Tag Archives: culture

Fewer laws, more leaders: food safety culture key to, uh, food safety

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“I don’t think we need more laws, we need more leaders.”

That’s one of several gems offered up by David Theno, buried in a too-long piece about food service food safety by Carolyn Surh of QSR.

An increased focus on raw produce safety has changed the way restaurants handle certain foods. For instance, the FDA now considers raw cut tomatoes a potentially hazardous food, in the same category as meats, seafood, eggs, and poultry.

For operations serving raw produce, well-known safety precautions such as storing or holding foods at appropriate temperatures, maintaining good personal hygiene, and avoiding cross-contamination are especially important. Even more vital, experts say, is sourcing a safe food supply chain.

For restaurants serving fresh, raw produce, ensuring that growers and processors are taking every precaution to avoid contamination can be difficult.

“On the supply side, one of the biggest risks today is produce,” Theno says. “There are many people who are trying to do a better job, so I don’t want to demean the [produce] industry, but I can tell you there are a lot of people who are not doing as well as others.”

Even the simplest food-safety practices continue to challenge restaurants where turnover rates are high and the staff tends to be young and inexperienced. Safety protocols and governmental regulations provide a framework by which to train employees, but the key is strong leadership, Theno says.

“How often is an inspector in a facility?” Theno asks. “Regulations give you a minimum set of standards, but if you’re going to make food safety happen, it’s a leadership thing. I don’t think we need more laws, we need more leaders.”

Indeed, strong management is a constant that can be applied over the vast number of localities that monitor food safety. Throughout the country, there are approximately 3,500 state and local health jurisdictions. Subject to guidelines that are adopted differently from county to county, foodservice operators know just how complex multi-state compliance can be.

With so much variance from location to location, on top of daily pressures like labor and supply chain, Theno has seen the best results in organizations where management places food safety at the top of the list.

“Where it’s done exceptionally well it’s because the leadership really owns these matters—they walk the talk, they live it,” Theno says. “Every day they ask questions that show their team that food safety is as important if not more important than everything else they do every day in the restaurant. When that leadership philosophy is present, I find their restaurants are in much better shape.”

 

God don’t have much to do with it; food safety outbreaks are not flukes of faith; buying might be

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A cantaloupe farmer linked to the listeria-related deaths of 36 people and the illnesses of at least 146 in 2011 says the outbreak was “something Mother Nature did. We didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Eric Jensen, the fourth-generation produce grower who runs what’s left of Colorado-based Jensen Farms with his brother Ryan, told the Dallas Morning News, “We’re not selling anything,” adding that he had to lay off his staff of 15 in December. “We’re just sitting still right now. We hope to figure out a way to come out of it. We’ve got four generations worth of work.”

Whatever your god or belief, I’ve yet to see divine intervention as a cause of foodborne illness. Instead, illnesses and outbreaks are frighteningly consistent in their underlying causes: a culmination of a small series of mistakes that, over time, results in illness and death. After-the-fact investigations usually conclude, why didn’t this happen earlier, with all the mistakes going on?

This is no different from other failures such as BP, Bhopal and the space shuttle Challenger: technological sophistication is easily superseded by the vagaries of human behavior and belief.

So while Jensen Farms languishes in bankruptcy and self-affirming fairy-tales, and distributors and retailers ask themselves, why did we rely on such lousy food safety assurances, California growers are trying to develop an industry-wide, mandatory food safety plan.

But based on early indications, California growers are setting up a flawed system that promotes self-satisfaction and soundbites over safety.

Tying a brand or commodity – lettuce, tomatoes, meat — to the lowest common denominator of government inspections is a recipe for failure. The Pinto automobile also met government standards – didn’t help much in the court of public opinion.

The best growers, processors and retailers will far exceed minimal government standards, will proactively test to verify their food safety systems are working, will transparently publicize those results and will brag about their excellent food safety by marketing at retail so consumers can actually choose safe food.

Some Drs. don’t know food safety doodoo

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Generalizations are generally risky.

