Tag Archives: Meat

Walmart’s Yiannas: ‘test the process, not the product’

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Frank Yiannas, corporate vice president, food safety for Walmart says the focus of food borne illness prevention has to move earlier in the supply chain — long before processors are testing for it and product is getting into consumers’ hands.

Meatingplace.com reports that Yiannas, told processors at the North American Meat Processors Association’s annual management conference in Chicago on Saturday retailers are willing to work with suppliers on reasonable cost increases related to improved meat product safety.

Yiannas, author of the aptly-titled 2009 book, Food Safety Culture, said the HACCP system is no longer applied in the way it was originally conceived and testing is ineffective, adding, “E. coli is present in such low levels, it can still cause illness but it’s hard to find. Even at N-120, a processor is going to be pretty sure [the tests will be] negative.”

And the industry can’t afford to put safety solely in the hands of the product’s final cook, he warned.

The best way forward is to “test the process, not the product,” he said. That is, if processors (and producers) work with a verifiably high level of safety, then the chances that the product is safe further down the line is exponentially higher.

Overseeing these efforts should be third-party certification programs, such as the Safe Quality Food program overseen by the Food Manufacturers Institute, Yiannas said. Their standards typically are more comprehensive and exacting than those issued by the government, and the third-party assurances carry weight in the market.

In answer to a question about the additional costs these programs and perhaps interventions require, Yiannas said, “Retailers are willing to share (in reasonable additional costs). There are always tradeoffs, but I have hundreds of example in which that made sense.”
 

Kudos to Cargill for showing Oprah how meat is made

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The bartender was riveted. So was the waitress. My requests for a beverage
on a quiet Tuesday afternoon in Kansas City in 1998 would have to wait until
commercial. Such was the power of Oprah.

That’s Oprah Winfrey – actress cum talk show diva – who today did a segment on beef production as part of her go-vegan spiel.

The results were far more conciliatory than earlier meat outings on Oprah, and the credit goes to Cargill, who opened one of their Colorado processing plants to Oprah’s cameras and rather than resort to a corporate spokesthingy, featured a surprisingly effective Nicole Johnson-Hoffman, the plant’s general manager.

Things didn’t go so well for the meat folks in 1996.

On March 29, 1996, nine days after the U.K. officially linked bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, with a new human disease, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced they were expediting regulations prohibiting ruminant protein in ruminant feeds, boosting
surveillance and expanding research.

The same day, several producer groups, including the U.S. National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), issued a statement supporting the moves and instituted a voluntary ban on ruminant protein in ruminant feed. Draft legislation was published in January 1997 and enacted into law later that year.

Then came Oprah. On April 16, 1996, Oprah announced during a show on food safety and mad cow disease she would stop eating hamburgers because of fears over BSE and that she was shocked after a guest said meat and bone meal made from cattle was routinely fed to other cattle to boost their meat and milk production.

The camera showed members of the studio audience gasping in surprise as vegetarian activist Howard Lyman explained how cattle parts and downer cattle (downer is the generic term used to describe cattle who can simply no longer stand) were rendered and fed to other cattle, and that BSE could make AIDS look like a common cold. The chief scientist for the U.S. National Cattleman’s Beef Association, rather than stressing the risk management actions that had been taken, was left arguing that cows were not vegetarians because they drank milk.

Today’s broadcast was different. Foodie journalist Michael Pollan wants people to know where their food comes from; Cargill obliged.

“Lisa Ling travels to Colorado, where Cargill, the biggest producer of ground beef in the world, gives her a rare inside look at how our meat is made.

“Upon arrival, the cattle are held in pens for two hours to calm them before they’re sent to be slaughtered. Each cow is then shot in the head with a bolt, which renders it insensible to pain. The cow’s artery is then cut, and about two minutes later, it dies from blood loss. After the animal’s death, the body is immediately washed, the skin is removed, and within minutes, the workers also remove the hooves, the hide and the head. The carcass is then moved to a giant cooler, where it stays for up to two days. After it’s been inspected and graded, it’s packaged, loaded on trucks and soon ends up in our local restaurants and stores.

“Nicole says she was happy to have Lisa at the plant, because she thinks people should know where their food is coming from. ‘I would not ridicule people who believe that you shouldn’t eat animals, but I would say that we are committed to doing it right. And I believe that when animals are handled with dignity and harvested carefully, that’s the natural order of things,’ says Nicole.

