Category Archives: Food Safety Policy

Kierkegaard? I don’t even know her: The Danish doctor of dread, and BS from food safety companies

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Without Kierkegaard, where would Woody Allen be?

The 200th anniversary of Soren Kierkegaard’s birth has brought some stereotypical outpourings about angst and existentialism.

Me, it’s better to play hockey.

I have a soft spot for the Danes. Spending five summers hammering nails with a couple of Danish homebuilders in Ontario (that’s in Canada) taught me the value of being well-read and beer at morning coffee, lunch, and afternoon coffee. My friend John Kierkegaard would say, the beer is nice, but the work, it isn’t really so good.

When I went to Copenhagen in 1998 for a scientific meeting, there was beer at morning coffee.

Gordon Marino wrote in The New York Times that the way we negotiate anxiety plays no small part in shaping our lives and character.  And yet, historically speaking, the lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, have all but repressed thinking about that amorphous feeling that haunts many of us hour by hour, and day by day. The 19th-century philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard stands as a striking exception to this rule. It was because of this virtuoso of the inner life that other members of the Socrates guild, such as Heidegger and Sartre, could begin to philosophize about angst.

The adytum of Kierkegaard’s understanding of anxiety is located in his work “The Concept of Anxiety” — a book at once so profound and byzantine that it seems to aim at evoking the very feeling it dissects.

Perhaps more than any other philosopher, Kierkegaard reflected on the question of how to communicate the truths that we live by — that is the truths about ethics and religion.

“Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. A person keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there.”

Kierkegaard understood that anxiety can ignite all kinds of transgressions and maladaptive behaviors — drinking, carousing, obsessions with work, you name it. We will do most anything to steady ourselves from the dizzying feeling that can take almost anything as its object. However, Kierkegaard also believed that, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”

In his “Works of Love,” Kierkegaard remarks that all talk about the spirit has to be metaphorical.  Sometimes anxiety is cast as a teacher, and at others, a form of surgery. The prescription in “The Concept of Anxiety” and other texts is that if we can, as the Buddhists say, “stay with the feeling” of anxiety, it will spirit away our finite concerns and educate us as to who we really are, “Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them.” According to Kierkegaard’s analysis, anxiety like nothing else brings home the lesson that I cannot look to others, to the crowd, when I want to measure my progress in becoming a full human being.

But this, of course, is not the counsel you are likely to hear these days at the mental health clinic.

I can attest to that.

So when Tyson launches a no antibiotics ever campaign, it is appealing to crass consumerism, making a buck, and throwing science back to when Kierkegaard was born.

We want our social media and technology, but we want our food produced in some 200-year-old barn.

Tyson President and CEO Tom Hayes said earlier this year that the company would continue to innovate in product development while remaining focused on sustainable production practices. “For us, sustainability isn’t a single issue; it’s about focusing on multiple dimensions in order to advance the whole,” Hayes said during the 2017 Consumer Analyst Group of New York (CAGNY) Conference in Boca Raton, Florida. “We will use our reach, capabilities and resources to drive positive change at a scale we believe no other company can match.”

Amy and I went to a Phoenix Coyotes hockey game when Wayne was coach, maybe 2006, and this loudmouth behind us was bragging about some cougar he hooked up with in Boca.

That’s your benchmark, Tyson.

I have vague memories of another company, back in 2006, that turned its back on science and proclaimed no antibiotics.

They forgot about food safety, too busy being posers.

How’s that working out, Chipotle?

The language of this presser is full swallow-whole.

The company’s sustainability plans include establishing strategic partnerships to set science-based sustainability goals; continuing third-party audits of farms to certify humane treatment of chickens; improving how chickens are raised through a concept farm, with innovations designed to be better for the birds, the environment and food safety; and increasing transparency across the business, including sustainability efforts.

I’ve know people who can write this stuff.

Not me.

Not Kierkegaard

I’ve got no genius for evil, that makes me common.

The name “Kierkegaard” means “graveyard,” and “Søren” is an affectionate Danish moniker for the Devil.

Sorenne, you know you have some devil in you, and some science.

I don’t go to restaurants much anymore: Too many fake beliefs, not enough science

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Beginning in April, 2011, 190 people were sickened with Salmonella Heidelberg linked to partially-cooked chicken livers throughout six U.S. states.

There have been endless outbreaks, especially of Campylobacter in the UK linked to similar products.

Stephen Luscombe, who runs the Golden Ball in Lower Assendon, UK, admitted serving undercooked calves’ liver in 2015.

Two diners suffered food poisoning and others suffered symptoms after eating a dish containing the meat at the restaurant.