But too often, celebrity doctors focus too much on the hypothetical and not enough on the things that actually make people barf.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, host of The Dr. Oz Show, and Dr. Mike Roizen, chief medical officer at the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute wrote in a recent column that food safety is a big concern for North Americans.

OK.

The good doctors’ idea of food safety is to ban agricultural use of antibiotics and clean up other aspects of the “food-pollution” problem such as growth hormones, artificial dyes and pesticides.

There are risks and benefits to any agricultural technology, meaning they require careful consideration and use.

The antibiotic apocalypse has been just about to happen since the Swann report of 1969.

The pesticide pestilence has been imminent since Silent Spring of 1962, renewed with Alar in 1989.

Food coloring?

Cry wolf.

People pick their poisons. Sometimes those choices are informed by data, sometimes by preference and learned behavior.

I have my own risk-benefit schizophrenia, as do most folks. So it’d be hypocritical to tell people what to choose or do. My job is to provide information in a compelling manner and adults can choose while protecting their kids.

Sanctimonious doctors sidestepping data in pursuit of ratings doesn’t help anyone.

‘What if it weren’t called pink slime?’ Still would’ve been shown the door

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People want to know about their food. Where it was grown, how, what’s been added and if it’s safe.

The N.Y. Times, as usual, gets that little bit right in a commentary yesterday, but wrongly thinks right-to-know is something new, that media amplification is something new because of shiny new toys, and offers no practical suggestions on what to do.

The term pink slime was was coined in 2002 in an internal e-mail by a scientist at the Agriculture Department who felt it was not really ground beef. The term was first publicly reported in The Times in late 2009.

In April 2011, celebtard chef Jamie Oliver helped create a more publicly available pink slime yuck factor and by the end of 2011, McDonald’s and others had stopped using pink slime.

On March 7, 2012, ABC News recycled these bits, along with some interviews with two of the original USDA opponents of the process (primarily because it was a form of fraud, and not really just beef).

Industry and others responded the next day, and although the story had been around for several years, the response drove the pink slime story to gather media momentum – a story with legs.

BPI said pink slime was meat so consumers didn’t need to be informed, and everything was a gross misunderstanding. BPI blamed media and vowed to educate the public. Others said “it’s pink so it’s meat” and that the language of pink slime was derogatory and needed to be changed. USDA said it was safe for schools but quickly decided that schools would be able to choose whatever beef they wanted, pushing decision-making in the absence of data or labels to the local PTA. An on-line petition was launched.

Sensing the media taint, additional retailers rushed to proclaim themselves free of the pink stuff.
BPI took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, the favored reading choice for pink slime aficionados, and four mid-west governors banded together to repeat the same erroneous messages during a media-show-and-tell at a BPI plant. Because political endorsements rarely work, and the story had spread to the key demographic of burger eaters, others sensed opportunity in the trashing of BPI. Wendy’s, Whole Foods, Costco, A&P, Publix and others launched their own media campaigns proclaiming they’ve never used the stuff and never would.

Guess they didn’t get their dude-it’s-beef T-shirts.

These well-intentioned messages only made things worse for the beef producers and processors they were intended to protect.

Here’s what can be learned for the next pink slime. And there will be lots more.
Lessons of pink slime
• don’t fudge facts (is it or is it not 100% beef?)
• facts are never enough
• changing the language is bad strategy (been tried with rBST, genetically engineered foods, doesn’t work)
• telling people they need to be educated is arrogant, invalidates and trivializes people’s thoughts
• don’t blame media for lousy communications
• any farm, processor, retailer or restaurant can be held accountable for food production – and increasingly so with smartphones, facebook and new toys
• real or just an accusation, consumers will rightly react based on the information available
• amplification of messages through media is nothing new, especially if those messages support a pre-existing world-view
• food is political but should be informed by data
• data should be public
• paucity of data about pink slime that is publicly available make statements like it’s safe, or it’s gross, difficult to quantify
• relying on government validation builds suspicion rather than trust; if BPI has the safety data, make it public
• what does right-to-know really mean? Do you want to say no?
• if so, have public policy on how information is made public and why
• choice is a fundamental value
• what’s the best way to enable choice, for those who don’t want to eat pink slime or for those who care more about whether a food will make their kids barf?
• proactive more than reactive; both are required, but any food provider should proudly proclaim – brag – about everything they do to enhance food safety.
• perceived food safety is routinely marketed at retail; instead market real food safety so consumers actually have a choice and hold producers and processors – conventional, organic or otherwise – to a standard of honesty.
• if restaurant inspection results can be displayed on a placard via a QR code read by smartphones when someone goes out for a meal, why not at the grocery store or school lunch?
• link to web sites detailing how the food was produced, processed and safely handled, or whatever becomes the next theatrical production – or be held hostage

