The Miami Herald is reporting that Timothy DeLong, president of Atlantis Foods, a Palm Beach County company that called food safety its No. 1 priority, was cited as pleading guilty to selling chicken, seafood and cheese products contaminated with a bacteria that may cause serious gastrointestinal infection, acknowledging that his company failed to notify clients that six shipments of food in 2003 were tainted with Listeria monocytogenes.

The story says that according to the two-count information charging DeLong, he failed to initiate a product recall or to tell customers that his Lantana-headquartered company shipped products before receiving the results of outside or in-house testing for safety.

On six occasions, an outside laboratory found Listeria monocytogenes in Maine lobster dip, salmon cream cheese and salmon spread, chicken salad and crab stuffing. But the government document said DeLong sold $50,000 of the tainted products.

In its website and in brochures, the company repeatedly pledged its commitment to top food safety standards, stating in one brochure that, "Food safety at its highest level is No. 1 on our priority list."

"Atlantis Foods is a supplier of high quality seafood, seafood salads, fresh soups, dips and spreads in the food industry. Atlantis Foods focuses on quality assurance, continuous improvement and providing maximum value through quality to our customers while expanding consumer identification throughout the United States."

Uh huh.

Carly Weeks of the Ottawa Citizen reports from the opening of the Institute of Food Technologists annual meeting in Chicago that the North American produce industry is facing a massive uphill battle to prevent future outbreaks and food scares because it still doesn’t know the source of many problems and what needs to be fixed.

David Gombas, senior vice-president of food safety and technology with the United Fresh Produce Association, was quoted as saying:

"At this point we really don’t know what we would need to do to make produce safer. It’s difficult to fix the problem when the source is unknown. … Now that we’ve recognized fresh produce as an area that’s vulnerable to pathogens, now the research has to be done and we’re playing catch-up."

Wow. Fresh produce landed on the public and regulatory radar after the 1996 Odwalla E. coli O157:H7 outbreak.

This is the same Dave Gombas who told an International Association for Food Protection symposium on leafy green safety on Oct. 6, 2006 in Washington, D.C. that if growers did everything they were supposed to do — in the form of good agricultural practices — and it was verified, there may be fewer outbreaks. He then said government needs to spend a lot more on research.

Huh?

Since we were on the same panel in Washington, I asked Gombas, why is the industry calling for more investment in research about the alleged unknowns of microbial contamination of produce when the real issue seems to be on-farm delivery and verification? Hiding behind the unknown is easy, working on verifying what is being done is much harder.

Seems like another case of saying the right things in public, but failing to acknowledge what happens on individual farms. Verification is tough. Auditing may not work, cause many of these outbreaks happened on third -party audited operations. Putting growers in a classroom doesn’t work, and there’s no evidence that begging for government oversight yields a product that results in fewer sick people.

Here are some suggestions:

• The first line of defense is the farm, not the consumer.

• All ruminants — cows, sheep, goats, deer — can carry dangerous E. coli like the O157:H7 strain that sickened people in the spinach outbreak, as well as the Taco Bell and Taco Johns outbreaks ultimately traced to lettuce.

• Any commodity is only as good as its worst grower.

Rules and regulations look pretty on paper. But they are not comforting to those 76 million Americans who get sick from the food and water they consume each and every year. Instead, every grower, packer, distributor, retailer and consumer needs to adopt a culture that actually values safe food.

The first company that can assure consumers they aren’t eating poop on spinach, lettuce, tomatoes and any other fresh produce, will make millions and capture markets.

Check out our papers below:

Powell, D.A. and Chapman, B. 2007. Fresh threat: what’s lurking in your salad bowl?. Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. 87: 1799-1801.

We also published a book chapter entitled Implementing On-Farm Food Safety Programs in Fruit and Vegetable Cultivation, in the recently published, Improving the Safety of Fresh Fruit and Vegetables

 Luedtke, A., Chapman, B. and Powell, D.A. 2003. Implementation and analysis of an on-farm food safety program for the production of greenhouse vegetables. Journal of Food Protection. 66:485-489.

Powell, D.A., Bobadilla-Ruiz, M., Whitfield, A. Griffiths, M.G.. and Luedtke, A. 2002. Development, implementation and analysis of an on-farm food safety program for the production of greenhouse vegetables in Ontario, Canada. Journal of Food Protection. 65: 918- 923.

I love butter and I loved it long before living in Brittany where they claim to make the best butter in the world, naturally flavored with sea salt. It was in France that I learned to eat butter with my Roquefort cheese. I’m salivating at the very decadent thought… But after turning 30 I sadly had to slow down on my intake as my metabolism started to  churn instead of speed through fat.

Now it seems that North American foodies have caught on and butter is the new cheese. According to the July 25 Globe and Mail, “Long overlooked by gourmets, butter is being transformed from a supper table staple into Quebec’s latest delicacy.” Gilles Jourdenais, who owns the Fromagerie Atwater – the largest cheese wholesaler in Canada, says that “Quebec’s nascent artisanal butter scene is where cheese was 15 years ago, when no one believed local products could rival European imports.”

In Quebec, farmers are pasteurizing their fresh milk in small batches and at lower temperatures to “preserve herbaceous hints in the milk and fullness in the cream.” Unlike France that allows consumers to purchase raw milk butters with very high fat contents, “Canadian law restricts producers from serving raw milk butters, so they are required to pasteurize the milk.”

Maybe on our way through the Quebec countryside to the Laurentians in the next few weeks we’ll make a stop at a local creamery. I’m all in favor of the small-batch low-heat pasteurized butter, as long as the care put into it includes microbiologically safe practices. It’s like buttah. My 30-something metabolism will handle it.