Tag Archives: Mammoth Burger

Tweeting about Food Safety

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Do you remember how you first heard about the latest round of Salmonella in the peanut butter?  Was it on the evening news, in the paper, or did you hear about it through Facebook or Twitter?  If you’re in the under 30 crowd you might fit into the latter category.  Social networking sites, like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are increasingly being utilized for up-to-the-minute recall information.

During the recent Salmonella outbreak, the United States Department of Health and Human Services – specifically the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – engaged in a heavy social media push to inform citizens about the health risks and product recalls.  As a result, the CDC Social Media Center was created as a central hub for harnessing the power of social networking to spread recall information.

Twitter is one of the sites currently used in the assortment of links.   Twitter allows users to “follow” one another’s “tweets” about what they do during the day.  The website is on the rise among medical professionals and there are accounts for all ranges of industry available.  Why not food safety?

Federal health agencies have been experimenting with new Internet tools, dubbed Web 2.0, that make it easier to deliver information directly to the public. The "Health 2.0" movement got a big boost with the arrival of President Barack Obama, who is pushing federal agencies to use the tools to make the federal government more transparent and participatory.

Current news about FDA recalls can be found @FDArecalls and public health updates from the CDC can be found @CDCemergency. The only snag is you have to sign up in order to receive tweets from the FDA, but hey, its free.  After all, you’re no one if you’re not on Twitter.

 

Natural Grocers defends itself against salmonella

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Founded on the belief that "health should not be expensive," Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage grinds its own peanut butter in-store using only domestic, U.S.D.A. certified organic peanuts.

In a statement addressing Natural Grocers’ connection to the outbreak of salmonella in Peanut Corp. of America peanuts, Executive Vice President and Co-Owner of Vitamin Cottage Heather Isely says,

"We are a relatively small, family-owned company that only sells carefully screened natural and organic products, and we work hard to source our products domestically because we believe in the quality controls in place in this country. We – among others – have been hurt by this one unscrupulous supplier…"

The company may have learned the hard way that natural and organic products are not invincible to foodborne pathogens.

Elsewhere in the statement, Isely says,

"[W]e trusted our government and industry food inspection process, which usually works extraordinarily well."

Since January 30, the fresh ground peanut butter made in Vitamin Cottage stores has contained peanuts from a new supplier, Hampton Farms.

"To further reassure our customers," Isely states, "we are now testing each lot of the new peanut butter stock for salmonella. We are working to find even more ways of keeping our customers safe."

Way to be proactive… now that you have to.

Times food safety editorial is nutty

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An editorial in Tuesday’s N.Y. Times about the now bankrupt Peanut Corporation of America and its Salmonella shitfest is long on outrage but short on imagination.

“While most successful food producers are far more diligent — big name-brand peanut butter is considered safe, for example — American consumers have faced far too many food-supply emergencies in the last few years.”

Is ConAgra a big food company? Wasn’t Peter Pan peanut butter the source of a huge Samonella outbreak in 2007?

“Congress needs to find more money for inspectors, especially at the Food and Drug Administration.”

Maybe, but lots of federal and state inspectors, along with the best and brightest the Ponzi scheme of food safety auditing had to offer all seemed to miss the problems at PCA. If someone wants to break the law and ship Salmonella-contaminated product, it’s going to happen.

“President Obama promised during the campaign to create a government that does a better job of protecting the American consumer. The nation’s vulnerable food supply is a healthy place to start.”

Government has a role. But nowhere did the Times editorial mention the power of consumer choice that would be unleashed if food producers would truthfully market their microbial food safety programs, coupled with behavioral-based food safety systems that foster food safety culture from farm-to-fork. The best producers and processors will go far beyond the lowest common denominator of government and should be rewarded in the marketplace.
 

