Tag Archives: Barfblog

My parents probably saved me from Salmonella

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I always wanted a pet turtle. When I was 10, I was really into comics (nerd alert). There was a comic book store in between my school and house, that I used to spend lots of time at, and all of my allowance. Right around that time, an underground comic book from creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird made its debut: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. What a ridiculous concept, but the coolest thing to this 10-year-old comic nerd. This was before the really cheesy cartoon, and even cheesier movies. When the Ninja Turtles were cool.

I made nunchaku and a bo staff out of broomsticks and chains from the hardware store.  I was a 10-year-old blonde-haired Canadian Napoleon Dynamite.

All of this background to set this up: I also begged my parents for a pet turtle. I was going to keep him in my room, and call him Leonardo. My parents refused and got me a cat instead.

I know it had little to do with pathogen concerns, and lots to do with the potential smell.  However, I’m grateful they shielded me from Salmonellosis.

This week’s food safety infosheet is all about reptile-related food safety concerns.

Download the infosheet here.

Creator of the Kebab (or donair, the after-bar street meat) dies

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Following up on my last post on the passing of the dude who helped create the microwave (and indirectly, caused lots of illnesses in Minnesota) there’s news out of Germany that the creator of the kebab (or donair as it’s known in Halifax or Calgary) has passed away.

 Mahmut Aygün, snack visionary and dab hand with a meat carver, has died of cancer at the age of 87, almost 40 years after permanently changing the drunken dining habits of millions.

The chef was born in Turkey but later moved to Germany in the hope of one day opening his own restaurant. He was serving customers at a snack stall when it dawned on him that kebab meat – a mix of roasted lamb and spices traditionally eaten with rice – could be served differently.

‘I thought how much easier it would be if they could take their food with them,’ he once said.

 (in celebration of the Conchords returning to HBO — the line "I’ll buy you a kebab" is at 2:11)

Donairs have been linked to at least three outbreaks of E.coli O157 in Alberta since 2004. Outbreak investigators found that the cooking practices traditionally used in kebabs and donairs, rotating a cone of meat around a heat source, were problematic.  Often, especially in the post-bar-closing rush, the heat sources are turned up so the outside of the cone gets scorched, but meat just below the surface doesn’t reach safe temperatures (because it’s being cut off quickly to meet the customer demands).  The cooking practice, along with the tendency for the meat cones to be made with ground meat and stored frozen can cause a perfect outbreak scenario.

And then cause the squirts. Or worse.

In response to the outbreaks a national committee was created in Canada to look at the risks associated with the food.  The group recommended that donairs/kebabs/shawarmas/street-meat-on-a-stick should be grilled after cutting off the cone to ensure pathogen-killing temps.  Good call.

I’m all for donairs and street meat. Or late-night chinese food.  Basically anything heavy and greasy tastes good after a few beers, but the places serving them have to know the risks associated with what they are serving, and where things might go wrong. Public health officials and food safety folks need to help businesses with this. If you don’t know what could go wrong, you shouldn’t be serving it.

Here’s a food safety infosheet on donairs from a couple of years ago.

barfblog.com featured in Jan. Food Technology magazine

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Amy is a merciless editor.

Sure, she looks all sugar and spice, cuddling with baby Sorenne (right, exactly as shown), but when it comes to words, Amy’s vicious.

I know Ben cries – silently, inside — whenever he gets edits from Amy.

I tried to get Kansas State public relations to do a press release about the husband and wife barfbloggers, but they weren’t going for it.

Instead, they came out with this after we wrote a paper about our blogging experiences that was just published in the Jan. 2009 issue of Food Technology, the monthly magazine of the Institute of Food Technologists (the full paper is below).

K-State’s Doug Powell, associate professor of diagnostic medicine and
pathobiology, is a co-author of the article "New Media for Communicating Food Safety.” In the article, Powell and the other researchers describe how methods of informing consumers must evolve to fit a new generation of food handlers.

"It is especially important to reach younger individuals, who at some point might handle food in a food service business and who get their information from nontraditional media like blogs," he said.