US Marines will do better than ‘subsist’ on Australian food

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They will stay for years, number up to 2500, possibly have their own aircraft and artillery, train with the Aboriginal-dominated Norforce unit and drop in to help in Asia-Pacific disaster zones alongside Australia’s Diggers.

But whatever you do, don’t call the Marine Rotational Force in Darwin, Australia, part of a U.S. base.

”No, no again,” said Lieutenant-Colonel AnDroy Senegar when pressed on how much his operation looked like the forerunner of an official base.

”We will build no infrastructure. We will subsist on Australian food. We will be part of the community. It will be a partnership. We will not be intrusive.”

No worries, here’s our dinner from a couple of days ago: Moreton Bay sand crabs with stuffed shells. Whatever the Marines eat, there will be choices aplenty.

When the Marines arrived in early April for the first of their six-month rotations, then federal Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, justified their presence by saying: ”The world is moving in our direction. It is moving to the Asia-Pacific.

”It is not just the rise of China, it is the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the ASEAN economies combined, the emergence of Indonesia, not just as a regional influence but as a global influence,” he said at a welcoming ceremony in Darwin.

Pink slime, sushi slime: one sickened 160 people with Salmonella

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Was the pink slime controversy really a “stunning display of social media power,” or just new-fangled risk amplification and a reflection of how bored many are?

The Washington Post, a print media outlet, arrived at the pink slime party yesterday to rehash what’s long ago happened, recycling sound bites in a lousy attempt to offer insight into how public opinion is transformed into beliefs. Worse, the Post provides a compelling reason why newspapers are in decline: no new facts or analysis, nothing new that on-line diggers didn’t discover and display weeks ago.

Social media changes the details, not the basics: one version of ‘ole timey social media was called a lynch mob.

Cue the cute cats video: it will get a lot more hits than pink slime, and way more than sushi slime. But only one, sushi slime, or imported frozen raw Nakaochi Scrape tuna product from a single tuna processing facility in India, has now been linked to 160 confirmed cases of Salmonella Bareilly, up from 141.

Asian culture, food regs collide in Virginia?

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The New York Times reports that in the rear of the Great Wall supermarket in Falls Church, Virginia, customers linger over razor clams, frozen conch and baby smelt arrayed at the fish counter. Crabs clamber over the ice. Below, sea bass circle in glass tanks. A girl in a stroller, eye level with a school of tilapia, giggles in delight.

But other tanks are empty. The bullfrogs, turtles and eels that Northern Virginia’s booming Asian population used to buy at the counter and take home to cook are nowhere to be found, seized last year by state agents who leveled criminal charges against two managers of the store accusing them of illegally selling wildlife.

The case, which is scheduled to go to trial in June, has put culinary traditions of Asian immigrants into conflict with state laws, illustrating what some see as a cultural fault line in the changing population of Northern Virginia. Asians make up 13.6 percent of the population of four Northern Virginia counties.

Lawyers for the store managers say that the law governing sales of live fish and other animals has not been updated to reflect advances in aquaculture, and that it is tilted against immigrants with unfamiliar cuisines and customs. In a court filing, they argue that the case “seems to be about the tyranny of the majority.”

