Tag Archives: Powell

Dear Dr. Provost

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We have never met; you have never e-mailed me, yet I learned yesterday via my dean that you were terminating my contract, as a full professor who has received above average evaluations for braun.hockeyseven years, effective June 30, 2013, because of bad attendance.

Lawyers will figure that bit out.

As a father of five daughters, I have strove to find a work-home balance for 25 years. I’ve probably failed more than succeeded. But I tried. My four older girls helped establish girls hockey in Canada, and I’m going to help establish girls hockey with my 4-year-old in Australia. And like I teach all the girls I’ve coached over the years, always go into the corners with your elbows up, Dr. Provost.

Bye-bye bites; fired for bad attendance

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I love my job.

I love my wife and family.

So when Dr. Amy Hubbell, formerly of Kansas State University, was offered a faculty appointment at the University of Queensland amy.doug.sorenne.xmas.12in Brisbane, Australia, I was supportive.

I consulted with the dean of the vet college, and my dept. chair and, given the electronic and eclectic nature of my research, extension and teaching, they agreed to experiment with me being based in Brisbane.

I was hired by K-State in 2006 for my food safety outreach activities, research and teaching.

I was promoted to full professor in 2010 in recognition of successfully fulfilling those objectives.

I consistently publish 5-7 peer-reviewed journal papers per year, publish approximately 1,000 blog posts per year on barfblog.com, publish approximately 400 editions of bites-l per year, conduct approximately 600 media interviews per year, successfully graduate 2-3 graduate students per year, manage a research budget averaging $200,000 per year, and teach a food safety risk analysis graduate course by distance.

Today I was told my contract would not be renewed beyond June 30, 2013, because of bad attendance.

I had presented options for on-line course in food safety policy, a massive open on-line course (MOOC) in food safety, and was repeatedly told my performance as a faculty member was above average – but I’m getting fired for not being there to hold my colleagues hand during tea.

I love my wife and family. And that’s where my allegiance lies.

 

Blame the consumer: Frozen foods shouldn’t have E. coli on them

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My colleagues think I’m unavailable because I’m in Australia. Maybe they’ve never been in love, know that the Internet sorta works, and have utterly failed at supervising graduate students amy.doug.sorenne.xmas.12even though they are on campus.

It’s advanced learning.

Elizabeth Weise from USA Today reports that at least 24 people are sick in 18 states in an outbreak of a rare strain of E. coli that appears to be linked to frozen chicken quesadillas and other mini meals recalled by a New York firm Thursday.

Rich Products of Buffalo, NY has recalled 196,222 pounds of frozen chicken quesadilla and other frozen mini meals and snack items for possible contamination.

The outbreak of E. coli O121 was first detected by health officials last week. Samples of frozen chicken mini quesadillas produced by Rich Products tested positive for the strain of E. coli at the New York State Department of Health Wadsworth Laboratory, according to the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service.

The company posted a notice on its website saying “consumer safety is our number one priority and we are voluntarily recalling these products effective immediately.”

The company also said “each of our product packages contain cooking instructions on the back of the packaging that, if followed, will effectively destroy any E.coli bacteria. These preparation instructions have been validated following the Grocery Manufacturers Association industry protocol to ensure food safety.”

However food safety experts said consumers shouldn’t have to presume the food is contaminated. “These are frozen products that need to be cooked but they should not have E. coli in them, because most of the ingredients should have been processed before hand,” said Douglas Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan.

Magical food safety myths

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Stacey Stumpf of the Journal Gazette writes that many Fort Wayne residents stuffed themselves silly on Thanksgiving with little thought about the safety of the traditional turkey feast accompanied by all of the trimmings. But the deadly salmonella outbreak this summer caused by tainted cantaloupe from an Indiana farm should serve as a reminder that people still need to be cognizant about food safety.

Despite all of the technological advances in food production and the outcry from some about the overregulation of the food industry, food safety remains a significant concern.

Here are five myths about food safety that deserve debunking.