Luscombe was fined £4,434, ordered to pay £5,284 costs and a victim surcharge of £120. 

Luscombe admitted serving food on the premises that was unsafe as it had been inadequately cooked and failing to implement and maintain legally required food safety procedures, including those for the safe cooking of high risk foods. 

Magistrates heard South Oxfordshire District Council, the environmental health authority, was asked to investigate after a member of the public suffered campylobacter food poisoning after eating at the restaurant.

Environmental health officers carried out an immediate unannounced inspection and found that the diners had been offered a set menu including calves’ liver for the main course.

They found the calves’ liver had been cooked at too low a temperature.

The restaurant was found to have no protocol to ensure high risk items, such as liver, were cooked according to recommendations from the Food Standards Agency.

It also failed to complete required monitoring records for almost three months, meaning it was failing to meet its legal requirements for food safety. 

Food fraud: CFIA lays charges after regular cheese passed off cheese as kosher at kids’ camp

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I don’t get the kosher-halal food thing, seems to involve excessive animal suffering, but hey, who doesn’t want to make a buck and fly live animals for slaughter 150 years after frozen food transport was invented.

According to Michele Henry of the Toronto Star, for the first time in Canada, the country’s food inspection agency has laid criminal charges against a businessman and his company for allegedly trying to pass off run-of-the-mill food as kosher.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has charged Creation Foods and its vice-president, Kefir Sadiklar, with sending cheddar cheese falsely described as “kosher” to Jewish summer camps in June 2015. The agency alleges forged documents were created to make it seem like the cheese adhered to Jewish dietary laws.

The regulatory body, which polices food labels across Canada, has laid five charges against Sadiklar and his family-run Woodbridge-based distributor related to cheese products sent to two camps — Camp Moshava near Peterborough and Camp Northland-B’nai Brith in Haliburton.

The agency alleges that forged letters of kosher certification were slipped into boxes of non-kosher Gay Lea Ivanhoe shredded “Ivanhoe Old Cheddar Cheese” that Creation delivered to “strictly kosher” Jewish summer camps in June 2015. Kosher products are typically sold at a higher price than non-kosher products.

In an email to the Star, the federal food inspection agency said this is the first case it “has brought before a provincial court related to the misrepresentation of a kosher food product.”

Sadiklar, 39, is scheduled to make his next appearance in Newmarket court on May 20.

If convicted, he and Creation could face steep fines and even jail time.

The allegations made by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have not been tested in court.

The term “kosher” refers to food that follows Judaism’s strict dietary rules that dictate not only what observant Jews can eat, but how the food is prepared and handled. In the case of making cheese, a rabbi would be responsible for adding the coagulation enzyme at the first stage and certifying that no non-kosher products touched the kosher cheese on the line.

A rabbi has more microbiological knowledge than a microbiologist?

Market food passed on safety, not some weird religious stuff.

If god was so caring, why are so many people getting sick from the food they eat?(Darwin had the same problem with religion after his daughter, Annie, died at 10-years-old).

Kelly oysters brand Gigas Oysters recalled due to domoic acid

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One of the first science columns I ever wrote for a newspaper 36-years ago was about domoic acid in shellfish.

Everything old is new again.

According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency DOM International Limited is recalling Kelly Oysters brand Gigas Oysters from the marketplace due to marine biotoxin which causes amnesic shellfish poisoning. Consumers should not consume and retailers, hotels, restaurants and institutions should not sell, serve or use the recalled product described below.

This recall was triggered by the company. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is conducting a food safety investigation, which may lead to the recall of other products. If other high-risk products are recalled, the CFIA will notify the public through updated Food Recall Warnings.

There have been no reported illnesses associated with the consumption of this product.

This is what creativity looks like at its ugly peak (even though this was filmed with makeup and tricks 7 years after being written, it’s still the best vid)

We don’t need no education: Why PR flunkery fails

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I could never do PR.

It’s so much about swallowing whole.

I’ve done it, I’ve applied for jobs, but it makes me feel nauseous.

In a Cormey-Team America way.

My grandfather – the original Homer — was the asparagus baron of Canada.

100 acres that he sold at the door in Alliston, Ontario (that’s in Canada) in the 1960s and 70s, and my cousin is making a living with 40 acres outside Cambridge, Ontario (also in Canada – Barrie’s Asparagus).

There’s this guy at the University of Guelph who has been doing the PR thing for decades. I once asked his boss, a good scientist, do you know how much bullshit this guy is spinning?

And he said yeah, but that was what the system required.

Swallow whole.

(Oh, and to my Ontario farmer friends, I understand it’s been a bit wet. Adapt).

But this isn’t about asparagus.

