Tag Archives: culture

Food safety failure: ‘let your butcher know you’re eating it raw and make sure it’s scent-free’

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 Here’s an effective way to get at some of the 1%; bad food safety advice.

The Wall Street Journal ran a recipe extolling the virtues of steak tartare – “itsy bitsy pieces of raw red meat cling together and make for bold, blissful eating” – and came in with this nosestrethcher:

“It is critical to source your meat from a top-notch butcher. The chances of ingesting pathogens, such as E. coli, are higher than when eating cooked meat, so shop with care. Let your butcher know you’ll be eating the meat raw and make sure it is scent-free. Ask about who raised your meat—you want a purveyor known for extremely sanitary practices.”

Or a butcher with those UV-goggles that make dangerous bacteria visible to mere mortals. That’s an investment I could get behind, if it worked.

It doesn’t.

The disclaimer at the bottom of the recipe is probably as effective as those on restaurant menu; or on investment agreements.

“Note: The FDA recommends cooking beef to 145 degrees and avoiding food that contains raw eggs.”

Canadian caterer upset over salmonella outbreak

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Ottawa Public Health has now confirmed 20 cases of salmonella, including 16 children between 15 months and 14-years-old, and four adults which they believe might have originated from The Lunch Lady Group caterer.

The owner of the Canadian company told CBC News Wednesday she is devastated by the news and called the outbreak a "mystery".

"It’s horribly painful because we love serving kids everyday," Ruthie Burd said over the phone from her home in Markham, Ont.

"We do everything we can to provide a reliable, safe service for the kids we serve."

"We have very strict guidelines for all sorts of things when it comes to food and kids," she said, "We empathize with parents in this whole situation. We really want to know what it is and what we can put in place to prevent anything."

As a parent, that doesn’t tell me much about the food safety training, standards, buying practices, personal hygiene and overall food safety culture in those kitchens.

The Lunch Lady has a blog but it hasn’t been updated since Aug., 2011. They have a statement about culture and sustainability but nothing about what is done so kids don’t barf from Lunch lady lunches. There is a statement about food safety, how it’s all government inspected and they pay attention to recall notices. Perhaps it would be more reassuring to parents if the “strict food safety and quality control policies set out by The Lunch Lady Group head office” were available for perusal.

Public health said 11 officials have been reassigned to deal with the salmonella outbreak, which also hospitalized three people. All have since been released.

They have their hands full, one doctor said, trying to contact families of children who may have consumed contaminated food.

"We’re talking not only to the families of ill children, but parents of well siblings or children that did not become ill," said Dr. Rosamund Lewis, who added 50 families are being interviewed regarding one daycare alone.

Selling food safety within A&P

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"Understanding that front line food handlers are oral communication learners and perceive their job as low-risk helps to develop programs to change this perception into positive attitudes."

So says Pat Brown, director of food safety for The Great A&P Tea Company, in Food Safety Tech.

Brown writes that food companies need a multi-tiered approach of selling food safety to ensure that every level from upper management to front-line food handlers are informed, involved, and rewarded for positive outcomes.

How best to do that?

Brown cites studies from FDA’s Oral Communication Project conducted by Clayton, et al., in 2002, which revealed that food handlers are primarily oral communication learners and obtain their knowledge about food safety by observing their supervisors and peers. Importantly, they view their job as very low risk.

It’s something me and Chapman figured out 10 years ago by looking at the learning literature from 50 years ago, and is the basis for our on-going food safety infosheets.

Brown writes, "In 2003, Green and Selman noted in their study of oral communication learners that there is a discrepancy between knowledge and behavior. Even when food handlers possess knowledge of safe food handling practices, they don’t always handle food safely. The food service and retail food industry have an extremely high turnover rate. For example, in my company the turnover rates run as high as 54 percent in deli, 52 percent in produce, 49 percent in seafood, 42 percent in meat and 41 percent in bakery. This aspect makes any realistic formalized training of part time associates difficult and ineffective.

"A study in 2004 by Dr. Donna Beegle noted methods that work and don’t work with oral communication workers. She observed that information presented in books or articles was less effective than providing workers with real time vivid examples that they can relate to with empathy. For example, a manager talking to a fruit salad preparer about the importance of scrubbing melons before cutting them and maintaining the cold chain could use current events as an effective learning tool. The manager could discuss the Listeria outbreak with cantaloupes and how many people have become ill or died. That same manager may use basic language and avoid using big words like Listeria and rather describe the importance of removing the mud from the rind to eliminate any “germs” that may contact the interior fruit.

