Carmen Chai of Global News reports that Rick Holley, a veteran food safety expert and University of Manitoba professor emeritus says these are the five things he won’t eat:
Raw shellfish and seafood
Raw sprouts and chopped raw vegetables and fruits
(“I do not eat sprouts, unless they’re cooked.”
He eats the chopped salads from the grocery store, though.
“I’m confessing now that I accept the risk because I value the convenience,” he said.
If you’re chopping up vegetables and fruit, they’re safe to eat for about four hours if kept at room temperature. In the fridge, they can last for up to three days, he said.)
Unpasteurized drinks
Undercooked meat
Undercooked eggs.
“My wife doesn’t like to sit with me at dinner and have guests in because, invariably, the conversation rotates to subjects near and dear to my heart and that’s contamination,” Holley joked.
Blue Bell announced Wednesday it was recalling select flavors of ice cream distributed across the South and made at its Sylacauga, Alabama, plant after finding chocolate chip cookie dough from a third-party supplier — Iowa-based Aspen Hills Inc. — that was potentially contaminated with listeria.
Blue Bell halted sales, issued a voluntarily recall of all its products in April 2015 and shut down its three plants due to bacteria contamination that was linked to 10 listeria cases in four states, including three deaths in Kansas. The company, headquartered in Brenham, about 70 miles outside Houston, resumed selling its products about four months later. Before resuming production, the company said it had implemented new cleaning and sanitizing procedures at its facilities, as well as new testing programs and new employee training.
The iconic ice cream brand is beloved in Texas, where people impatiently awaited its return to store shelves after the recall.
No illnesses have been reported from the latest recall of ice cream distributed in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, Blue Bell said.
Blue Bell said on Thursday in an email to The Associated Press that it found listeria contamination in packages of cookie dough ingredient received from Aspen Hills.
But a statement from Aspen Hills said its cookie dough product tested negative for listeria before it was shipped to Blue Bell and that the “positive listeria results were obtained by Blue Bell only after our product had been in their control for almost two months.”
Aspen Hills said that Blue Bell is the only customer who received the cookie dough product “included in our voluntary recall.” Blue Bell has been a customer of Aspen Hills since January.
Highland Council, which is leading in the investigation at the family-run Connage Highland Dairy in Ardersier said there is no link “at this stage” to any cases of illness or the on-going E.coli O157 outbreak which has resulted in the death of a child in Bearsden.
The E.coli outbreak resulted in the shutting down in the operations of another family-run award-winning cheesemaker Lanarkshire-base Errington Cheese whose cheese has been linked to the outbreak.
Highland Council environmental health officers are liaising with Food Standards Scotland in the probe.
The council said that the organic cheese firm had contacted the council voluntarily regarding issues with their own internal quality testing, triggering the probe.
A spokesman said: “Environmental Health officers are investigating the matter and further sampling has been carried out.
“The council are liaising with Food Standards Scotland on the investigation. There is no link at this stage to any cases of illness or the ongoing E.coli O157 outbreak in Scotland.”
Callum Clark, who runs the business with wife, Jill insisted it is not connected to the E.coli outbreak and there was “nothing actually wrong”.
“We asked them to come in. Obviously environmental health are all a bit sensitive and on high alert on everything with the Errington thing,” he said. “Everyone is extra edgy over that.
“We are being fully helpful and co-operating with environmental health. It’s just the testing regime we are looking at.”
Owned and run by the Clark family, Connage Highland Dairy has been using traditional techniques to produce a range of organic, handcrafted, vegetarian cheeses since the family farm opened in 2006.
As the third case of Guillain-Barre Syndrome has been linked to the Campylobacter contamination of Havelock North’s water supply, New Zealand, chlorinating water in Christchurch’s northwest is off the table, for now.
The council instead decided to accelerate a $16 million programme to replace 22 shallow bores, supplying 80,000 northwest households.
The work was originally due to be finished by June 30, 2018, but most of the wells would now be decommissioned by March 2017. Fourteen of the most vulnerable shallow wells have already either been decommissioned or shut down.