It’s about the weird perversion that a bunch of groups have to educate consumers.

The U.S. just went through the dumbest electoral cycle in its history, and people want to be educated?

No it’s the rise of idiocracy.

In the past week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration got $3 million to educate consumers about genetically engineered foods, Cargill unveiled its Non-GMO Project partnership, which is stupid beyond belief (and knowing that Cargill’s Mike Robach, vice-president, corporate food safety, quality & regulatory is chair of the Global Food Safety Initiative’s board of directors makes me question the value of any food safety audit ever sanctioned by GFSI), and the National cattlemen’s Beef Association has produced “two fact sheets on beef production and processing, available to consumers seeking more information about their steaks and other cuts, and how they got to the plate,” to educate consumers makes me want to scream.

How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

Whenever a group says the public needs to be educated about food safety, biotechnology, trans fats, organics or anything else, that group has utterly failed to present a compelling case for their cause. Individuals can choose to educate themselves about all sorts of interesting things, but the idea of educating someone is doomed to failure. And it’s sorta arrogant to state that others need to be educated; to imply that if only you understood the world as I understand the world, we would agree and dissent would be minimized.

There’s a shitload of academic literature about the value of story-telling, about providing information rather than educating, withholding judgement, but these assholes can’t help themselves.

They know better.

Waste money.

My farmer relatives who interact with people daily know a whole lot more than you.

Audits and inspections are never enough: A critique to enhance food safety

30.aug.12

Food Control

D.A. Powell, S. Erdozain, C. Dodd, R. Costa, K. Morley, B.J. Chapman

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956713512004409?v=s5

Abstract

Internal and external food safety audits are conducted to assess the safety and quality of food including on-farm production, manufacturing practices, sanitation, and hygiene. Some auditors are direct stakeholders that are employed by food establishments to conduct internal audits, while other auditors may represent the interests of a second-party purchaser or a third-party auditing agency. Some buyers conduct their own audits or additional testing, while some buyers trust the results of third-party audits or inspections. Third-party auditors, however, use various food safety audit standards and most do not have a vested interest in the products being sold. Audits are conducted under a proprietary standard, while food safety inspections are generally conducted within a legal framework. There have been many foodborne illness outbreaks linked to food processors that have passed third-party audits and inspections, raising questions about the utility of both. Supporters argue third-party audits are a way to ensure food safety in an era of dwindling economic resources. Critics contend that while external audits and inspections can be a valuable tool to help ensure safe food, such activities represent only a snapshot in time. This paper identifies limitations of food safety inspections and audits and provides recommendations for strengthening the system, based on developing a strong food safety culture, including risk-based verification steps, throughout the food safety system.

Power of going public: 30 children in Jerusalem daycare sick with Salmonella

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Arutz Sheva of Israel National News reports that on April 30, a report was received from the mother of an infant enrolled in an Emunah daycare in Jerusalem claiming infants and toddlers in one of the daycare’s classes were suffering stomachaches and intestinal disturbances.

According to Ynet, an investigation by the Jerusalem District Health Office found the problems had begun several days earlier, in the daycare’s 2-year-old class, when 15 of the class’s 24 children became ill and one was hospitalized.

In the infants’ group, 15 out of 18 infants became ill, and one was hospitalized.

Last Wednesday, the Health Office received the results of the various tests performed, and found that one of the sick children tested positive for salmonella.

A district health supervisor was immediately sent to the daycare, where they found that both breakfast and lunch were served hot and made on the premises. The supervisor also made a list of health hazards which the daycare will need to fix.

During the visit, the supervisor took samples of food stored in the daycare since April 28. Though the samples did not test positive for salmonella, they did test positive for several other pathogens.

Ron Doering: Of course I’m proud of CFIA, why isn’t the rest of Canada?

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Doering writes: The 20th anniversary of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA)  seems to have gone by unnoticed, even by the CFIA. Has it lived up to the original vision? Has it achieved its promise from 20 years ago?

Of course I‘m not an unbiased observer. In April, 1995 I was given the lead responsibility to carry out the consultation on how Canada should reorganize its food inspection and related activities. I put together the team to carry out the review.  We called ourselves the Office of Food Inspection Systems (OFIS). When we completed the consultation, we  recommended the most ambitious of the options reviewed–that the government should create a new independent legislated agency with the full regulatory authority for the whole food chain. Our Minister Ralph Goodale went to Cabinet in  the late fall of 1995 and the Chretien Government adopted our recommendation. OFIS was also given the lead to set it up and we got the historic legislation through in time to open the doors on April 1, 1997. Later I served as its President until I retired from the public service. 