"Dr. Beegle noted that sometimes oral communication learners are intimidated by management and may listen more to their peers. Therefore, assigning more experienced food handlers to mentor new hires is also an effective tool.

"Information presented, but not practiced, sends negative messages to the oral communication learner. Therefore it’s essential that active managerial controls include “walking the walk” by having managers carry thermometers to take temperatures, wash their hands as soon as they enters prep rooms and wear hair restraints and appropriate garments when inside prep areas."

Brown lists three examples used at A&P, but no stories, which seems sorta weird after citing the oral communication folks.

Formal training of all upper management operational teams to become food safety professionals through one of the CFP ANSI certification programs is essential to obtain the support required to sustain a culture of food safety.

But more training doesn’t correlate with improved food safety; it’s hit and miss, and other factors are involved. Even the experts learn from stories.

Developing metrics to quantify the success of internal food safety programs and reporting them to upper management are also key factors in maintaining the food safety momentum. The use of internal auditors, rather than third party audit companies, provides a more accurate evaluation of an operation due to a vested ownership since the inspector’s perspective is that of a customer first, then a regulator and finally an internal auditor. These metrics are shared with all of the operations and merchandising teams in order for them to understand any opportunities and develop ways to improve compliance.

Measuring food safety culture within an organization is a developing concept. The UK Food Standards Agency is apparently working on comprehensive metrics for food safety culture; hopefully it’s better than “cook food until it’s piping hot.”

‘Sprouts aren’t necessary for Jimmy John’s to rock;’ chain permanently pulls sprouts from menu?

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Kirksville, Missouri, is home of Truman State University where Amy completed her undergraduate degree with bad 1980s hair and clothing (even though it was the 1990s), and where we trekked in March 2010 so French scholar Dr. Hubbell could give an invited seminar to her peers and reminisce.

Kirksville seems like a typical Midwest college town, which means the students probably like their Jimmy John’s sandwiches.

Jason Hunsicker of the Kirksville Daily Express reports that Jimmy John’s is making a permanent menu change to put an end to the restaurant’s connection to E. coli outbreaks from raw clover sprouts.

Will Aubuchon, owner and general manager of the Kirksville Jimmy John’s, said an email was sent by "Jimmy himself" late Thursday night ordering all franchise locations to permanently remove raw clover sprouts from their menus.

It’s unclear whether the move applies to all raw sprouts or just clover (and the previously banned alfalfa) sprouts.

The move was made in the wake of an E. coli O26 outbreak that has sickened 12 people in five states, including Missouri. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a release stating an investigation into the outbreak determined the individuals were likely infected from raw clover sprouts they consumed at Jimmy John’s restaurants.

The outbreak was not tied to the Kirksville restaurant and is not a direct result of conditions at any Jimmy John’s restaurants, but instead problems with the company’s supplier of the raw clover sprouts.

"Jimmy decided he was tired of the negative press from it and he thinks sprouts aren’t necessary for Jimmy John’s to rock," Aubuchon said.

Aubuchon said he’s been working with Jimmy John’s for 12 years and it is "kind of weird" to not have sprouts on the menu. He said regular Kirksville customers who ordered sprouts had read recent news reports and temporarily stopped adding the item to their sandwiches.

Now, however, the move will be permanent. Aubuchon expects some customers to be upset, but said he will encourage them to try alternative options like cucumbers. He also anticipates Jimmy John’s will work to add a new vegetable offering to its menus.

Jimmy John’s spokeswoman Mary Trader said on Thursday that the company is not releasing a statement at this time.

With five sprout-related outbreaks since 2008 at Jimmy John’s alone, they should be better at this public relations thing. A table of sprout-related outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/sprouts-associated-outbreaks.

And if sprouts are gone from JJ’s menus, Jimmy may want to think about microbial food safety in general, those deli meats, lettuce and tomatoes. There have been lots of outbreaks and lots of sick people. Maybe this time it won’t have to happen in a Jimmy John’s outlet for the company to reassess what should be on the menu and what is required of suppliers to do business with Jimmy John’s.

Slippage and snot happens: wash your hands of these food safety myths

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Sprouts are not a health food. But there’s lots of other food safety myths. USA Today’s Elizabeth Weise spoke with food safety experts to pull together a list of the most common food safety myths.

* Mayonnaise is a death trap.