Whether you eat meat or not, Nicole thinks everyone who’s interested in the American food system can work together to create better results. ‘I think we’re all on the same path trying to figure out the right way to get to good health for our families and environmental sustainability and humane treatment,’ she says. ‘We’ll find a better result together, even if we have perhaps different perspectives or different beliefs.’”

The slaughterhouse portion of the video is available at:=

http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Inside-a-Slaughterhouse-Video/topic/oprahshow

No lion meat tacos for Tucson

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The N.Y. Times reports that Tucson’s Boca Tacos y Tequila will not offer lion meat tacos after extensive publicity which attracted the wrath of lion supporters.

The owner, Bryan Mazon, wrote on Facebook yesterday,

“Due to concern for safety of our families, customers, vendors, and friends we will not be selling African Lion Tacos. We will continue to bring unique and creative menu items, but not at the expense of safety.”

African lions are a threatened species in the wild, and international trade in their meat is prohibited under a United Nations treaty. But meat from lions raised in captivity in the United States can legally be sold, the United States Department of Agriculture has said.

An investigation by CNN traced the meat back to an Illinois supplier who declined to identify its source.
 

Local is worst: Canadians export food that’s tested, keep the rest for home and blame consumers if they get sick

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A B.C. meat processing plant that covered up lab results revealing a sample of its product was contaminated with a deadly E. coli strain will not have to test for the bacteria now that it’s provincially regulated.

Pitt Meadows Meats Ltd. said it made a business decision to abandon its federal licence because it incurs higher costs than are necessary because the company doesn’t export.

Regulations require federally licensed plants to report positive findings of E. coli O157 strain to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

But testing for E. coli O157 isn’t mandatory in a provincially regulated plant.

Joseph Beres, inspection manager for the Canada Food Inspection Agency, said federal and provincial plants are committed to the same health and sanitation standards and use the same inspectors. But he said the presence of the deadly bacteria might only be discovered if people become sick.

Ritinder Harry, a spokesman for the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, told CBC News, apparently with a straight face and acting like he’d never heard of the U.S. zero tolerance policy for E. coli O157:H7 that has been in place since 1994, and the whole Mike-Taylor-it-doesn’t-get-us-anywhere-to-blame-consumers-for-O157-bit, also back in 1994, that provincial meat processing facilities are not required to regularly test for pathogens because "the likelihood of finding a contaminated sample is very low,” and that the best way to eliminate risk of being infected is to follow basic food safety rules, including using a thermometer to ensure the meat is properly cooked, avoiding cross contamination with raw meat or raw meat juices in the kitchen, and promptly refrigerating meat regardless of whether it is cooked or uncooked.

This isn’t some Greasy Jungle, Metropolis Noir, with funeral home sandwiches and coffee. People get sick.


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Tuscon restaurant to offer lion meat tacos

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Why aren’t there more meats on a stick?

And why aren’t there more lion-meat tacos?

The Arizona Daily Star reports Boca Tacos y Tequila, a Tucson taco restaurant, will start accepting orders for African lion tacos, to go along with previous tacos featuring alligator, elk, kangaroo, rattlesnake and turtle.

According to the US Food and Drug Administration, lion and other game meat can be sold as long as the species isn’t endangered.

Most of Boca’s exotic tacos range between US$3 and US$4. The lion tacos will cost US$8.75 apiece.
 

B.C. meat plant covers up positive E. coli test; we’re sorry but it was a disgruntled ex

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Who hasn’t used that line.

And why wasn’t Kevin Allen interviewed for this story?

CBC News reports that one of British Columbia’s largest meat processing plants (that’s in Canada) covered up lab results that showed a sample of its product was contaminated with E. coli O157.

The coverup came to light when Daniel Land, who oversaw the plant’s quality assurance, contacted CBC News, saying officials at Pitt Meadows Meats Ltd. told him to keep quiet about the positive test result obtained on Sept. 9.

Daniel Land says the Pitt Meadows plant manager ignored a positive test for E. coli.

"[The plant manager] said this does not leave the room … and I don’t want nobody talking about this," said Land. "He crumpled [the test finding] up and threw it into my garbage can."

Plant officials, however, say they didn’t report the test results because they suspected the whistleblower was trying to sabotage the plant and questioned his general sampling procedures. Officials also say later tests were negative for E. coli, suggesting the public was never in danger.

"Under normal circumstances, the CFIA would have been informed immediately," the plant said in a written statement. "But due to the suspect sample handling, the decision was made to handle this issue in house. If the second test result would have been positive, the CFIA would have been notified immediately."

