Tag Archives: Mammoth Burger

New report on safety of U.S. imports urges recall authority for FDA

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The U.S. Interagency Working Group on Import Safety has issued its report to President Bush with the snappy title, Protecting American Consumers Every Step of the Way: A strategic framework for continual improvement in import safety.

The report outlines an approach that can build upon existing efforts to improve the safety of imported products, while facilitating trade.

Approximately $2 trillion of imported products entered the United States economy last year and experts project that this amount will triple by 2015. … While we acknowledge it is not possible to eliminate all risk with imported and domestic products, being smarter requires us to find new ways to protect American consumers and continually improve the safety of our imports. We recommend working with the importing community to develop approaches that consider risks over the life cycle of an imported product, and that focus actions and resources to minimize the likelihood of unsafe products reaching U.S. consumers. …

Supporting this model are six building blocks: 1) Advance a common vision, 2) Increase accountability, enforcement and deterrence,
3) Focus on risks over the life cycle of an imported product, 4) Build interoperable systems, 5) Foster a culture of collaboration, and 6) Promote technological innovation and new science.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Food and Drug Administration would be granted power to require manufacturers and importers of "high risk" products to take steps to prevent contamination and other problems. The FDA could require producers and importers of such goods to certify they comply with FDA standards. The FDA could bar imports if it is given no access or only limited access to production records. The agency would also be able to mandate recalls on tainted products, something it can’t do now.

At least the panel got this bit right:

"Americans benefit from one of the safest food supplies and among the highest standards of consumer protection in the world. Our task is to build on this solid foundation by identifying actions for both the public and private sectors that will help our import safety system continually improve and adapt to a rapidly growing and changing global economy."

Not the safest, which is difficult to substantiate, but one of the safest.

There’s no real surprises in the report, it all sounds good, but really, government is limited in what it can do. And I’m not sure what they mean by focusing on high-risk products. Anything can be high-risk depending on how it was produced — pot pies, peanut butter and pepperoni come to mind. And those were all foodborne illness outbreaks associated with domestic products. Food from around the corner or around the globe has the potential to be contaminated with dangerous microorganisms. Focusing on imports may detract from efforts at home. A strong food safety culture may translate to fewer sick people.

Will more inspectors make food safer?

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No.

An Associated Press story last night continues the fascination with all things political and the on-going, bureaucratic discussion about whether a single food inspection agency will improve food safety.

The story notes that in the two ConAgra contamination cases, it turns out that an FDA inspector hadn’t been to the company’s peanut butter plant in Georgia for two years before the recall, while a USDA inspector visits the Missouri pot pie plant daily.

If that’s the case, then maybe inspectors are the wrong focus here.

Bill Marler got it right yesterday when he wrote about the same AP story that,

Frankly, I am not sure a single agency, or the government for that matter (remember how well it did in Hurricane Katrina), will solve the problem of companies selling poisoned products to customers.  Perhaps when farmers, ranchers, shippers, middlemen of all sorts, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers and restaurants all recall that customers could be their kid, they would put safety before profits.

I expressed a similar notion this morning in the Baltimore Sun.

"You can’t inspect your way to a safe food supply," said Douglas Powell, scientific director at Kansas State University’s International Food Safety Network. "You can’t have an inspector on every site 24/7 to inspect every piece of food that goes to market. You have to create a culture where everyone from the farm to the processing facility, people at restaurants, consumers at home are more in tune with the culture of food safety. People need to get really religious about this. Food safety is everyone’s responsibility."

How best to develop a food safety culture is where we’re focusing much of our research activity.

It’s certainly more than telling people,

"We have the safest food supply in the world,"

as Mindy Brashears, director of the International Center for Food Industry Excellence at Texas Tech University, did in the same Baltimore Sun story.

Food safety and food quality are different: Fancy food doesn’t mean safe food

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Joel Rubin of the Los Angeles Times describes in gut-wrenching glory his recent adventures with Salmonella, and how his initial suspicions of sushi proved wrong: instead it was the Hollandaise sauce at BLD, a trendy L.A. eatery.

Rubin describes how in Los Angeles County,

a small army of inspectors, doctors, specialized nurses and epidemiologists in the Department of Public Health watch over our 38,000 restaurants, markets and bakeries, hoping to catch problems with cleanliness and food handling before a meal gets contaminated.

When two or more people get sick from the same food — an outbreak — these are the experts who try to figure out where and when and how things went sideways. It happens 40 or so times a year in the county, sometimes at restaurants you would never expect.

Rubin provides excellent detail of the epidemiological process that eventually found over 20 sick customers linked to BLD. In the end, at least 40 people are suspected to have been sickened from the Hollandaise sauce at BLD that Sunday, making it one of the largest outbreaks of food-borne illness in Los Angeles this year.

Owner Neal Fraser, "who has a reputation for using only fresh, natural ingredients, made a traditional sauce," meaning raw eggs.