Actually, mayonnaise is an ingredient "with penicillin-like properties," says Don Zink, senior science adviser for the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in College Park, Md. Mayo is a homogenized mixture of oil and water, with egg white to stabilize it. The salt and vinegar or lemon juice makes the tiny droplets of water suspended in the mixture deadly to microbes. So for a safer salad, don’t hold the mayo. Putting in more mayonnaise only makes it safer, he says. No, not forever, but certainly long enough for a picnic.

• Pink pork is a no-no.

Not any more. Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture revised its decades-old guidelines and now says that pork, and all whole meat cuts, have to get to only 145 degrees internally, not the 160 the agency had previously suggested. That means a pork roast can have a rosy interior, not the dead gray of your mom’s roast. The change comes because despite everything you were ever told, there’s no trichinosis in commercial pigs. The parasitic disease is caused by eating raw or undercooked meat infected with roundworm larvae. It was a problem years ago, but no longer exists in commercially grown pork, according to the National Pork Board in Des Moines.

• You can smell when food’s gone bad.

Microorganisms divide into two main groups, those that cause spoilage and those that cause disease. There’s some overlap, but many bacteria that cause disease don’t cause overt spoilage. "You could have loads of E. coli or salmonella or listeria in a food and it would not appear to be spoiled or have any off-odor or flavor," says the FDA’s Don Zink. The only real way to judge the safety of a food is by what you know about how it was prepared and stored.

• You should wash produce and meat.

This one seems like a no-brainer: Washing makes things cleaner, right? Wrong. People think they can make produce safer by rinsing it under the tap, but that’s a holdover from the days when they carried in vegetables straight from the garden, still dripping with dew, dirt and the occasional slug. Bagged leafy greens don’t need to be washed at all. "Just open the bag and put them in the salad bowl," says the FDA’s Zink. They were already washed in a sanitizing solution at the packing plant and frankly it was probably a lot cleaner than your kitchen.

Micro-organisms actually bond to the surface of the food item. "You are not going to rinse them off, it simply won’t happen, they cannot be washed off," he says.

All washing might do is "remove the snot that some 3-year-old blew onto the food at the grocery store," says the ever-forthright Powell at Kansas State. Washing "lowers the pathogen count a little, but not to safe levels if it’s contaminated."

Even though half the recipes involving meat tell you to rinse it off (especially chicken and turkey), this is unnecessary and actually dangerous, says Elisabeth Hagen, under- secretary for food safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "Rinsing meat or poultry with water can actually increase your chance of food poisoning by splashing raw juices and any bacteria they might contain onto your sink and counters."

• If the water touched your hands, they’re clean.

Think a quick rinse of your hands before you handle food is good enough? Nice try. A good hand-washing takes at least 20 seconds, says Doug Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., who has written research papers on the topic. The real cleansing is done by the friction and force of rubbing your hands together, along with the soap. The temperature of the water doesn’t really matter, as it takes 160 degrees to kill bacteria, which would be fine except water that hot would also give you third-degree burns. But warm water does make it more likely you’ll spend the necessary 10 seconds scrubbing under vigorously flowing water. And then another 10 seconds of vigorous rubbing with a towel. "The friction rips the microbes off your skin," says Powell. If you really want to go for the gusto, invest in a nail brush. "Because if you had a Number Two and you experienced ‘slippage’ with your toilet paper, that’s where the pathogens go, under your nails."

 

Do people in Dubai know who Tim Horton was? And does it matter? Shopping for food safely in Emirates

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Upon arriving in Abu Dhabi, I did what I always do when temporarily unbound from the responsibilities of family and out on the prowl: I had a nap; and then went grocery shopping.

The Hypermarket is next door to the hotel, so I wandered around at 11 p.m. The place was bustling with young families, singles, and endless staff obsessed with cleaning. That seemed like a good sign.

I collected the usual basics for before- and after-meal snacking: berry juice, yogurt, Greek salad, tabbouleh, whole grain bread, Dairy Milk chocolate, and cheese (in North America it’s Extra-Old cheddar, in Australia it’s Extra Tasty, in the United Arab Emirates it’s Extra Mature).

Driving from Dubai to Abu Dhabi was eerily similar to driving from Tucson to Scottsdale, although Arizona has more hilly bits. Desert, gas stations, concrete monuments and groovy architecture.

Tim Hortons?

The venerable Canadian coffee and doughnut shop was everywhere. Can’t find one in Australia, can’t find one in the southern U.S., but they’re everywhere in UAE after opening their Dubai outlet in Sept. 2011. A local paper noted at the time, Tim Hortons is to Canadians what the falcon is to the UAE; an intrinsic part of the culture and an inescapable symbol of Canadian life.

I tried to explain to the driver who Tim Horton was. That didn’t go so well.