Washington Post on PCA: “Welcome to the Nut House”

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A story in Sunday’s Washington Post details some of the inner-workings of Peanut Corp of America’s operations. One of the interviewees, David Brooks, a former buyer for a snack company, spoke to the culture of the family business:

Even as PCA was rapidly expanding, a former buyer for a major snack manufacturer said the Parnells found success by operating a low-cost business that relied on the cheapest peanuts they could find. They used minimum wage labor and a bare-bones front office.

"The old man [Hugh Parnell Sr.] used to look for distressed situations: Someone over-inventoried or had peanuts from last year that they had to move," said David Brooks, who was a buyer for a snack company that refused to purchase from Parnell because of concerns about sanitation and what he called the "culture" of the family business. "He would aggressively look for these, making phone calls, hunting people down. Stewart grew up in that and was the same way."

On three occasions in the mid-1980s, Brooks inspected PCA’s Gorman plant to determine whether to buy its peanut products, he said. Each time, he gave the plant a failing grade.

"It was just filthy," said Brooks, who has since retired from the food business. "Dust was all over the beams, the braces of the building. The roofs leaked, the windows would be open, and birds would fly through the building. . . . It was just a time bomb waiting to go off, and everybody in the peanut industry in Georgia, Virginia and Texas — they all knew."

Parnell ran PCA from a converted garage behind his home in a wooded, upscale suburb. Earlier this week, kayaks and a covered powerboat sat in the driveway next to the two-story building. A sun-faded banner with a picture of a squirrel hangs nearby from Parnell’s house reading "Welcome to the Nut House."

Earlier this week I was on the Gil Gross Program, AM 810 San Francisco, talking about food safety culture, barfblog and our ideas on marketing food safety. Gil was all over the marketing to consumers idea.

Gil got that even if there was more oversight and inspection that something else is needed to push food safety along and was running with the idea that consumers can pressure industry to share more info — and demonstrate their food safety culture.  I told him that there are lots of consumers looking for and able to handle more information about food safety, just saying that "we have a good food safety system" isn’t good enough anymore.  It’s time for companies doing a good job on food safety to back it up and open their doors (post test results, put up web cams) and recapture some of the lost trust.  You can listen to the interview here.

And for your weekend peanut butter-related YouTube clip, here’s a somewhat creepy video of a The Marathon’s 1961 hit, peanut butter (watch until at least 13 seconds into it for the creepiness).

 

 

No incentive for a culture of food safety?

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In an op-ed published on Marler Blog today titled, The market for peanuts: Why food in the U.S. may never be safe, Denis W. Stearns seemed to list three reasons why there is little economic incentive for producers to make food that is safer than that of any other producer.

Stearns argued that the culture pervading Peanut Corporation of America was a perfect example of those ideas at work.

1. To begin with, there is no such thing as a “free” market for food…

Consumers want safe food, but cannot tell if a food is hazard-free before purchase and therefore cannot discriminately buy only safe brands.

Stearns referred to a New York Times article that described “the array of poor work conditions and safety flaws” hidden behind the plant’s walls that was not perceived in its products until hundreds were sickened.

2. [R]egulations can impose a predictable cost that companies can meet, but need not exceed.

An incident/outbreak linked to one producer can turn consumers off the entire product-category, regardless of how far above and beyond regulations unassociated producers go to ensure safety.

In the same vein, George Akerlof was quoted as saying “there is an incentive for sellers to market poor quality merchandise since the returns for good quality accrue mainly to the entire group…rather than to the individual seller.”

3. Finally, there is the important issue of traceability—or, in the case of the United States, the stunning lack of it.

If it is not likely that an incident/outbreak will be traced back to the producer responsible, the possibility of making a profit from a contaminated food may be greater than the chance they’ll get caught.

Stearns cited e-mails by Peanut Corp. president Stewart Parnell in which he directed that contaminated produce be shipped: "I go thru this about once a week. I will hold my breath …. again."

Stearns closed with this:

[A]t this point, after outbreak after outbreak after outbreak, is it possible that finally, once and for all, the case for the effective regulation of the food industry has been incontestably made?