Rubin then goes back to the source  — Chino Valley Ranchers — one of the country’s largest producers of organic eggs. It owns more than a million birds, all roaming around in cage-free houses. In the days before I got sick, 45 dozen of their medium-size, AA-grade eggs, laid by hens raised on organic feed, had been delivered to BLD.

When Rubin visited, he found an impressive-looking operation where chicks are vaccinated, hens screened for infection and eggs put through a mind-bogglingly thorough washing and quality-control process.

Salmonella happens. At fancy restaurants, at local dives, and everywhere in between. Take steps to reduce the risk, in this case using pasteurized eggs.

The Safe Food Caf?

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President Jon Wefald likes to remind me that Kansas State University will not be getting a hockey arena any time soon. I even gave him one of our collectors T-shirts (left, exactly as shown) and he said, no way.

Which is too bad cause one of our ideas to help finance the arena was the Safe Food Café, a restaurant and observational food service kitchen where we could videotape the food safety behaviors of employees and customers, and experiment with interventions.

Apparently the Dutch were listening in, and have come up with their own variation.

The Associated Press reported that a new research centre — dubbed the "restaurant of the future" — at the Dutch university of Wageningen will track diners with dozens of unobtrusive cameras and monitoring their eating habits.

Rene Koster, head of the Center for Innovative Consumer Studies, said,

"We want to find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel. We try to focus on one stimulus, like light," as overhead bulbs switched through green, red, orange and blue. This restaurant is a playground of possibilities. We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse. The changes must be small. If you were making changes every day it would be too disruptive. People wouldn’t like it."

University staff who want to eat at the new restaurant have to sign a consent form agreeing to be watched.

The new research centre — which cost almost 3 million euros ($4.26 million) — was set up in partnership with French catering group Sodexho Alliance and other companies interested in using the restaurant to test their products.

Yum! A culture of food safety?

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David Novak, the 54-year-old chairman, chief executive officer and president of Louisville, KY-based Yum! Brands said in a Restaurants and Institutions Q&A that the take-away lesson in his new book, Education of an Accidental CEO: Lessons Learned from the Trailer Park to the Corner Office, that

"the key to growing is to be an eager learner. One cutting-edge difference in the best leaders I’ve been around is that they truly are avid learners."

Novak also says that, "There’s no way you can achieve success without knowing your stuff."

Dude, you serve food in 5,000 KFCs, 5,000 Taco Bells and 7,000 Pizza Huts in the U.S.. You also stress the Yum culture. When you were asked, What can kill a culture? you responded,

"It’s people saying one thing and doing something different. That’s what’s death."

Especially when it comes to food safety. Taco Bell’s performance in the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak last fall involving lettuce — no, it wasn’t the green onions — raises questions about how well Taco Bell knew their food safety stuff, and restaurant inspection results like this Pizza Hut in Witchita, KS, wonder how much people are saying one thing and doing another.

Novak says,

"The biggest thing I think we did in making our company come alive was to train people on our How We Work Together Leadership Principles [customer focus, belief in people, recognition, coaching and support, accountability, excellence, positive energy and teamwork]. We developed a comprehensive training program that we rolled out around the world. We put process and discipline around culture."

How about food safety culture?

Restaurant inspection — by Larry the Cable Guy

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Despite being universally panned by critics and avoided by moviegoers, I finally saw Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector while editing news the other night. Sure it’s terrible and deserves its #87 ranking in IMDb’s Bottom 100, but it has some food safety moments.

When Larry’s partner, Amy Butlin, asks,

"How did you become a health inspector? I mean working for the government, it sounds so exciting?"

Larry responds:

"Well, I gotta tell ya, Keepin people from blowin’ chunks and crappin’ on themselves is pretty much all I’ve ever been good at. I mean, no one really knows the responsibility I carry around."

Favorite line? After ingesting some tainted food, Larry proclaims:

"My stomach ain’t felt this bad since I got the fish sticks out of the vending machine at the Phillips 66."

“Cheese is the new cool … You simply cannot make a food that is too posh or too expensive”

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The Toronto Star reports that Alex James, 39, bassist with British supergroup Blur and who once billed himself as "the second drunkest member of the drunkest band in Britain," is talking British cheese.

James was quoted as telling The Independent last week that cheese is the new cool, adding,

"The music business is a sinking battleship. It is a complete contrast to the food industry, which is just so buoyant. You simply cannot make a food that is too posh or too expensive."

James’ journey through the careful art of curdling milk is the subject of The Cheese Diaries, a series of videos undertaken for The Guardian (and viewable online at YouTube) in tandem with connoisseur Juliet Harbutt, one of Britain’s foremost cheese experts.

Harbutt, who occasionally gives lectures on cheese in France, was further quoted as saying the British revival is sometimes galling to Gallic sensibilities "because the French are still totally confident that they invented cheese and are the only ones who make it properly. I enjoy reminding them that they learned it from the Romans, just as England did."