  1. All food that is labeled FDA inspected is inspected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Increasingly, private, for-profit companies are inspecting producers rather than the FDA because the federal agency doesn’t have the capacity to inspect the food industry that does $1.2 trillion in annual sales.

Doug Powell, the lead author of a recent Kansas State University study called “Audits and Inspections Are Never Enough: A Critique to Enhance Food Safety,” described third party inspections as “meaningless.”

I’m not sure I said that, but I and my co-authors argued that the system of audits and inspections needs to  be significantly strengthened.

2. Food from a small organic farm is the best choice.

There are several components to this myth that need parsing.

Because the food from large factory farms reaches more people, the government focuses more of its limited resources on inspecting larger operations. Small farms are actually less likely to receive government oversight. One could argue that it’s easier for a small family farm to pay attention to its food-handling processes, but small, in and of itself, does not always mean safer.

It is also true that attaching the label “organic” to food does not automatically make it healthier or safer. Not all food labeled organic is equal.

3. Fresh turkeys are superior to frozen birds.

There is a difference. A truly fresh turkey tends to be juicier and more tender than a frozen bird. But raw is not the same as fresh. An unscrupulous retailer could easily thaw a previously frozen turkey and sell it as fresh to make more money.

A fresh organic turkey costs about $3.50 per pound, compared to frozen turkey from the local grocery store that runs less than $1 per pound.

Unless you are able to purchase a turkey directly from a nearby turkey farm, you are probably better off going with frozen. A turkey that was frozen immediately after being butchered and was kept frozen until it was cooked may be fresher tasting than a “fresh” bird that isn’t so fresh.

4. Ground beef from a butcher is safer than from a supermarket.

The pink slime scandal from earlier this year likely led to more people buying ground beef from a butcher rather than a grocery store (or forgoing hamburger all together).

One argument in favor of selecting a cut of meat and then having the butcher grind it into hamburger is you know you are getting the meat from one animal. Meat from several cows can be in a pound of ground beef at the supermarket. The theory is that the larger the number of cows, the better that chances that one of the animals was contaminated.

But as with most food safety issues, how the meat is handled and prepared is a better determining factor for its safety.

5. Food is safe as long as it’s in the freezer.

Freezing does not kill bacteria, and you can’t cryogenically rejuvenate food that has already started to spoil.

Grass-fed, natural or otherwise, no guaranteed meat safety

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Microorganisms don’t discriminate; just ask the 550 diners who got sick with norovirus at Heston Blumenthal’s fancy pants Fat Duck restaurant a few years ago.

Sarah Elton, whose new book Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet will be published in the spring, writes in the Globe and Mail there is a prevalent belief that meat in the local food system is safer than what is offered at the supermarket. I thought this too, long before the XL Foods recall, and while researching my book, Locavore, about the local food movement’s alternatives to the industrial food system in Canada, I became more familiar with the differences. I am willing to pay more for locally-raised meat because it’s better for the environment, supports local economies, and is safer from the nasty bugs of industrial food such as E. coli O157 and antibiotic-resistant pathogens – or so I thought. The other day, as I was preparing grass-fed beef for dinner, I took a second look at what I was cooking. I realized I had assumed that this beef was safer – but was it really?

It turns out that buying a safer meat is more complicated than simply choosing local, organic, naturally raised or grass-fed. In fact, none of these labels is guaranteed to be safer.

“Bacteria really don’t care about our politics,” said Douglas Powell, a food scientist at Kansas State University who has been studying E. coli O157 for two decades. “There are risks in all food systems.” As a study out of Purdue University that compared regular beef to grass-fed concludes, “there are no clear food safety advantages to grass-fed beef products over conventional beef products.”

All cows can potentially carry toxic E. coli – as can wild deer and even raccoon. Meat is most likely to be contaminated when the carcass is gutted; animal hides can carry, and spread, the bacteria.

“Almost all food decisions are faith-based,” Powell said. “That’s why people say things like ‘I trust my farmer.’ Faith-based food systems have to go.” He wants companies to provide the consumer with food safety data.