I can only hope so.

Because until the market for peanuts—and other food—is made to work for the benefit of the public health, the big profits will continue to go to the companies that cheat, cut corners, and do not care.
 

Peanut Corp. president keeps quiet amidst accusations that he put profits before safety

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After e-mails released in today’s U.S. Congressional oversight and investigation subcommittee hearing revealed the sentiments of Peanut Corp. of America’s president, Stewart Parnell, toward the company’s microbial testing, the Associated Press reported,

Parnell sat stiffly, his hands folded in his lap at the witness table, as Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., held up a clear jar of his company’s products wrapped in crime scene tape and asked him if he would be willing to eat the food.

"Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, on advice of my counsel, I respectively decline to answer your questions based on the protections afforded me under the U.S. Constitution," Parnell said.

After repeating the statement several times, he was dismissed from the hearing.

Sammy Lightsey, his plant manager also invoked his right not to testify when he appeared alongside Parnell before the subcommittee.

As the hearing opened this morning, the Atlanta-Journal-Constitution reported,

Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Marietta, admonished company executives sitting in the crowd, saying they could invoke their Fifth Amendment rights not to testify, but that doesn’t protect them from justice if they’re found guilty of wrongdoing.

Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, was quoted as saying, “This company cared more about its financial bottom line than it did about the safety of its customers.”

According to the AP, the president of one company that tested products for Peanut Corp. spoke to the House panel.

Charles Deibel, president of Deibel Laboratories Inc., said his company was among those that tested Peanut Corp. of America’s products and notified the Georgia plant that salmonella was found in some of its peanut stock.

"It is not unusual for Deibel Labs or other food testing laboratories to find that samples clients submit do test positive for salmonella and other pathogens, nor is it unusual that clients request that samples be retested," Deibel said. "What is virtually unheard of is for an entity to disregard those results and place potentially contaminated products into the stream of commerce."

Peanut Corp. president urged shipping tainted nuts

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It’s as bad as it gets.

Early reporting from today’s U.S. Congressional oversight and investigation subcommittee hearing where Peanut Corp. of America President Stewart Parnell was forced to appear and is expected to take the Fifth Amendment and not testify, depicts a company focused on profits rather than food safety.

E-mails between Parnell and Sammy Lightsey, manager of the company’s Blakely plant, were released as part of a congressional hearing that started at 10 a.m. Wednesday.

• In one e-mail, Lightsey wrote Parnell discussing positive salmonella tests on its products, but Parnell gave instructions to nonetheless “turn them loose” after getting a negative test result from another testing company.

• In another e-mail, Parnell expressed his concerns over the losing “$$$$$$” due to delays in shipment and costs of testing.

• Parnell in another company-wide e-mail told employees there was no salmonella in its plants, instead accusing the news media of “looking for a news story where there currently isn’t one.”

On Jan. 19, Parnell sent an e-mail to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, pleading with the agency to let it stay in business.

He wrote that company executives “desperately at least need to turn the raw peanuts on our floor into money.”

Other revelations underpinning the Salmonella outbreak:

• The Georgia Department of Agriculture conducted two inspections of the company’s Blakely, Ga. plant in 2008, but did not test for salmonella on its own on either occasion — despite an internal agency goal to conduct such tests once a year.

• The company’s largest customers, including Kellogg’s, engaged contractors to conduct audits, but they did not conduct their own salmonella tests.

*The FDA did not test for salmonella at the plant, despite the 2007 salmonella outbreak traced to the Con-Agra plant about 70 miles from Peanut Corp. of America’s Blakely plant.

Companies must come clean on food safety

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Sometimes I fancy myself a bit of a headlines writer — so much fun to take pop culture and puns and adjust it to the content.  An op-ed of mine was published in the Raleigh News & Observer today and the headline was great: Companies must come clean on food safety. I didn’t write it.