WoooooooooHoooooooooo

Pregnant women not receiving food safety info

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Researchers report in the latest Australian and New Zealand Journal of Health that in a survey of 586 women attending antenatal clinics in one private and two major public hospitals in New South Wales between April and November 2006, more than half received no information on preventing Listeria.

It’s long been government advice that pregnant women should avoid soft cheeses, smallgoods, raw seafood and pre-prepared vegetable salads such as coleslaw because of their potential to contain the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes.

Listeria can produce a toxin that crosses the placenta and can cause miscarriages.

Lead researcher Dolly Bondarianzadeh, from the University of Wollongong’s School of Health Sciences, said,

"In my experience, food was not high on the list of health risk topics for doctors, nurses and midwives to discuss with clients. Our results show that when it comes to food, women who have enough information and knowledge from a trusted source change their eating behaviour."

"Health professionals who deal with pregnant women should all be raising the importance of educating women about food safety in pregnancy."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control recommendations for persons at high risk, such as pregnant women and persons with weakened immune systems, includes:

-Do not eat hot dogs, luncheon meats, or deli meats, unless they are reheated until steaming hot.
-Avoid getting fluid from hot dog packages on other foods, utensils, and food preparation surfaces, and wash hands after handling hot dogs, luncheon meats, and deli meats.
-Do not eat soft cheeses such as feta, Brie, and Camembert, blue-veined cheeses, or Mexican-style cheeses such as queso blanco, queso fresco, and Panela, unless they have labels that clearly state they are made from pastuerized milk.
-Do not eat refrigerated pâtés or meat spreads. Canned or shelf-stable pâtés and meat spreads may be eaten.
-Do not eat refrigerated smoked seafood, unless it is contained in a cooked dish, such as a casserole. Refrigerated smoked seafood, such as salmon, trout, whitefish, cod, tuna or mackerel, is most often labeled as "nova-style," "lox," "kippered," "smoked," or "jerky." The fish is found in the refrigerator section or sold at deli counters of grocery stores and delicatessens. Canned or shelf-stable smoked seafood may be eaten.

The USDA risk assessment for listeria is ready-to-eat foods is available here

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/rdad/FRPubs/97-013F/ListeriaReport.pdf

and one from the World Health Organization is here.

http://www.who.int/foodsafety/publications/micro/mra_listeria/en/index.html

Should bake sales be regulated?

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Some students groups are upset after the University of Nebraska at Omaha banned the sale of homemade baked goods on campus.

UNO officials said the ban was put in place due to concerns about food allergies and contaminated food, although there had been no reports of contamination.

While such bans, along with similar attempts to inspect church pot-lucks and other community-based initiatives may seem heavy-handed, the potential for sick people and subsequent liability cannot be ignored.

Anyone who serves, prepares or handles food, in a restaurant, nursing home, day care center, supermarket, local market or yes, even  for a bake sale, needs some basic food safety training. And health inspectors are there to provide some minimal oversight.

You Buy — You Kill — You Dress — You Take Home

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Amy has survival skills. She knows how to field-dress animals. And has pretty good bowstaff skills.

At Tom Prince’s farm 20 miles west of Indianapolis, a Muslim man kneels over a goat, says a brief prayer, then cuts the animal’s throat. It’s hard to imagine a greater cultural mishmash than the early morning gatherings that take place here every Friday and Saturday.

Tim Evans, who reports for The Indianapolis Star, writes in USA Today this morning that since 1999, Prince has operated a self-service slaughterhouse that specializes in providing goat meat to the Indianapolis area’s growing international community. His card reads "You Buy — You Kill — You Dress — You Take Home," and business is booming. Prince also sells lamb and sheep, but goats are the big seller.

Prince, 80, runs the facility from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Friday and Saturday, selling an average of about 50 goats per weekend. In the weeks before Muslim and other religious holidays, he says, sales often double.

The story provides an excellent overview of several facets of the intersection between food, language and culture, something we at iFSN are beginning to explore in a more structured manner (really, I’m getting’ some culture from Amy the French professor and outdoor survivalist).

Prince’s slow Southern drawl stands out from the languages spoken by customers who have found their way to Central Indiana from Morocco, Yemen, Nigeria, Kenya, Pakistan, Mexico and other places around the globe where goat is a dietary staple.

For some, butchering their own meat helps maintain a link to cultures they’ve left behind in Africa, Central America and the Middle East. Others, including the large number of Muslims who buy from Prince, prefer to kill and butcher the animals themselves to ensure food preparation standards of their faith are followed.

Prince said he doesn’t know a lot about Islam, but he is savvy enough as a businessman to make sure the slaughterhouse meets their needs — including situating the killing table so it faces east toward Mecca.

Goats, like all ruminants, are natural reservoirs for E. coli O157:H7. So be clean, be safe, unlike the employees of the Captains Galley’s restaurant in China Grove, N.C., who earlier this year slaughtered a goat after hours, leading to an O157 outbreak that sickened 21 and killed an 86-year-old. Safety and culture can go together.