It is clear that Kai Wei Jin, one of the managers charged, is unhappy about being in the middle of a criminal case. Mr. Jin, 25, fiddled uncomfortably with his phone during an interview, saying he just wanted to satisfy his customers.

“We’re not trying to break the law,” he said. “We just want to do business, and just support the culture.”

Lee Walker, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, said that the laws were necessary to protect wildlife, and that charges were leveled only after a warning went unheeded.

“We really try to educate folks about the regulations before we ever try to bring charges,” he said. “In this case, every attempt was made to educate about what’s legal. And, unfortunately, action was not taken.”

The case arose early last year after what prosecutors called a “concerned citizen” made a report of illegal sales. Officials went to the store several times and bought red-eared slider turtles and largemouth bass, which they said was labeled “mainland rockfish.” They returned last April, seizing turtles, eels, bullfrogs and crayfish, and delivered a warning, prosecutors said.

When officials returned and found largemouth bass still for sale, they said, they sought charges against the managers. Both were indicted on four felony counts, but the prosecutor later agreed to reduce the charges to misdemeanors, which carry potential penalties of jail time and fines of up to $2,500.

Some of the species fall under a broad category of wildlife that cannot be bought or sold, while sales of largemouth bass are forbidden because it is a native game fish. Crayfish can be sold, but the store lacked permits, according to prosecutors’ court filings.

Lawyers for the store managers say that categorizing the fish and other creatures as wildlife does not make sense, because they were farm-raised for eating.

Receipts filed with court motions show, for example, that some of the turtles were raised in Oklahoma. The bullfrogs were shipped from the Dominican Republic. The bass and some eels came from a Pennsylvania fish farm.

A Great Wall store in neighboring Maryland makes for a study in contrast. The fish counter there has many of the creatures that have vanished from the Virginia store. Turtles labeled “farm-raised” paddle in one tank, selling for $9.99 per pound. At the counter, mesh bags bulge with live bullfrogs for $5.99 a pound.

If the hygiene hypothesis is real, does it matter?

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The most frequently asked question with public and scientific crowds at any food safety jamfest I’ve done over the past 20 years: Is food too clean?

It comes from that adage, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

But what if it kills you? Or causes irreparable damage, like 8-year-old Brit, Elisabeth Willoughby, who contracted toxocariasis, probably from contact with dog doo while crawling in the park as an infant. Her right eye was permanently scarred by the roundworm parasite.

Watching daughter Sorenne slowly recover from whatever made her stronger the other night via 14 vomits and five diarrheal episodes reinforced, to me, how little is known.

The concept of exposing people to germs at an early age to build immunity is known as the hygiene hypothesis.

I’m not an immunologist, but the idea makes biological sense; I do, however, get concerned with the details, and generalizations.

Medical types have suggested that the hygiene hypothesis explains the global increase of allergic and autoimmune diseases in urban settings. It has also been suggested that the hypothesis explains the changes that have occurred in society and environmental exposures, such as giving antibiotics early in life.

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) reported in Science last month that exposing germ-free mice to microbes during their first weeks of life, but not when exposed later in adult life, led to a normalized immune system and prevention of diseases.

Moreover, the protection provided by early-life exposure to microbes was long-lasting, as predicted by the hygiene hypothesis.

"These studies show the critical importance of proper immune conditioning by microbes during the earliest periods of life," said Richard Blumberg, MD, chief for the BWH Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endoscopy, and co-senior study author, in collaboration with Dennis Kasper, MD, director of BWH’s Channing Laboratory and co-senior study author. "Also now knowing a potential mechanism will allow scientists to potentially identify the microbial factors important in determining protection from allergic and autoimmune diseases later in life."

Does that mean if your kid gets an infectious disease later in life, parents are negligent for not exposing them to a little infectious disease earlier in life?

It all sounds romantically agrarian – a little dirt is good for you – until specifics get in the way; specifics like, it’s your kid.