Tim Horton was a bruising (ice hockey) defenseman who won 4 Stanley Cups with the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1960s. Born in 1930 in Cochrance, Ontario, Horton spent his formative years playing in mining communities surrounding Sudbury, Ontario (that’s in Canada; my sister and her family live up there). He got noticed by the Leafs organization and moved to Toronto when he was 17-years-old. He died in a car accident in 1974 after a 24-year National hockey League career?. Horton had a reputation for enveloping players who were fighting him in a crushing bear hug (sorta like my uncle, who played small-town hockey in Northern Ontario). Boston Bruins winger Derek Sanderson once bit Horton during a fight; years later, Horton’s widow, Lori, still wondered why. "Well," Sanderson replied, "I felt one rib go, and I felt another rib go, so I just had—to, well, get out of there!” ?

Tim Hortons Inc. was founded in 1964 in Hamilton, Ontario by Canadian hockey player Tim Horton. In 1967 Horton partnered with investor Ron Joyce, who quickly took over operations and expanded the chain into a multi-million dollar franchise. There are almost 3,000 Tim Hortons in Canada, and another 50 in the U.S. The chain accounted for 22.6 per cent of all fast food industry revenues in Canada in 2005. Canada has more per-capita ratio of doughnut shops than any other country. In Canada, owning a Tim Hortons is like owning a license to print money (that’s the Tim Hortons sign in Cookstown, Ontario, north of Toronto, where my father is from)..

I never bought Tim Hortons coffee – I can make better stuff at home. But I will track down an UAE outlet and savor the nostalgia of a still-warm, sugar- encrusted apple fritter. Maybe even some Timbits – doughnut holes – just like the ones used to bribe my girls with to get to 6 a.m. hockey practices. I bribe 3-year-old Sorenne to her 7 a.m. swimming class in Brisbane with fresh melon. Different climate, different motivations.

5 years of red-yellow-green inspection grades in Sacramento County

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Social embarrassment works on a number of levels: Scarlett letters, verbal putdowns, passing gas. Even stickers of shame, the New York City practice of slapping a neon yellow sticker along with a $65 fine on cars that illegally block street cleaners. According to the New York Times, the fine is largely irrelevant, it’s the embarrassing – and difficult to remove — stickers that is fueling city council’s move to end the 25-year-old practice.

With food safety, social embarrassment is an effective tool to increase awareness of issues: iPhones recordings of dancing mice, restaurant inspection grades, making people barf and hearing all about it.

How to measure effectiveness remains problematic.

Five years ago, Sacramento County in California launched a green-yellow-red food facility rating program, about 10 years after Toronto in Canada launched a red-yellow-green restaurant inspection disclosure program.

Val Siebal, director of the Environmental Management Department, said that since the program began, food facilities receiving a green or “Pass” placard increased from 88 to 94 percent. At the same time, major health risk violations that could potentially cause foodborne illness have decreased. Restaurants are inspected three times a year and other food facilities twice a year. Routine inspections are unannounced.

“The program has been well-received by food facility owners and operators, and is popular with restaurant patrons. The color-coded placards give consumers an instant message about the establishment’s food safety inspection record and compliance with State and local food safety laws,” said Siebal.

A food inspection results website and smart phone apps were recently made available. Visit m.ffi.saccounty.net with your smart phone or tablet and view the inspection results for food facilities in your immediate area. Free apps can be found in the Android Market and iTunes app stores by searching for ‘Sac Food.’ Visit our mobile web & app page for more information.

The 25-minute “How to Get a Green” training video is available in four languages (English, Spanish, Cantonese, and Vietnamese). It can be viewed online at www.emd.saccounty.net/EnvHealth/FoodProtect/FoodVideoTraining.html.

Inspections don’t make safe food, holds people accountable; FSIS food safety inspection presence unaffected by office closures

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“Offices don’t inspect, even then inspections don’t make food safe. It is up to the producers, the processors and the retailers. Inspections only hold people accountable. It is up to the industry to make food safe, not the inspection services -they are ultimately responsible for the products they produce.”

Or something like that as I, described as US-based food safety professor and blogger Doug Powell, chatted to the British reporter in France in the late Australian hours about a U.S. food safety policy decision.

Mark Astley of Food Quality News writes that US food safety and inspection efforts will not be hit, despite plans to close a third of Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) district offices, according to the US government.

The closures are part of the USDA’s Blueprint for Stronger Service plan, which will see the closure of almost 260 offices, facilities and labs across the US.