As for me, I’ll continue to buy meat raised without antibiotics, by farmers practising low-impact agriculture. I will also, however, buy a tip-sensitive meat thermometer. I’d rather be safe than sorry.

barfblog.com, bites and us

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barfblog.com seems to have migrated OK  to its new home, and things are working, unlike those penis enlargement promos, which forced us to close the last site.

For those of you old-timers who followed us using RSS feeds (which I love, but Chapman says the younger kids don’t get RSS) you may need to re-subscribe to get it working.

We are still adding functionality.

This will still take awhile to sort out – our primary tech guru is Gonzalo, who’s now back full-time at vet school, and doing a Masters in Public Health, and has a wife and a young son, so I try not to bug him too much.

The daily listserv, bites-l (bites.ksu.edu) will stay the same for now, and readers can find everything there. If you need your hourly shot of food safety goop, follow us on Twitter (barfblog), facebook (Doug Powell), RSS or, subscribe to barfblog.com.

Nosestretcher alert: me?

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I did not invent the phrase “nosestretcher alert.”

Anyone who knows me long enough soon begins to realize I have about 187 snappy comebacks or phrases, primarily borrowed from sophomoric movies.

So while I’m grateful to Vicky Boyd of The Packer for saying barfblog.com is one of her must-reads, I have to clarify the phrase “nosestretcher alert” originated with Frank magazine, a must-read for me in Canada in the 1990s.

Frank, modeled after Private Eye in the U.K., skewered and mocked the rich, political and supposedly media savvy.

From wiki:

Frank often incorporates custom jargon and phrasing in articles. Examples include referring to news readers as “bingo callers,” public relations staff were referred to as “bum boys” and “fartcatchers.” When the magazine alluded to two famous Canadians having sexual relations, it would refer to them as “horizontal mambo partners.”

Frank also referred to many of Canada’s elite in a derogatory manner based upon their personalities, name, or other unique characteristics. Prime Ministers were always referred to by nicknames such as Byron Muldoon or Jean Crouton rather than their real names.

I had forgotten about bingo caller and fart catcher; I’ll have to start using them again – in honor of Frank.

Do Canadians get tired of repetition? Walkerton, Maple Leaf, and now XL; or will they go back to sleep after Thanksgiving turkey

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“I’ve been doing this stuff for 20 years, and I’m getting sort of bored about reading the same thing over and over. They don’t learn. They all say the same thing about how food safety is the No. 1 priority. But, against economics, it doesn’t stand a chance.”

That’s what I told the Globe and Mail yesterday. Amy says I’m grumpy; I say experienced.

There’s nothing boring about people getting sick, and it has now spread to Newfoundland with a lab-confirmed case of E. coli O157:H7 linked to XL Foods in Alberta; what’s boring is the political nonsense, just like in Walkerton and Maple Leaf.

Canadians do like to hold really tight to their myths.

“Doug Powell, however, says it’s XL that should be in the spotlight, not the CFIA. The Canadian-born Kansas State University professor of food safety co-authored a study this year titled “Audits And Inspections Are Never Enough,” and says food safety is up to plants. “It’s not a function whether it’s big or small, whether it’s local or global. It’s that you know about microorganisms and take steps to reduce them, or you don’t.”

Meanwhile, questioning the beef sector is tantamout to treason in Alberta. Premier Alison Redford has unequivocally backed the sector, saying last weekend that beef was “safe” despite some “regulatory challenges.” Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason called it the “most foolish and irresponsible comment on food safety since ‘shoot, shovel and shut up,’” referring to former premier Ralph Klein’s infamous message to farmers during the mad-cow crisis.

“It’s time that the government stopped playing PR for the beef industry,” Mr. Mason says.

 Powell worries the plant will reopen, and production will continue to increase, with the same attitude authorities have taken for a century – trust us, it’s safe – and no data to back it up.