Regulations require federally licenced plants to report positive findings of E. coli O157 strain to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

CFIA inspection manager Joseph Beres called the plant’s coverup a serious breach of regulations, but said no evidence of E. coli was found on subsequent tests of the plant’s products.

Cyclist positive for clenbuterol, claims contamination

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Another cyclist has been caught eating at the Mark McGwire café and another is blaming Mexican meat for testing positive for clenbuterol.

The Danish cycling federation Tuesday revealed that Philip Nielsen, 23 (right, exactly as shown), of the continental Concordia team, tested positive for clenbuterol during the 2010 Vuelta a Mexico.

Nielsen won stage 8 of the Mexican tour in April and both A and B samples have come back positive. His case now is making its way through the Danish disciplinary process.

Nielsen claims he was not doping, but did offer an excuse of how the banned product found its way into his system.

Italian Alessandro Colo also tested positive, but he claimed that his test was triggered by eating contaminated meat in Mexico.

The Nielsen case comes as Spanish officials consider what to do with Alberto douchebag Contador (left), who is facing a two-year ban and disqualification of his Tour de France crown after he tested positive for the substance en route to winning last year’s Tour.

Ex-workers confirm date-changing on BC Superstore meat; required to use smell-test; feds say consumers are on their own

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After an investigation revealed a B.C. grocery store changing the best-before date on fish, former Superstore employees have come forward to claim that it wasn’t the first time this happened.

CTV News reports that former Langley Superstore employee Sylvia Taylor claims that changing best-before dates isn’t something new for the grocery chain. She worked in the deli department during the 1990s.

"Part of our duties, as directed by our manager, was to check our meat packages in the display cases for their best-before dates. If they were expired, we were to pull the meats, open up the packages, smell them, and if they smelled okay, we re-wrapped them and put a new best-before date, extending usually by about five days. When we were told to change the best-before dates, I stopped buying any meat products from the Real Canadian Superstore."

Jason Paxton claims he had a similar experience when he worked in the seafood department at the Duncan Superstore.

"Every time the meat was re-packed, the best-before date was changed. The majority of it we could wash off, re-package it and get a couple of more days out of it."

Paxton says he has since told his friends not to shop at Superstore.

Ken Randa of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency says there are no laws against changing the best-before dates on packaged food, adding,

"If they change the best-before date, there may not be anything wrong with it, and maybe no legislative issue with us. Ultimately, they have to answer to you, the consumer.”

Superstore says employee are not allowed to change best-before dates and are required to sign a policy stating as much when they’re hired. The store says they’re also required to review and re-sign on a regular basis.

Uh-huh.
 

Four sickened by E. coli after eating meat from Zillman Meat Market in Wisconsin

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The Wausau Daily Herald reports that four people have become ill, including one person who was hospitalized, from E. coli after eating meat processed at Zillman Meat Market in Wausau, Wisconsin.

The Marathon County Health Department says that ready-to-eat, custom smoked meat products made from wild game processed between Sept. 30 and Nov. 13 are the only products being investigated.

Ruth Klee Marx, an epidemiologist with the health department said the market will complete a “thorough cleaning” of their facility “in the next several days.”

Pat Zillman, owner of the market, said he and his staff are fully cooperating with the health department and provided any information requested by health department officials.

No ready-to-eat products are being sold but fresh meat is still available for sale.

In a worrying poo-pooh of bacterial cross-contamination, Zillman said, “There is always an inherent risk of bacterial contaminations when you purchase fresh meat. That’s why people need to cook it properly.”

Officials recommend using a food thermometer to ensure temperatures reach 155 degrees, particularly for ground fresh meat.

That would be 160F for ground beef, 165F for chicken.

The health department is advising people to not eat smoked, ready-to-eat meat products purchased from Zillman. Hunters who brought their own meat to Zillman’s to be processed into smoked, ready-to-eat also should not eat the products.

US to Canada: your meat inspection sorta sucks, only send us the good stuff

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The dean of Canadian food and farm reporting, Jim Romahn, has written a powerful piece about the continuing failures in Canadian meat inspection – failures that had to be pointed out by Americans.

More than a year after 21 people died after eating Maple Leaf Foods Inc. products contaminated with Listeria monocytoges, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency was failing to enforce its own standards and there was sloppy follow-up when hazardous conditions were identified.

Those worrisome facts are contained in a report prepared by two U.S. inspectors who visited in the fall of 2009 to check Canada’s compliance with its own standards. They visited headquarters in Ottawa, 23 meat-processing plants and two labs.

