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Tufts justice students need to learn to substantiate rhetoric about E. coli in beef: students organize petition for more free−range meat

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Has Change.org jumped the shark?

Students enrolled in the Environmental Justice and U.S. Literature class taught by English Professor Elizabeth Ammons last Thursday collected signatures in Dewick−MacPhie Dining Hall and outside Carmichael Hall for a petition asking that Tufts Dining Services offer more free−range meat options in the dining halls.

The petition, which is also available online at Change.org, asks Dining Services to dedicate 10 percent of its meat purchases in the 2013−2014 academic year to free−range and to incrementally increase meat purchases to 50 percent free−range by 2020.

Tufts Daily reports that “non−free−range meat, despite being soaked in ammonia, has 20 times more E. coli bacteria than free−range meat, according to the petition.”

“The industrial meat system isn’t very clean,” sophomore Kara Daniels, a member of the class, said. “People have died from E. coli outbreaks. It just really affects people.”

Yes, people die from E. coli outbreaks involving all sorts of foods and feeding conditions. There are lots of capable people at Tufts who can respond to this, but the lit students initiated this one, so, what’s the source? What’s the reference? Show everyone the data.

Has ‘food safety culture’ jumped the shark?

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The first thing Bob Dudley, the new chief executive of embattled oil giant BP, vowed to do was "change the culture" of how the company tackles safety issues after the Gulf of Mexico disaster and promised to "make sure this does not happen again."

Same thing after Bhopal and the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

Me and Chapman and Frank Yiannas and Chris Griffith have been pushing the concept of food safety culture for years as an enhancement to inspection, regulation and training.

Culture encompasses the shared values, mores, customary practices, inherited traditions, and prevailing habits of communities. It’s when one food service or farm or retail employee says to another, dude, wash your hands, without being told by the boss or the inspector.

But now that safety culture is being touted by BP, the concept may have jumped the shark.

Jumping the shark is an idiom used to describe the moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise. The phrase was originally used to denote the point in a television program’s history where the plot spins off into absurd story lines or unlikely characterizations. These changes were often the result of efforts to revive interest in a show whose audience had begun to decline, usually through the employment of different actors, writers or producers.

The phrase jump the shark refers to the climactic scene in "Hollywood," a three-part episode opening the fifth season of the American TV series Happy Days in September 1977. In this story, the central characters visit Los Angeles, where Fonzie (Henry Winkler), wearing swim trunks and his leather jacket, jumps over a confined shark on water skis, answering a challenge to demonstrate his bravery. The series continued for nearly seven years after that, with a number of changes in cast and situations.