FoodQualityNews.com understands that the changes will impact inspection reporting structure but will not affect the inspection duties performed in the districts.

X-ray food: companies do it to avoid recalls and protect their brand names

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I agree with Steve Alexander of the Minnesota Star Tribune when he writes, “If consumers only knew what went into food safety, they might think they’d slipped into a James Bond movie.”

Which is why I’ve been urging companies, producers, retailers, to publicly flaunt their food safety efforts for 20 years, and am now convinced an effective way to build a food safety culture within any operation from farm-to-fork is public marketing of food safety efforts.

At Legendary Baking in Chaska, the pies it makes for Bakers Square restaurants and local grocery stores are X-rayed to make sure there’s nothing inside but pie.

The completely automated machines X-ray a pie and use a computer to analyze the image in a second or less, then eject it from the assembly line if it appears to contain a foreign object.

That’s not unusual in the food industry, where products have long been subjected to X-ray machines, metal detectors or special weighing devices to weed out objects such as metal or plastic parts that might fall off an assembly line.

"We have been using X-rays for seven years to eliminate the potential for dense foreign objects in products," said Steven Hawkes, general manager of the bakery in Chaska, a unit of American Blue Ribbon Holdings in Denver.

Hawkes declined to say whether the machines had ever found any foreign objects in pies.

While assembly line X-ray machines are expensive — they sell for tens of thousands of dollars each — food companies find the cost is well worth it, said Ted Labuza, a food engineer in the Food Science and Nutrition Department at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul.

"Compared to the cost of product liability lawsuits, X-ray machines are cheap," Labuza said. "Under Minnesota law, manufacturers are 100 percent liable if their product causes damage, and in most other states it’s the same."

The X-ray machines, which cost $45,000 to $70,000 each, are about 98 percent accurate in detecting contaminant particles as small as 1 to 2 millimeters in diameter, said Bob Ries, Thermo Fisher’s lead product manager for metal detection and X-ray products.

At Legendary Baking, the Thermo Fisher machines can scan one or two pies per second, Ries said.

Consumers might be surprised to know how many products they use have been X-rayed, Ries said: "anything in foil, foil tops or cans" and a lot of glass bottles.

"If you walk through a grocery store, there’s a 99.9 percent chance that a product there went through either an X-ray machine or a metal detector," Ries said. "Companies do it to avoid recalls and protect their brand names."

What those X-ray googles to help see bacteria that might be contaminating a $0.50 pot pie?

Cantaloupe moves through the system; Frontera CEO discusses company’s role in listeria outbreak

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On Nov. 21, The Packer conducted an exclusive question-and-answer interview with Will Steele, president and CEO of Frontera Produce, Edinburg, Texas, the marketer of the listeria-tainted cantaloupes shipped by Jensen Farms, Holly, Colo. Below are some edited highlights from that interview.

Q. Please explain Frontera Produce’s business relationship with Jensen Farms.

Our role was that of a marketing agent, providing our expertise to find buyers and manage the sales paperwork and logistics for cantaloupe grown and packed by Jensen Farms.

As part of our marketing services, we utilized our inventory control system in which every pallet of Jensen Farms cantaloupe marketed by Frontera was remotely entered into our database when it was harvested and shipped. This proved to be important in tracking the product to customers in our database because we had records of where each pallet came from and where Jensen Farms shipped it.

Q. What are Frontera Produce’s food safety requirements and traceability systems? Have any changed since this outbreak?

In the wake of this experience, we are examining, among other things, the role of audits. Third-party audits are an important and useful tool, but they are obviously not fail-safe. Audits provide baseline information on conditions at the time they are conducted. So we are looking at possible changes that might further enhance food safety. One area of focus is whether additional steps are needed to validate the audit findings regarding food safety protocols that are in place. Validation could be in the form of a follow-up audit, or perhaps other measures that will help provide additional assurance of food safety compliance.
This is an industry-wide issue that all of us must deal with, so we are also talking with others in the produce industry and sharing our experience so that we can further our collective knowledge and understanding.

Q. What’s your view on the lawsuits that have named Frontera as a defendant?

First, it is important to remember that the greatest tragedy in all of this is the human one. And it is this human tragedy that drives us to continue to analyze every aspect of this unprecedented event in an attempt to prevent it from ever happening again.

That there is litigation is not surprising; almost anytime there is an injury, a lawsuit will follow. In fact, it is to be expected. We have seen this again and again, where even companies that never saw or touched the product were drawn into litigation based on association or something other than actual wrong-doing. It is an unfortunate reality.