Looking back on the original OFIS documents, the CFIA was created to meet five broad objectives. How well have these been met? 

Enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of federal food inspection and related services. The CFIA clearly met this goal. $44 million dollars were saved.  Overlap and duplication was reduced. Sixteen programs that had formerly been delivered by four different departments were brought under one roof. Consumers and industry now have one point of contact. 

Provide integrated governance of food safety, plant health and animal health. This was fully achieved.    We are still the only jurisdiction in the world that brings under one agency the whole food chain: feed, seeds, fertilizer, all food including fish as well as animal and plant health. The value of this integration has been widely recognized. For example, Canada managed the challenge of BSE better than most countries because senior officials in charge of animal health were also in charge of food safety. This integration also accounts for our fully integrated investigation and recall system led by the widely-respected Office of Food Safety and Recall (OFSR). Canadians now take this single point of contact for granted. Remember, for example, that in the US it is still the case that a vegetarian pizza is the responsibility of FDA but a pepperoni pizza falls under the jurisdiction of USDA etc.

Enhance international market access.  The CFIA has harmonized technical trade areas, negotiated many international equivalency agreements, challenged misuse of technical measures and played a major role in influencing international standards. Former OFIS member and afterwards CFIA Vice-President Peter Brackenridge has noted that “with the changing international trade environment, a single organization like the CFIA is well placed to manage the challenge of protectionism by the misuse of technical standards.”

Enhance Provincial and Federal regulatory harmonization.  Former OFIS member and afterwards CFIA Vice-President Cam Prince notes that this is one area where progress has not met our original expectations. This issue may take on increased impetus in light of the recently announced Canadian Free Trade Agreement but there continues to be major international trade law barriers to full intergovernmental harmonization.

Modernize Canadian Food Law. In 1999 the CFIA introduced  First Reading of Bill C-80 which would have provided a truly modernized legal basis for the regulation of food and related activities but it did not proceed for political reasons. With the current Safe Food for Canadians Act (and Regulations) now being completed, finally we will have a more modern legal foundation for the future, though not as integrated as the former Bill would have provided. 

With an annual budget of over $700 million and over 6,000 staff the CFIA is, by far, Canada’s largest science-based regulatory agency, respected within the federal system, by the provinces and admired around the world as a model. 

The CFIA has met most of our original expectations. While there have been bumps along the road, Canadians should be proud of the CFIA’s many achievements. Its anniversary should be celebrated.

Stop making sense: Why risk communication sucks

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I was lying on the floor, ordered to remove my shoes, and asked: “What do I think of when I hear the term, GMO.”

This was about 1995, and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food – always a Ministry, stick with the gospel – had brought in some French marketing guru who apparently got famous selling coffee on the aroma, and he was now going to tell us how to sell genetically engineered foods.

We also got to sit behind one-way mirrors and watch people react to terms which, while voyeuristic, was completely dumb and cost taxpayers a few hundred thousand.

It was at that point I solidified my view of stop the bullshit, you wanna sell genetically engineered food, brag about it or go home.

Now, after a decade of disappointing results to reduce the number of people barfing from foodborne illness – nothing to do with GE foods — it’s time for fresh approaches.

Same as it ever was.

barfblog.com has no sponsors – government, industry or academic – so we’ll try a few things.

It won’t be polite.

People barfing and dying from a meal is unacceptable in a so-called advanced society.

And look for our new boy band (of writers) Food Safety Assholes.

My PhD is in food science, but it was really risk communication as related to food.

That was over 20 years ago.

Academics and consultants are still reinventing the wheel and still making a good buck at it.

Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post reports the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will fund a campaign to promote genetically modified organisms in food under a bipartisan agreement to keep the government funded through the end of September.

People don’t want to be educated, they want to be compelled, with decent stories.

More than 50 agriculture and food industry groups had signed on to an April 18 letter urging the funding to counter “a tremendous amount of misinformation about agricultural biotechnology in the public domain.” 

As David Brooks of the N.Y Times wrote about Donald Trump, he’s a “political pond skater — one of those little creatures that flit across the surface, sort of fascinating to watch, but have little effect as they go.”

Same with all the GMO social actors in this 20-year-old fairytale.

Been there, done that. The ditch is more interesting than the road.