Accelerating the work would cost an additional $480,000.
The council would also embark on a programme to raise community awareness of the risks of drinking untreated water from the shallow bores.
Canterbury’s medical officer of health, Alistair Humphrey, last month asked the council to explain why its continued use of the shallow wells did not present “an untenable risk”. Humphrey’s request was prompted by a gastro outbreak caused by campylobacter in the water supplying the town of Havelock North in Hawke’s Bay.
Staff will now talk to Humphrey to see if he was satisfied with the council’s response, without chlorinating the water. They will report back to the council in November.
Water from the bores was tested for E.coli daily, but it took at least 24 hours to get the results, so there was always a 24-hour period where contamination could go undetected, council three waters and waste boss John Mackie said.
He said the council complied with the water standards, but his professional advice to the council was to chlorinate the water, which would eliminate the risk.
Mayor Lianne Dalziel asked Mackie if the risk from the shallow bores had changed in the last few years. He said no.
She said it was only the perception of risk that had been heightened since the Havelock North contamination.
Laura Fonda of Queen Anne View reports that Toulouse-Petit Kitchen & Lounge (601 Queen Anne Ave N) has been temporarily closed down by King County heath officials as they investigate possible food poisoning at the restaurant.
According to King County Public Health, six out of seven people from the same party ate at the restaurant and became ill with symptoms consistent with a bacterial infection such as Salmonellosis or Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. The potential food source is still under investigation, but Public Health notes that the party had consumed food items that may increase the risk of foodborne illness, including raw beef and raw egg.
Public Health investigated the restaurant today and found “several problems including room temperature storage, inadequate refrigeration and improper cooling of potentially hazardous foods and cross contamination, which resulted in temporary suspension of the restaurant’s permit.”
The salmonella illness emerged after fundraiser for a volunteer fire department in Rutherford county.
“Salmonella can be very serious and cause death in some people,” said deputy state epidemiologist John Dunn.
No one died, but several people got sick, some hospitalized.
“We know of a number of others — 18 total so far and hearing of more and all attended the Lascassas Fire Department fish fry on September 10th,” said Dunn.
More than 400 people attended the event at the station on Lascassas Pike. The meal included fried fish and chicken along with homemade white beans other sides an array of desserts.
Since then, many were sickened by salmonella and shared their experiences on Facebook.
One woman lost 15 pounds, another ended up in the hospital, and one was sick for over a week and still not 100 percent.
This was the first time something like this has ever happened at a Lascassas Volunteer Fire fundraiser.
A case–control study was conducted to identify the source of the outbreak. STEC O26 infection was identified in 20 children (median age 17 months) with HUS, two of whom reported severe neurological sequelae. No cases in adults were detected. Molecular typing showed that two distinct STEC O26:H11 strains were involved. The case–control study showed an association between STEC O26 infection and consumption of dairy products from two local plants, but not with specific ready-to-eat products. E.coli O26:H11 strains lacking the stx genes were isolated from bulk milk and curd samples, but their PFGE profiles did not match those of the outbreak isolates.
This outbreak supports the view that infections with Stx2-producing E. coli O26 in children have a high probability of progressing to HUS and represent an emerging public health problem in Europe.
Community-wide outbreak of hemolytic uraemic syndrome associated with Shiga toxin 2-producing Escherichia coli O26:H11 in southern Italy, summer 2013
Eurosurveillance, Volume 21, Issue 38, 22 September 2016
Product may have been distributed in Washington DC, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia thru Lancaster co-op.
The Chevre lot #816 was in 8 oz. shrink wrapped bags, French herb chevre lot #736 was packaged in 8oz. Shrink bag. Both Chevre may also have been in 5 lb. plastic tubs. The Feta lot #836 with expiration 12/16 and Gouda lot 426 was a square block 8oz package or a 5 lb block, also shrink wrapped.
No illnesses have been reported to date.
The recall was the result of a routine sampling program by Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. The samples collected by Pennsylvania were found to be contaminated with Listeria Monocytogenes. We are currently working with PA Department of Agriculture to resolve the issue.