My answer to questioning minds goes something like this:

We know immune systems take several years to develop in young children, and things start to go downhill after 55. (Freedom 55?) A little dirt may be good for kids, but there will always be some who, through genetics, environment and other unknowns, will be more susceptible to disease than others. And we’re not smart enough to know who those individuals are. The good ole’ days usually included stories about a family that lost a kid. And it was probably some kind of infectious disease. Western societies have enough science and enough affluence to decide, one is too many.

Then there’s the policy. I can’t image the agriculture minister or secretary announcing that investments in a lot of this food safety stuff would be better spent on other societal priorities. We’ve done a cost-benefit analysis and decided it’s better for everyone to get a little sick. We’re going to lose a few, and we don’t know who those few (or many) are, but it’s a cost-effective approach.

T. Olszak, D. An, S. Zeissig, M. P. Vera, J. Richter, A. Franke, J. N. Glickman, R. Siebert, R. M. Baron, D. L. Kasper, R. S. Blumberg. Microbial exposure during early life has persistent effects on natural killer T cell function. Science, 2012; DOI: 10.1126/science.1219328

Raw meat raves in New York

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Lawyers, prepare your briefs.

And put on clean ones.

The New York Post reports on Gotham’s burgeoning food porn trend to consume meat raw, and lining up for the privilege.

Takashi is one of a small but growing number of restaurants around the city catering to those who are rah-rah about consuming their animal flesh raw-raw.

The first dish to come out is the yooke, ground chuck prepared like a Japanese version of steak tartare. Topped with a raw quail egg, it’s adorned with Japanese seaweed and an enormous shiso leaf.

It’s also by far the tamest uncooked dish at Takashi, which gets its meat from some of the better purveyors around, such as Dickson’s Farmstand and Pat LaFrieda.

Maybe they have those CSI UV goggles that make dangerous bacteria visible. Otherwise, it’s hucksterism to charge a premium.

“Raw meats or undercooked foods leave you at risk of infection [of parasites or a slew of other illnesses],” says Dr. Michael Mansour of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital.

According to NYC’s Department of Health, restaurants must notify diners when food isn’t cooked to required temperatures — either verbally or by printing this on the menu. A diner may also request such a dish. Basically, it’s buyer beware — though the DOH says it will investigate complaints of people getting sick from eating raw food. But with so many New Yorkers obsessed with high-quality ingredients, meat so fresh it can be served raw is seen as a benchmark — not a danger.

Food porn trumps.

At downtown’s Acme, you’ll find endive leaves stuffed with a mix of raw bison and sweet shrimp. At Manzo in Eataly, Piedmontese beef is hand-cut and ground to order. Hakata Tonton, just a couple of blocks from Takashi, offers veal liver sashimi on its menu, as does EN Japanese Brasserie on Hudson Street. Last fall, Hecho en Dumbo in the East Village offered venison tartare on the chef’s menu. (It plans to bring it back next fall, too.)

And then there’s raw chicken, a dish not for the squeamish. “There are a lot of places in the city that serve raw chicken,” says Dave Pasternack, chef-owner of Esca in Hell’s Kitchen. But you might have to ask, with a nudge and a wink, to go off the menu.

For some, raw meat is uncontroversial. “It’s my soul food,” says Takashi’s Inoue, who grew up in Osaka. “That’s how we eat in my home in Japan. The meat is very, very fresh.”

Very fresh, except when it sickens and kills, like it did in Japan last year, leaving four dead and at least 70 sickened with E. coli O111 from raw beef.

Pick your poison.

Eat it, don’t tweet it; gratuitous food porn video shot of the day

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As the usual suspects weigh in with ol’ timey public relations strategies and superficial observations of social media in the , it’s good to poke fun at all things foodie. Satirical takedowns of the pretentious and pompous never go out of style, regardless of the medium.

From Eater, a cautionary tale for this modern life: the below anthem from The Key of Awesome! warns against the perils of tweeting before eating. A send up of Pet Shop Boys songs, it features "culinary paparazzi," a lobster and a cupcake posing like super models, and an unhappy ending. For the next time you think, "it’s unthinkable to dine out and not record it/Want the world to know I can afford it."