Here’s the op-ed:

RALEIGH — Since last September more than 520 cases of salmonella typhimurium have been linked to products from Peanut Corporation of America. PCA’s peanut butter and paste products are used by many food companies and in many products, including Kellogg’s, NutriSystem and Luna bars.
It’s unknown how salmonella made its way into the peanut butter, but it’s a hardy pathogen, and in addition to peanut butter it’s been associated with almonds, sesame seeds, tahini and chocolate.
The high-fat content of these foods protects salmonella from the environment and in the gut, so only a small dose is needed to make someone sick. If salmonella is in a product such as peanut butter, there’s little that a consumer can do other than to cook the food (envision fried peanut butter crackers).
More than 800 products have been recalled to date, highlighting the interconnectedness of our food system and showing how one company’s problem can quickly impact the entire industry (The always prepared Girl Scouts quickly announced that none of their cookies are made with PCA products).
There’s now a climate of uncertainty over what to buy, eat and discard — is all peanut butter unsafe? What about whole peanuts? Some consumers will be vigilant and check the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s searchable database (www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/hottopics/salmonellatyph.html). Others will just stay away from peanut products altogether.
Naturally, there has been a push for greater oversight of the food industry, with more inspectors and inspections. President Barack Obama has used the salmonella outbreak to announce a review of the FDA’s functions.
Inspection is part of the answer, but it’s not as though inspectors have magical salmonella-detecting glasses.
Inspectors can help point out where there might be food safety system breakdowns, but what’s more important is what happens when the inspectors aren’t around.
Can a company identify and address risks associated with its products? Can company officials create an environment in which everyone values food safety and shares the same goals?
A crackdown on the food industry, and the resulting fear of getting caught, might work to change practices in the short term. A better long-term goal is to focus on creating a society that values food safety and compels folks to ask more questions where they buy food, whether at the supermarket, in restaurants or at farmers’ markets.
A segment of consumers (especially peanut-butter-product eaters right now) is already looking for more information about food safety. Asking questions creates pressure on the industry to demonstrate a safety culture, where everyone within an organization has shared values about how not to make customers sick.
It’s time for the really good companies to step up, open their doors and show everyone how they make sure that outbreaks don’t happen to them. Not their inspection or audit results, but a compelling story of how they identify and control risks.
Recapturing lost trust in a chaotic post-outbreak atmosphere could be the biggest return on all our food safety dollars, especially if companies can back it up and start marketing their food safety efforts.
Ben Chapman is a food safety extension specialist at N.C. State University.

Market food safety so consumers can choose

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The news this morning is full of features and editorials seeking to explain the shit storm of Salmonella produced by Peanut Corporation of America.

Chapman and I tried to take it a step further and focus on effective, long-term steps to reduce the incidence of foodborne illness from farm-to-fork. At this point in time, promoting food safety culture coupled with marketing and a series of carrots and sticks is the best we can come up with.

In 1204 in Montpellier, France, a butcher selling a substitute meat in place of the advertized beast was required by statute to reimburse the customer twice the amount paid. In Narbonne, regulations dictated a whipping “with sheep tripe” in front of the food stall for unscrupulous sellers. China routinely executes its biggest food frauds.

During a hearing before the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee looking into a salmonella outbreak linked to a Georgia peanut processing plant, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont said Thursday that food producers responsible for widespread, deadly outbreaks of disease should face jail time, not just fines, to get food makers to take food safety seriously.

Sixteen years after E. coli O157:H7 killed four and sickened hundreds who ate hamburgers at the Jack-in-the-Box chain, the challenge remains: how to get people to take food safety seriously?
Lots of companies do take food safety seriously and the bulk of American meals are microbiologically safe. But recent food safety failures have been so extravagant, so insidious and so continual that consumers must feel betrayed.