One such blog is Powell’s barfblog.com, a site that receives more than 5,000 visitors daily. The site operates with the understanding that to compel audiences to change their food-handling behaviors, the messages should be rapid, reliable, relevant and repeated, Powell said. The blog is available at https://www.barfblog.com

The content combines pop culture references and current events with food-handling information to engage readers. The posts also combine food safety messages with personal experiences, which connect readers to the effects of foodborne illness on families and communities, he said.

"Up to 30 percent of all Americans will get sick from the food and water they consume each year. That’s just way too many sick people," Powell said. "The site is all about providing information in a compelling manner, using pop culture and different languages, to ultimately have fewer sick people."

The other authors of the article include: Amy Hubbell, K-State assistant professor of modern languages; Casey Jacob, K-State research assistant in diagnostic medicine and pathobiology; and Benjamin Chapman, food safety extension specialist at North Carolina State University.

barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/uploads/file/powell_newmedia.pdf

Salmonella outbreak linked to peanut butter

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As Doug posted earlier, it looks as though peanut butter has been implicated in the current 400+ person outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium.  Earlier tonight AP cited CDC sources as saying that the Salmonella also may have contributed to three deaths. AP reports that it looks like Minnesota Dept of Health has yet again cracked the case and recovered the outbreak strain from an opened jar of King Nut brand peanut butter, and has epidemiolgy to back it up:

"The commonality among all of our patients was that they ate peanut butter," said Doug Schultz, a spokesman with the Minnesota Department of Health. While the brand of peanut butter couldn’t be confirmed in every case, the majority of patients consumed the same brand, he said Monday.

Here’s a food safety infosheet that focuses on the outbreak. You can download it here.

Would having more inspectors really keep Listeria out of RTE meats?

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Maybe I’m cynical about the whole thing, but I don’t see overworked meat inspectors being the most important factor leading to the Maple Leaf/Listeria outbreak. I don’t know what more inspectors would have done about Listeria living deep inside a slicer.

Bob Kingston, president of the Agriculture Union representing food inspectors through the Public Service Alliance of Canada thinks the lack of inspectors and resources is exactly what the problem was — and he’s trumpeting that opinion again today.

In an article about the lack of progress of a promised government inquiry of the outbreak Kingston says changes proposed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency include more stringent oversight, more reporting and more rigorous testing.

"They sort of put all the right pieces in place except for one thing: they haven’t been given any resources to do it. With all the government’s talk about how well resourced the agency was, and how they were going to make sure that whatever needed to be done was done, they haven’t come up with a single penny yet."

The union is calling for 1,000 more inspectors and veterinarians across the entire food-safety system. At least 200 more are needed for processed-meat inspection alone, Kingston says.
"If you talk to the average inspector out there, they figure they’ve probably got about twice as many plants as they feel comfortable with."

So what will these extra inspectors do, and how are they going to help companies like Maple Leaf implement the culture of food safety we hear so much about? Regulators need to evolve and do a better job helping folks from farm-to-fork to develop a food safety culture, and verify that their steps reduce risk are being implemented.

The best part of the article was related to the political dancing-with-stars mess around this magical inquiry:

Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz’s office deferred questions about the delay to the Prime Minister’s Office.
"An announcement will be made in due course," said PMO spokesman Dimitri Soudas.

Classic.

A Hoser in North Carolina

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I’m a total food safety nerd. I even use big food safety events to remember when things in my life happen.  Had I not emailed Doug in the winter of 2000 looking for an on-campus summer job at Guelph, I’m sure I wouldn’t be doing that.

The story would be a lot cooler if I had sought out Powell as a potential employer because I was interested in the stuff he did, but I didn’t. I had no idea what he did — and being a bit of an idiot, I didn’t bother to look it up. I emailed Doug on the advice of a friend, and former Powell Lab-ite, Lindsay Core. Lindsay knew I was desperately looking for a job, and didn’t tell me much else about the dude or what he filled his days with. Lindsay just said "I think you two will get along".  I didn’t really know what that meant, but really had no other prospects.  So I emailed him. And he hired me to pull news.

Pulling news meant that I surfed through the tubes of the interweb for anything food risk-y (food safety, GE crops, animal disease, etc) and the stories I found (along with the other news pullers) become the content for FSnet and the other listserv postings Doug puts together every day.  Doug’s philosophy fit in with what I was looking for — he never really cared where I was as long as I could be found with an email and that I would get something to him when he needed it.