A comparative study of communication about food safety before, during, and after the “Mad Cow” crisis

The Oxford Handbook on the Science of Science Communication, Matteo Ferrari, 2017

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=lang_en&id=HSjADgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA133&ots=mJpAHnOqBA&sig=59L03Bb3gH2bnlnpEfuAhIv4H-8#v=onepage&q&f=false

The “mad cow’ saga provides useful insights into the complexities that surround public communication on food safety issues. The first part of the chapter describes the most important scientific characteristics of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and its human counterpart, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The second section offers an account of the unfolding of the public communication before, during, and after the BSE crisis, including the diverse positions adopted by different countries and the legal reforms enacted to improve risk communication. The final part provides an analysis of the key features of the mad cow crisis: the importance of trust and transparently, the uncertainties that can characterize scientific information, the effects of cognitive bias, and the role of cultural context. All these factors contributes to both the amplifying and downplaying-depending on the place and time- of the BSE risk in the public mind. 

840X greater risk from raw milk and products

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Risk comparisons are generally risky.

I avoid them.

But if some folks are going to push a point, expect some push back.

Risk comparisons depend on meals consumed. Not many Americans consume raw milk or raw milk cheese, yet the products are continuously the source of outbreaks.

The following abstract of a paper takes a stab at quantifying the per-meal problem.

Why has no one published about the imagined safety of raw milk products in a scientific journal?

Because it’s another food safety fairytale.

Until credible data is presented, all the naturalist wankers can take the advice of novelist Kurt Vonnegut, “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?”

And stop wasting public health resources, assholes.

Outbreak-related disease burden associated with consumption of unpasteurized cow’s milk and cheese, United States, 2009-2014

Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 23, no. 6, June 2017, Solenne Costard , Luis Espejo, Huybert Groenendaal, and Francisco J. Zagmutt

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/23/6/15-1603_article
The growing popularity of unpasteurized milk in the United States raises public health concerns. We estimated outbreak-related illnesses and hospitalizations caused by the consumption of cow’s milk and cheese contaminated with Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli, Salmonella spp., Listeria monocytogenes, and Campylobacter spp. using a model relying on publicly available outbreak data. In the United States, outbreaks associated with dairy consumption cause, on average, 760 illnesses/year and 22 hospitalizations/year, mostly from Salmonella spp. and Campylobacter spp.

Unpasteurized milk, consumed by only 3.2% of the population, and cheese, consumed by only 1.6% of the population, caused 96% of illnesses caused by contaminated dairy products. Unpasteurized dairy products thus cause 840 (95% CrI 611–1,158) times more illnesses and 45 (95% CrI 34–59) times more hospitalizations than pasteurized products. As consumption of unpasteurized dairy products grows, illnesses will increase steadily; a doubling in the consumption of unpasteurized milk or cheese could increase outbreak-related illnesses by 96%.

‘Some will rob you with a 6-gun, some with a fountain pen’ Why people are smuggling butter into Wisconsin

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Maple syrup thefts in Quebec; adulterated olive oil from Italy; horse meat filler in the EU and apparently everywhere.

The mob’s got its fingers in all kinds of food fraud, but leave it to Wisconsin to quaintly produce a butter smuggler.

Whenever Jean Smith leaves her home in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to visit relatives out of state, she’ll stop in Nebraska to load up on blocks of Kerrygold butter, imported from Ireland, which is banned in the state that calls itself, “America’s Dairyland.”

“Ms. Smith brings back as much Kerrygold butter with her when she visits family in Nebraska,” said a civil lawsuit she and three other butter-lovers filed against Wisconsin in a state court last month. “She keeps large amounts of the butter in her home refrigerator in the hopes that she will have enough to last her until her next out-state trip.”

Kerrygold says the “winds, rain and warming influence of the Gulf Stream all contribute to the lush grass” where the Ireland-based company’s happy cows graze before they’re milked to create butter that’s “silky and creamy and glow a healthy, golden yellow.”

It may be specially crafted but the product is what’s called “ungraded butter,” which doesn’t carry the familiar USDA stamp of approval or in this case a Wisconsin grade. The state is the only one in the U.S. to declare it “unlawful to sell, offer or expose for sale, or have in possession with intent to sell, any butter at retail unless it has been graded.”

M. L. Nestel of The Daily Beast writes that Smith’s lawsuit is the first of three dealing with the butter law this year. In one federal lawsuit, Kerrygold accuses a competitor of trademark infringement for selling “Irishgold” butter. In another federal lawsuit, a small ungraded artisanal butter company called Minerva claims its butter is getting cut out of the Wisconsin market over an outdated technicality.

The 1953 law was rarely enforced until now, maybe because the grading process is grueling.

A grader has to assess in sequential steps the “flavor and aroma, body and texture, color, salt, package and by the use of other tests or procedures approved by the department for ascertaining the quality of butter in whole or part,” according to the state’s website on the matter.

The story goes on to outline the minutia of grading standards, protectionism and bullshit claims.

And, like most food porn, has nothing to do with safety.