Tag Archives: Food

Food stored under sewage line; Sweat Pea closed in Colorado

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It’s difficult to imagine a place called Sweet Pea Market and Café in corn-fed Colorado needing to fight the man. Serving up local produce, fighting health inspectors, it’s a powerful narrative, until folks discover food was stored beneath an unshielded sewer line in a basement walk-in cooler — installed without a permit.

Steamboat Today reports the decision by county officials Tuesday to close Sweet Pea Market and Cafe, the first license revocation of its kind in Routt County in at least 30 years, involved issues that go beyond the popular downtown eatery’s seating capacity and restrooms.

Tuesday’s Board of Health hearing was required by state law after the Routt County Department of Environmental Health assessed three fines of $1,000 each — July 28, Aug. 6 and Aug. 20 — to Sweet Pea owners Jonathon Hieb and Katherine Zambrana. The owners paid all three fines.

The violation that led to the inspections, fines and hearing involved Sweet Pea’s operation during the summer with far more seating capacity than its one restroom allowed, according to state health regulations.

The violations involve food stored in the walk-in cooler and Sweet Pea’s basement walk-in freezer, which also was installed without a permit and walled with noncompliant, absorbent materials including plywood and foam core.

County senior environmental health specialist Heather Savalox said she discovered the cooler and freezer in an inspection Sept. 2 after an anonymous complaint.

“I’ve never seen anybody else store food under a sewer line,” Savalox said about Sweet Pea’s basement. “In 15 years, I’ve never seen that.”

Mike Zopf, director of the county’s environmental health department has directed Routt County’s environmental health department for 31 years. He told commissioners Tuesday that “we have never before recommended that a retail food license be suspended or revoked until" Tuesday.

Rex Brice is vice president of the Steamboat Springs chapter of the Colorado Restaurant Association. He owns four local restaurants: Rex’s American Grill & Bar, Mazzola’s Majestic Italian Diner, Big House Burgers & Bottle Cap Bar, and Lil’ House Country Biscuits & Coffee.

“I feel bad for Sweet Pea, but I’ve always been given the information I’ve needed to make those decisions and I’ve always been held accountable for the regulations,” Brice said. “I guess if you’re going to hold one person accountable, you’ve got to hold everybody accountable.”

In explaining her support for the Sweet Pea license revocation, Commissioner Diane Mitsch Bush said the potential impacts of public health risks can be disastrous.

She recalled a local incident of salmonella in 2002 at the former Seasons at the Pond restaurant.

The outbreak occurred Dec. 16, 2002, likely from fruit salad. Fifty-one cases of salmonella were reported in the weeks that followed. Those contaminated ranged from 4 to 72 years old, and 96 percent were Routt County residents.

Hieb said Sweet Pea had about 15 people on staff at the time of the revocation.

He said the community showed “unbelievable” support for Sweet Pea on Tuesday night when the market had a sale on inventory up to its closure at midnight Wednesday.

“Thank God for our community,” Hieb continued. “We’re going to do everything in our power to open up in two months.”
 

Food donated for animals served in UK zoo cafeteria

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In scandal-starved U.K., the Daily Mail reports a safari park has been forced to admit serving up food meant for its animals in the public canteen.

Woburn Safari Park in Bedfordshire has said that potatoes and onions generously donated for the animals were fed to paying customers.

However safari park bosses stressed today that they had not put customers’ health at risk.

The incident only came to light when a member of the public (or kitchen staff – dp) complained to Central Bedfordshire County Council about kitchen practices.

Park chiefs were then forced to admit that in September last year they had used food in the public canteen that had been donated as animal feed.

However, they insisted this was a ‘one-off’ and not common practice at the park which houses animals including lions, tigers, elephants, rhino and giraffes.

The potatoes and onions were said to have been unsuitable for the animals.
Officials from Central Bedfordshire Council launched an investigation into the incident and discovered the allegations were true.

L.A. County wants food trucks to carry health letter grades

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Why not? Wherever people eat, they should be able to get publicly-funded information about food safety; the smart operators will market their excellent food safety.

Los Angeles County public health officials are asking the Board of Supervisors to expand to food trucks the county’s popular letter grading system that evaluates safe food handling practices. The vote, originally scheduled for Tuesday, has been pushed back a week.

If approved, 6,000 full-service catering trucks and 3,500 hot dog, churro and other limited food service carts would be covered by the ordinance. If the supervisors approve it, enforcement would first begin in unincorporated areas of the county.

Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of the county Department of Public Health, said,

“Even before this trend, we felt people were asking us: We go to a restaurant, we like the grading system, but what about all these trucks that are coming? How do we know? We’ve been looking at this for some time.”

