb cited the restaurant for three foodborne risk factors and four lesser violations. The restaurant’s owner did not return calls for comment Monday.