Gary Acuff is the antithesis of Hunter S. Thompson.
Champan and I call him the nicest guy in food safety, but who knows — everyone in those U.S. college towns acts like they came from an audition for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, or Blue Velvet.
His research has focused on improving the microbiological quality and safety of red meat in all areas of production and utilization. Most recent activities have centered on the effective use of surrogate bacteria for validating process controls in Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) systems.
Meatingplace sat down with Acuff after he addressed this year’s Food Safety Summit in Rosemont, Ill.
Meatingplace: What are some of the biggest challenges these processors face in validating their food safety processes?
ACUFF: Maybe the biggest challenge is getting their arms around it because they are convinced that their process works or they wouldn’t be doing it. A typical response is to show negative product samples, but that doesn’t prove your process is working; it just proves that you had a lot of negative samples. Validation is taking a deeper step to actually find the data or generate the data to prove that their process does exactly what they say it is doing. And that’s been difficult for people to start thinking about how to do that.
The next hardest concept becomes not having enough pathogen on their product to show a three-log kill. The answer is, we know you don’t have three logs on there, but we want to know what your process would do if you did have three logs because some day three logs may show up.
Meatingplace: What is the appropriate use of the scientific literature in terms of the validation process?
ACUFF: The scientific literature should be where you start. That’s what you pull out and say, “It looks like we can do something like this and add some control to our process.” I’m not sure that you can take it much further than that.
Meatingplace: When are microbiological studies from laboratories useful and when are they dangerous?
ACUFF: It’s another step. You have the scientific literature. Now you want to try and apply that to your process. If you take that scientific literature and go straight out to the process then you’re going to have a lot of hits and misses before you are successful. But if you do a challenge study in the laboratory you can actually use the pathogen so that gives you even stronger data because you’re looking at the behavior of the pathogen. At the same time, you can run the surrogate organisms parallel to that and use that data to reflect or extrapolate when you use the surrogate in your process.
Michael Hafford of Extra Crispy reported a couple of months ago that Hunter S. Thompson did not hold many things sacred, least of all his sobriety
But he was a real person. And he was a real person who loved breakfast. I, myself, am a boring-ass white boy who read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at age 14 and became enthralled with Thompson’s ability to file while seemingly actively snorting whatever powder was around. And I also love breakfast. So I’ve gotten obsessed with this quotation about Hunter S.Thompson’s breakfast (I also read the Vegas book when I was 14).
“I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert… Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music… All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.”
(Binge watching season 2 of Narcos while I write, I’m continually impressed by the outrageous sweaters worn by cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.)
I view Hunter S. Thompson the way I view all writers talking about their supposed routines: They’re just baiting someone stupid enough to try to recreate them into personal or mental ruin. And yet, the breakfast beckoned to me. How could it not? The sheer amount and variety is completely insane. The food alone is enough to stop one’s heart, let alone the drinking and the dessert cocaine.
So I decided to try to conquer it, this Mt. Olympus of breakfast. My attempt at the breakfast took nearly five hours, inspired a minor argument, and was consumed as close to naked as I could get with a photographer and several other assistants around. I couldn’t be alone for the breakfast—I had a photographer, several people helping with the cooking, and other people that just wanted to gawk—but I cherished my few alone moments and understood why he would have valued his alone time. At times I had to lay down. Once, I vomited. Other times, I wish I had. I think I learned something. Definitely I learned about the limits of my endurance.
Hafford goes into all the details of this 5-hour marathon.
Finishing the breakfast, or coming as close as I did, more or less confirmed my suspicions. This was not a mortal amount of food to eat. Hell, this was not a mortal amount of food to describe eating. I wouldn’t characterize myself as shocked that Hunter S. Thompson would eat (or say he ate) breakfast like this, but I would say I’d be surprised if he did this more than once in his life. This type of eating requires a hotel because it’s elaborate and you couldn’t really find that solitude or nudity anywhere else. Preparing the food took an hour just by itself. One could picture him, cigarette clamped in jaw, growling the order into the phone. One could also picture the person taking the order asking if he needed two place settings.
Raw shellfish and seafood