Public health officials said the current program does not meet annual inspection goals because they cannot locate food vehicles that move constantly. The new ordinance will require vendors to give information about their vehicle whereabouts and mandates that the trucks be inspected twice a year.

Erin Glenn, chief executive officer of Asociacion de Loncheros, an association of lunch trucks, said,

“As long as enforcement is fair, and the inspectors treat local food vendors with respect, just like they do with the brick-and-mortar establishments, hopefully the inspection standards are the same, I think the regulations are fine. I think it’s a step in the right direction to improve public health, and we’re all for it.”
 

Math lessons for locavores

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Stephen Budiansky, the author of the blog liberalcurmudgeon.com, writes in the N.Y. Times today that the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas.

Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.

The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

It takes about a tablespoon of diesel fuel to move one pound of freight 3,000 miles by rail; that works out to about 100 calories of energy. If it goes by truck, it’s about 300 calories, still a negligible amount in the overall picture. (For those checking the calculations at home, these are “large calories,” or kilocalories, the units used for food value.) Overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system.

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.
 

Do you feel lucky? Some food good long past expiration date

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A new survey sponsored by ShelfLifeAdvice.com, a food storage reference website that estimates U.S. consumers unnecessarily discard billions of dollars of food a year, found that three in four U.S. consumers believe certain foods are unsafe to eat after the date on the packaging has passed.

But, according to Andy Miller of msnbc.com, experts say that if most foods are stored properly, they can be safe for days after the ‘use by’ date.

Ira Allen, a Food and Drug Administration spokesman, said the food date does not equate to safety, adding,

“If something is past its date, and stored properly, often it’s OK."

Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety, said foods that can last far beyond an expiration date with proper storage include flour, sugar, rice and cake mixes, adding.

“There’s no reason that dry goods wouldn’t be safe except if it becomes wet.’’
 

‘Be the bug’ and beware cross-contamination

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I routinely appropriate lines from popular movies.

When trying to explain the risks of cross-contamination and dangerous microorganisms moving around, I invoke the scene from Caddyshack where Chevy Chase explains to Danny how the universe works and “to be the ball.”

Be the bug.

Produce, pet food, pizza and pot pies — the bugs that make humans barf are showing up in wild and wacky places. And they move around. A lot.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control updated the ongoing outbreak of Salmonella infection, serotype I 4,[5],12:i:- linked to frozen mice fed to reptiles. As of July 29, 2010, 34 were sick from 17 states. Hundreds were sick in the U.K. last year from the same bug from the same supplier.

Pet owners, be the bug, and consider all the opportunities that bug has to move from dead, frozen mouse to counters, dishes, hands, and the environment. CDC says,

* Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water immediately after handling frozen rodents used as food for reptiles, or anything in the area where they are stored, thawed, prepared, and fed to reptiles.

* Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water immediately after handling live rodents and reptiles, or anything in the area where they live and roam.

* Keep frozen rodents away from areas where food and drink are stored, prepared, served, or consumed.

* Avoid using microwave ovens or kitchen utensils used for human food to thaw frozen rodents used for reptile feed. Any kitchen surfaces that come in contact with frozen rodents should be disinfected afterwards.

* Do not let children younger than 5 years of age or people with weakened immune systems handle frozen rodents.

Be the bug.

Florida not inspecting food at hospitals, nursing homes

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In a few weeks we’ll be leaving for a month of seaside (Gulf-side) writing in Florida.

As food safety dude and axman Roy Costa has pointed out, I sure hope I don’t end up in a Florida hospital, because no one is doing food inspections.

The Department of Health told Associated Press yesterday it’s working with other agencies to figure out who will handle inspections at the state’s 286 hospitals and 671 nursing homes. Meanwhile, the Department of Children & Families is temporarily taking over the inspection of day-care centers, which were also part of the cuts.

The health department had been inspecting facilities four times a year until Gov. Charlie Crist signed a bill (HB 5311) stopping them. Experts say people at these facilities are the most vulnerable for foodborne illnesses.

DCF Secretary George Sheldon said his agency decided to fill the gap at day cares and will temporarily oversee inspections because “it was the right thing to do.”

DCF employees already inspect day-care facilities for safety issues. Sheldon said the Legislature was trying to consolidate inspections to prevent multiple state agencies from visiting the same facilities to inspect different standards.

The health department inspected more than 15,000 day-care centers last year, finding nearly 12,000 violations, including food from unsafe sources, poor hygiene and contaminated equipment.

I don’t really care who inspects as long as there is accountability in the system through — at a minimum — public availability of results and mandatory training for anyone who handles and prepares food.
 

Are catered meals the biggest source of foodborne illness in America?

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In the wake of several high-profile outbreaks of foodborne illness at catered events – 180 people barfing after 3 events prepared by an unlicensed caterer in North Dakota last year, and 57 people barfing at events at an Illinois catering hall this month – MSNBC reports today catered events make more people sick than outbreaks involving meals at restaurants or prepared at home.