About three weeks in, I fell in love with the content and became hooked on food safety communication. That’s when an E.coli O157 outbreak linked to Walkerton Ontario’s town water system hit. I was already interested in disease (maybe it was because of Outbreak or the Hot Zone?), but the coverage and discussion within the Powell lab around Walkerton (how the outbreak was handled and communicated to the folks drinking the water) drew me in. I knew it was time to move from molecular biology and genetics to food safety. So finding what I really liked is linked in my mind to the 2000 Walkerton outbreak.

That’s where it all started.

I equate a May 2003 trip to Dani’s graduation from Dalhousie in Halifax with the news of the first Canadian BSE case. On the way home, I saw Doug on the in-flight CBC newscast talking about how CFIA has handled things (and thought, even when I’m away from Guelph for three days Powell and food safety follow me).

In 2006 I was about to leave for a trip to Kansas to visit Doug, and begin the initial evaluation of the food safety infosheets, when the E.coli O157:H7/spinach outbreak broke. When I arrived in Manhattan it was all E.coli O157 and spinach for us. The picture that Christian created with the skull and leafy greens (right) became a signature picture amongst the food safety infosheet pilot participants. Those pilots, and conversations with Doug and Amy in their living room, evolved into video observation of food safety practices — one of the things I’ve spent the past couple of years on.

I’ll always remember 2008 for a bunch of personal things (having a kid, getting hitched, getting a position at NC State and moving to North Carolina) — and will probably equate it to Maple Leaf Foods, Listeria monocytogenes and Michael McCain (who was just named Canadian Business Newsmaker of the Year — kind of like OJ being named US Sports Newsmaker of the Year?).

In my time spent in the various incarnations of FSN/iFSN/barfblog/Powell’s lab, I’ve seen Doug’s hair catch on fire; been accosted in a hot-tub (not by him) while in Phoenix with him; got lost on a trip with him in snowy, -20C Montreal without my coat; threw up in his backyard; talked about a ridiculous amount of pop culture with him; started a company with him and Katija; translated Kiwi accents for him; and, maybe most importantly, went to see Neil Young with him.

We’ve golfed, played squash and hockey together. Each of which he beat me at, and often reminds me of it. He also likes to point out, and I never argue with him, that I owe him. I do; although it’s a bit like owing something to Tony Soprano.

There’s lots of stuff I’ve left out of the post because it’s hard to write about 8 years in 750 or so words, but through all the fun stuff and late-night emails, Doug has shown me how to create a lifestyle around food safety where working and vacations blend together.

Doug’s got lots of friends, former friends and never-friends. The ratio is probably about 1:1:1. Some food safety folks have told me that they wish he was nicer. I’m glad he’s not. His skepticism and cynicism (and sometimes lack of tact) makes him great at what he does, and have made him the perfect mentor for me.

So enough of this post being about Doug, it’s really about me. On Monday I start a faculty position in the Department of 4-H Youth Development and Family & Consumer Sciences at NC State University as food safety extension specialist.  I’m excited as I get to support extension agents throughout North Carolina; develop food safety programs to be delivered from farm-to-fork; and, conduct applied research on food safety. It doesn’t sound like a job to me. $550 for season tickets to the Hurricanes, and about three hours to Myrtle Beach are added bonuses.

Dani, Jack and I left Canada a week ago for the USA. Our furniture will arrive sometime next week, so for now we’re minimalists. We’re currently camping indoors, with only an air mattress, lawn chairs and a 42" television (I guess the TV isn’t really camping equipment, but whatever).

On Tuesday night we picked a whole chicken up at Target and decided we’d roast it, but forgot that in our equipment-less situation we didn’t have our trusty PDT 300 to take the temp. 

The juices were running clear.  The chicken was piping hot (even a bit crispy) but after I had my first couple of bites I noticed that the meat close to the center looked pretty raw.

We went and got an interim thermometer at Target yesterday.???

The Monday start date hinges on me not coming down with Campylobacter or Salmonella.