The politicos in Washington are focused on legislative fixes, maybe creating a single-food inspection agency, maybe increasing inspections, insisting microbiological test results be submitted to government, maybe mandating jail time for the most audacious executives. Such moves may send a signal of hope and change, but will do little to reduce the carnage contaminated food and water wreak on the American public each year – 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths.

Industry – the folks that process peanuts and all those companies that make some of the 1,550 different peanut butter crackers, ice cream, energy bars and dog treats that have been recalled – is equally void of ideas. The system to ensure safe food relies largely on so-called third-party audits of suppliers, a system that glowingly approved Peanut Corporation of America and its leaky roof, filthy floors and rat-infested storage areas.

Other peanut butter manufacturers like Unilever and ConAgra Foods say they have “stringent food safety and quality control standards.” But neither will say what it is they do better than PCA; neither will say how often the plants test their finished product for foodborne illnesses or other contamination. Maple Leaf Foods in Canada, whose deli meats killed at least 20 Canadians last fall, says it has done 42,000 tests for listeria across 24 packaged meat plants in the past three months, but will not make the results publicly available for scrutiny.

Even Whole Foods, where consumers pay a hefty premium for basic foodstuffs, said the company carefully checks the paperwork for all the products it sells, but can do no better than the minimal standard of government.  “For the thousands of products we sell, that’s the extent we can go to. The rest of it is up to the F.D.A. and to the manufacturer.”

Like a fiscal house of cards, the Ponzi scheme of inspection and verification for food safety is collapsing with merely the mention of consumer scrutiny. Sort of like an eighth grade party with chaperones — just pop and chips. But when the inspector or auditors leaves, the party turns exciting (read all about it on Facebook).

A cultural shift is required for everyone, from the farm through to the fork, to take food safety seriously. Frank Yiannas, the vice-president of food safety at Wal-Mart has taken an initial stab in his new book, Food Safety Culture: Creating a Behavior-based Food Safety Management System.

Yiannas says that an organization’s food safety systems need to be an integral part of its culture. At Peanut Corporation of America, former employees are now coming forward to tell of filthy conditions in the Blakely, Georgia, processing plant. A company with a strong food safety culture would have encouraged those employees to speak up while they were employed, not because the manager or auditor or inspector was watching, but because it was the right thing to do.

The best food producers, processors, retailers and restaurants should go above and beyond minimal government and auditor standards and sell food safety solutions directly to the public. The best organizations will use their own people to demand ingredients from the best suppliers; use a mixture of encouragement and enforcement to foster a food safety culture; and use technology to be transparent — whether it’s live webcams in the facility or real-time test results on the website — to help restore the shattered trust with the buying public.

Here’s what consumers can do: at the local market, the stop-n-shop or the supermarket, ask someone, how do I know this food won’t make me barf? While such talk may be socially frowned upon, it’s time to put aside the niceties and bureau-speak and talk directly about safe food.

The more customers ask, the more food providers will be encouraged to market their food safety efforts.

Just like in 13th century France.

Doug Powell is an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University and the publisher of barfblog.com. Ben Chapman is a food safety extension specialist at North Carolina State University.

Memories of Guelph: Don’t kiss toilets

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Guest barfblogger Don Schaffner sent Doug and I the below picture from one of his favorite blogs,  blame it on the voices. The picture, likely staged, reminded me of something similar I had seen before my food safety geekdom. 

During my first couple of years of university, I used to go to Retro Wednesdays at the Trasheteria, an-aptly named bar next to Sun-Sun’s in downtown Guelph. There wasn’t any Journey or Foreigner played — it was early nineties retro with the Beastie Boys and Rob Base, with some Nine Inch Nails mixed in.  Pretty much the same stuff I still listen too.

One of those Wednesday nights, I hit the restroom and saw what I think was a lipstick mark, akin to the Rolling Stones logo, on the lip of the toilet. I returned to my table and sent a couple of my friends in to confirm.  I hadn’t really thought of it until Don sent the pic, but maybe we need a "Don’t kiss toilets" website.