Uh-huh.

The story says that new figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control “show that illnesses from reported outbreaks of food poisoning linked to catering outpace those from restaurants or home cooking. 36 illnesses per catering outbreak; 13 at restaurants or home-prepared meals.

Between 1998 and 2008, there were 833 outbreaks of foodborne illness traced to caterers, incidents that sparked 29,738 illnesses, 345 hospitalizations and 4 deaths, according to Dana Cole, a CDC researcher.

Proportionately, the outbreaks from catering are higher than the 22,600 illnesses from 1,546 reported home cooking outbreaks and the 101,907 illnesses from 7,921 outbreaks in restaurants and delis.

“Partly that’s because at larger banquets and weddings the number of people served tend to be larger,” Cole said.

Uh-huh.

I hadn’t heard about this new data, and can’t comment on its validity because it hasn’t, as far as I can tell, been published anywhere. One, Dana Cole, and a couple of others from CDC are scheduled to present results next Tuesday at the annual meeting of the International Association for Food Protection in a talk entitled, Sources and settings: contaminated food vehicles and the settings of foodborne disease outbreaks.

Usually the media stuff happens after the data is at least presented, and preferably after the paper is peer-reviewed and published. I look forward to reading the scoring system the researchers uses: if spinach is contaminated on a farm with E. coli O157:H7 and makes people barf after eating at a catered event, a restaurant, or a home, how is that scored? And does it matter?

Jacob, C.J. and Powell, D.A. 2009. Where does foodborne illness happen—in the home, at foodservice, or elsewhere—and does it matter? Foodborne Pathogens and Disease, 6(9): 1121-1123.
http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/fpd.2008.0256

??Foodservice professionals, politicians, and the media are often cited making claims as to which locations most often expose consumers to foodborne pathogens. Many times, it is implied that most foodborne illnesses originate from food consumed where dishes are prepared to order, such as restaurants or in private homes. The manner in which the question is posed and answered frequently reveals a speculative bias that either favors homemade or foodservice meals as the most common source of foodborne pathogens. Many answers have little or no scientific grounding, while others use data compiled by passive surveillance systems. Current surveillance systems focus on the place where food is consumed rather than the point where food is contaminated. Rather than focusing on the location of consumption—and blaming consumers and others—analysis of the steps leading to foodborne illness should center on the causes of contamination in a complex farm-to-fork food safety system.

Ringo says, yum yum hospital food; hospital kitchen inspections in Philadelphia region yield range of results

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Don Sapatkin of the Philadelphia Inquirer has been writing for at least a year about deficiencies in the antiquated Philly system and that even with improvements in inspections, most food establishments don’t publicize even their most positive inspection reports, and no government in the Philadelphia region requires that they be tacked up for easy viewing like a menu.

Last week, Sapatkin turned his investigative focus to Philadelphia’s hospital kitchens, and found they were far more likely than food establishments as a whole to be out of compliance with food-safety regulations, averaging six violations apiece in their most recent quarterly inspections by the city health department.

The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, routinely named among the nation’s best medical centers, was cited 14 times. The largely organic kitchen at Cancer Treatment Centers of America’s Eastern Regional Medical Center in the Northeast had eight violations.

And in New Jersey, Virtua Memorial Hospital in Mount Holly was rated "conditional satisfactory" after inspections in November and last month found several violations.

"Many live German cockroaches observed on or at base of wall in dish-washing room, dead roaches observed under shelving in paper storage, next to ice machine, and behind refrigerator in vegetable prep area," a Burlington County health department inspector wrote June 28.

All three hospitals said the violations had been quickly corrected.

Food generally isn’t considered when patients choose a hospital. Yet a review of inspection reports from around the region found scores of violations, as well as wide variations in what was cited from county to county. Some evidence suggests that the scrutiny is more rigorous in the city.

Inspections are a far-from-perfect measure of risk: Inspectors found nothing amiss before or after an outbreak sickened 54 people and killed three patients at a Louisiana state hospital in May. And experts say most hospital kitchens go overboard with food safety, cooking so thoroughly to kill microbes that flavors may be lost.

Sheri Morris, food program manager at the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, which regulates restaurants and stores but not hospitals, said,

"Anybody who has a compromised immune system is going to be more susceptible to food-borne illness. And hospitals are full of people with compromised immune systems.”

Since inspections are a snapshot of a constantly changing kitchen, they have limited ability to predict either safety or danger. "Just because you went in there and the place had no violations doesn’t mean that 15 minutes later the place didn’t go to pot," said Dennis J. Bauer, food-safety coordinator for the Bucks County Health Department.