Doug sent me an email a couple of nights ago (while we were chatting about the fantastic Canada/US World Junior Hockey Tournament game) that said "you your own dude at NC State" (he’s one arm typing with Sorenne lately).  Yep. That’s true, but I wouldn’t be my own dude here if it wasn’t for him, and I’m excited to work on more great stuff together.

Food handlers don’t have time

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Researchers at Kansas State published the results of a study of the barriers to food safety practices of food handlers.  Conducting focus groups with 159 food handlers, split into 2 groups, the researchers report that food handlers not only have a lack of food safety knowledge but also often a lack of understanding why employees should comply with food safety guidelines.

Yep. Totally.  So what do we do about it?

The recommendations the researchers provide are:
-Provide regular food safety training to their foodservice employees;
(sure, except training for knowledge change on it’s own doesn’t do much, as they state in their press release)
-Educate employees about the consequences of improper food handling to improve attitudes toward food safety; (we prefer to use “compel” instead of educate, education is too limiting).
–Place signs about consequences of improper food handling in food production areas; (kind of like our food safety infosheets?)
And three food safety culture ideas — (at barfblog we’ve been talking about food safety culture for a while, as have Frank Yiannas and Chris Griffith):
–Encourage food safety compliance with verbal reminders and praise;
-Be good role models;
-Incorporate food safety practices into employees’ daily routines to eliminate the perceptions that they do not have time to perform them.

Hey this is great — but what’s missing is the how. Just telling managers to make more time for food handlers isn’t very realistic. Food safety communications types, us included, need to get out and start testing food safety culture and measure behavior. And share the results so everyone can build on it.

I presented some similar findings of food handler barriers at IAFP 2007 and some qualitative data on food safety practices at food service (highlighting time pressures especially) at IAFP 2008. I don’t think the solution to time pressures is telling the industry to slow down, or more "education". I think we need to engineer processes and equipment (like self sanitizing knives), look to new tools (like using sanitizer during busy times, instead of handwashing) — and test them. If they work, and they don’t slow the kitchen down, it’s an easy sell.

Our research in food safety culture needs to move to show me, don’t tell me.

Talking turkey

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Being a food safety nerd, I’ve had a lot of fun developing food safety infosheets over the past 5 years. The idea behind the infosheets is to take stories, add some humour/shock/kitch and generate dialogue around food safety.

The turkey food safety infosheet is generating a lot of interest. I’m no Sarah Palin, but most responses have been from over-eager gotcha folks who are pointing out what appears to them to be serious food safety errors (especially around thawing, stuffing and cooling leftovers). Some have been nice; others, not so much.

Our focus in building the food safety infosheets is to provide practices based on the best available science. And sometimes what the FDA Food Code, USDA FSIS consumer education and published peer-reviewed articles say around food safety practices differ.

Go figure.

We base the food safety infosheets  on the best available science, not jurisdictional regulation. It’s our way of being consistent because recommendations changes so much from location to location (Canada and the U.S. recommend two different temperatures for endpoint temp for poultry: 165F in the U.S., and 180F in Canada — both countries apparently looking at the same data).

People seem to get especially antsy when we disagree with the regulators. Everything we put in "what you can do" section of the food safety infosheets has to have references to back it up (which sometimes the regulatory recommendations do not).

Here are the references for the 3 recommendations folks have mentioned the most (thawing, cooking stuffing to 150F and cooling leftovers)

Thawing on the counter:

Lacroix BJ, Li KW, Powell DA. 2003. Consumer food handling recommendations: is thawing of turkey a food safety issue? Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research, 64(2): 59-61. (this whole paper can be found at the bottom of this post)

Lee M. 1993. Methods and risks of defrosting turkeys. Environmental Health Review (Winter):96-100.

OP Snyder, 1999. Thawing at ambient temperature on the counter. Hospitality Institute of Technology and Management, St. Paul, MN USA.

Stuffing:

The 150F recommendation is based on a 6-7 log reduction of salmonella in stuffing at 140F for 12.7 min (pathogen destruction is time/temperature, and it will take that long to take the stuffing from 140-150. Pete Snyder’s Turkey HACCP document explains it well (second paragraph on page 2).

From the doc:

As expected, no salmonellae or staphylococci was recovered.  They were killed above 130°F as the turkey was cooking.  Actually, if the stuffing had been sampled at 140 to 150°F, they would have found that these organisms would be dead, considering that 140°F for 12.7 minutes gives a  7D reduction of Salmonella in beef.