They found that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency generally has good manuals and intentions, but falls short at the plant level, including failures to identify lax sanitation and to enforce its standards.

Thirty years ago, when Canadian reporters began to obtain U.S. inspection reports on our packing plants, all of the deficiencies identified applied to specific problems and individual plants. This audit has identified similar deficiencies at the plant level, but far more serious, it found deficiencies in the overall system.

Had the U.S. inspectors not checked it’s likely that the deficiencies would have persisted, putting Canadian consumers at risk and the meat industry under threat of losing export markets.

The report also indicates some of the systemic deficiencies were identified during previous annual audits, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency promised to fix them, but they persisted. This is after the Maple Leaf crisis and frequent promises by Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz and Prime Minister Stephen Harper that corrective action would be taken as swiftly as possible.

They have never talked about the U.S. audit reports that highlighted things that needed attention.

During the inspections of 23 plants – Canadian officials went along with the two U.S. officials – they identified problems so serious that three plants were banned from marketing their products in the U.S. and three more were issued warnings that they would be banned if they failed to immediately correct deficiencies.
Four of these six plants were processing ready-to-eat meat products, meaning they would go directly to consumers without any further steps to eliminate hazardous bacteria.

They also found by checking records that some of the plants were running overtime hours without any government inspectors checking conditions.

At another plant, they said the documents that indicated compliance “did not consistently reflect the conditions encountered at the time of the audit.” Later in the report, they write “the actual conditions of the establishment visits were often not entirely consistent with the corresponding documentation.”

Supervisors are supposed to periodically check the performance of front-line government inspectors, but the auditors found “system weaknesses . . . in the manner in which supervisory reviews were conducted.”

They also said there was “an inconsistent identification of potential non-compliances or potential inadequate performance by the inspection personnel.

“The deficiency concerning the lack of supervisory documentation is a repeat finding from the 2008 audit,” this report says.

The two U.S. auditors say the Canadian Food Inspection Agency needs to improve its communications its employee training and awareness and its feedback systems.

They found inspectors were failing to do their duties, as outlined in agency manuals, because they noticed:

– “Lack/loss of consistent identification of contaminated product and product-contact surfaces and other insanitary (sic) conditions.
– “Inconsistent verification of adequate corrective actions . . . with regards to repetitive non-compliances.
– “Inconsistent and loss of documentation of non-compliances in a manner that reflects actual establishment conditions, and
– “Lack/loss of increased inspection activities when non-compliance is observed . . .”

They add that “many of these findings are closely related to those identified during the previous audit.”

They also “identified system weaknesses regarding implementation and verification of HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points) systems within the CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency).”

More specifically, they identified “inaccurate analyzing of hazards” for HACCP protocols, “Inadequate implementation of basic elements of the HACCP plan, including monitoring and ongoing verification procedures” and “inappropriate verification of corrective actions taken in response to deviations from the critical limit (for harmful bacteria)”

In addition, they identified lapses in recording instances of non-compliance, such as failures to enter problems in the record book, failures to identify the level of bacterial contamination ad failure to record the “actual times when the entries were made.” They also noted that border inspectors conducting spot checks of Canadian hamburger heading to customers in the U.S. found “several occurrences of zero-tolerance failures in addition to two positive results for E. coli O157:H7.”

Between Jan. 1 and Oct. 31, the U.S. border inspectors turned back 61 million pounds of Canadian meat, calling for repeat inspection by Canadians, and rejected 7,277 pounds that “involved food-safety concerns.” Labeling could be the problem with some of the shipments that were sent back.

In response to this audit, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said it would increase inspections at 126 of the 190 plants certified to export to the U.S. There is no mention of what will happen at plants selling only to Canadians.

They say “supervisors are now required to accompany inspectors on a quarterly basis. . .”

“The sanitation task was re-structured to focus more on a global assessment of plant sanitation including more emphasis on Ready-to-Eat areas and equipment.”

The CFIA is also stepping up its training programs, its identification of critical control points for its HACCP protocols, its “Listeria related inspection tasks associated with operational/pre-operational sanitation, ventilation (e.g. condensation), building construction and maintenance of equipment.”

The CFIA also says “an electronic application is being developed to allow inspection staff access to historical data at the field level which will provide for more timely compliance decisions.”

When he was asked about the audit, Agriculture Minister Ritz said he has committed an additional $75 million to meat inspection since that audit was completed.

The results of the 2010 audit are not yet available from U.S. officials.