Cooling:

Turkey should be refrigerated within 2 — and continuously cooled reaching 41F within 15 hours.  Pete Snyder also has a referenced cooling paper that explains this well.

from the doc:

In 1992, this author received an agreement from Ray Beaulieu and Jeffery Rhodehamel at the FDA that there was indeed no scientific basis for the FDA retail food cooling regimes, and that it was appropriate to do a study. With the help of Dr. Vijay K. Juneja, USDA ARS ERRC, a study was conducted using hamburger as the food item and C. perfringens as the target organism (Juneja, 1994). Clostridium perfringens was selected, because, of the three spores, C.perfringens has the shortest lag and fastest generation time.


Hamburger was selected as the media, because C. perfringens is found in hamburger, and hamburger has often been involved in C. perfringens outbreaks. Various cooling times were evaluated in order to determine the safe cooling time. One cooling time chosen arbitrarily was 15 hours to go from 130 to 45ºF, with a 38ºF temperature of coolant, in this case, air in the refrigerator. The 15-hour cooling time showed about 3 multiplications of C. perfringens. The USDA has accepted this cooling time as safe (Federal Register, January 6, 1999), because it now accepts cooling when there are 3 or less multiplications of C.perfringens.

As I replied to one interested subscriber, here are our references, show us yours.
 

Turkey time: Food safety for the holidays

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In Canada, Thanksgiving is in October. It’s kind of cool because the weather can be nice (26C this year — and we’ve had snow all day today) and it’s not too long after Labour Day (an October holiday is fun).  This year, Thanksgiving was extra exciting because of Jack, the newest addition to the family (right, being compared, size-wise, to a half-eaten turkey).

For the past few years we’ve held thanksgiving at our house, and with the aid of Tyler Florence and a tip-sensitive digital thermometer things have been peachy. It’s my favourite Candian holiday. But, being a huge NFL and college football fan I also like U.S. Thanksgiving. Four days of football on television during the day is awesome.

One thing about U.S. Thanksgiving has always been a bit weird to me:  the presidential pardon of the White House turkey. I read today that the 2008 turkeys are from Ellsworth, Iowa. The 20-week-old turkey weighs about 45 pounds. Their names are chosen by public vote from a list: Popcorn & Cranberry; Yam & Jam, Dawn & Early Light; Roost & Run; Pumpkin and Pecan; and Apple & Cider. It’s all a bit creepy.

To get you in the holiday mood, the newest food safety infosheet focuses on the safey thawing, preparation and cooking of a holiday turkey. Thanx to Pete Snyder for his excellent information at Hospitality Institute of Technology and Management.

Click here to download the infosheet.

New Food Safety Infosheet — Stay home if you are sick

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Don’t go to work if you are ill. 

It’s easy to say, but hard to do.  Especially if you are a food handler supporting a family, and you don’t get paid for sick days.  Or if you are a line cook and your boss tells you that she really needs you to show up because someone is already sick.

Indiana, like other juresdictions around North America has a law that says if a food handler has one of a handful of illnesses that can be passed to the public through food, they need to stay home. Indiana’s list includes: Salmonella, shiga toxin-producing E. coli, Shigella, hepatitis A and norovirus.

According to the Star Press, the Delaware County (IN) Health Department is starting to crack down on food establishments that lack a policy of excluding employees from work if they have one of the five illnesses: "A recent informal survey revealed operators typically could not name any of the five reportable illnesses, or name the reportable symptoms," the Indiana State Department of Health reports in its Winter 2008 newsletter Food Bytes. "Only a few could name any symptoms and perhaps name one reportable illness.

Why hasn’t the law been enforced before now?

"It was sort of like, not a hidden rule, but not a very well understood rule," said Terry Troxell, food division supervisor at the county health department. "No one knew its importance. Now, after we’ve become standardized by the state, it’s one of the things being picked up on during inspections."

This week’s Food Safety Infosheet is all about why it is important to stay home if you are ill, and stay away from food handling until you stop shedding the pathogen in your poop and puke.

Click here to download the Food Safety Infosheet