As Sarah Schmidt of Post Media reported, when the opposition asked Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz about the sweeping beef recall last week, the veteran minister stood up in the House of Commons to declare that no illnesses had been linked to the virulent strain of E. coli found in meat from XL Foods Inc.

“We have actually done a tremendous job,” Ritz told the NDP’s deputy agriculture critic Ruth Ellen Brosseau at the time, saying he was in daily communication with officials at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency about the “status of this recall and on the work forward to get back into that lucrative American market.”

The answer was bad timing. Ritz, who was worried about trade after the Americans shut the border to the company, turned out to be wrong about the growing food-safety issue that soon ballooned into Canada’s largest-ever beef recall, spanning all provinces and 41 states. Government scientists confirmed that very day a genetic match between tainted steak from the XL plant, and four cases of human illness in Alberta. Public health authorities are now testing whether a spike in E. coli cases in Saskatchewan is also linked to tainted XL Foods beef.

Oh, and CFIA admitted Friday its 40 inspectors and six vets failed to notice during routine inspections that the plant at the centre of Canada’s largest-ever beef recall had not properly implemented its own plan to control food safety risks.

As E. coli meat recall widens, experts wonder why gaps in food safety haven’t been closed

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When the bunch of us were writing our paper on the failures of audits and inspections, we had several disagreements about what was an audit, what was an inspection, what should be included, and so on.

I insisted that to consumers, it didn’t matter, and there were failures in both kinds of systems, we should highlight both and not get to hung up on the distinctions.

Sometimes you just have to get stuff out the door.

And sometimes you have to be an asshole (guilty).

Hopefully Canadian media is moving beyond its infatuation with political and company-versus-union rhetoric on food safety issues and starts asking, why aren’t farmers, processors, everyone, taking responsibility for their slice of food safety?

XL Foods has been silent and it’s disgraceful.

I would never want to buy their meat if they can’t stand behind it; but, as a lowly consumer, I have no way of knowing what meat is what at retail – large or small – and that’s why firms need to start marketing their food safety efforts to shoppers (but only if they can back it up, with data).

Sarah Schmidt of Postmedia writes in papers across Canada this morning that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has vowed again to tighten the rules at slaughterhouses, as the country’s largest ever beef recall expanded Tuesday to more than 1,500 products.

But as the government continues to grapple with the massive recall of meat from the XL Food Inc’s facility in Brooks, Alberta, experts are probing why, four years after the federal government vowed to fix problems of food safety following a deadly listeriosis outbreak in deli meats, big gaps in the food safety system still exist.

This time, Canada’s second-largest slaughterhouse is at the centre of the potential E. coli O157:H7 beef contamination of hundreds of products, now linked definitively to five cases in Alberta of people becoming sick after eating tainted beef. Saskatchewan public health officials, meanwhile, are investigating whether a spike in E. coli cases in that province is connected to the Alberta plant.

Richard Arsenault, CFIA’s director of meat inspection, said Tuesday the agency will establish a firm threshold that requires companies to divert or dispose of beef trimmings if positive test results for E. coli O157:H7 reach a certain percentage on “high event days” — i.e. days when higher than normal detections of E. coli O157:H7 are made. (Beef trimmings are material taken off the carcass that is not suitable for steak and is used for hamburger.)

“Nobody could agree on that number, so we essentially asked people to keep on eye and look at it. But there wasn’t a lot of structure about how people went at that,” Arsenault told Postmedia News. “I’m fairly confident we’re going to have that as well, I just don’t know what the number is going to be.”

The commitment to establish a threshold follows a pledge Monday by CFIA that it will also bring in a rule requiring companies to analyze test results of beef trimmings so they can identify emerging food-safety problems. “There certainly was no requirement to start looking inside the data to see trends within a day’s production, and that’s something that definitely would have made a big difference if we had had that,” Arsenault said.

But food-safety experts say the latest developments beg the question: Why do gaps still exist after the government announced last fall it had made good on all 57 recommendations that stemmed from a probe of the 2008 listeriosis outbreak. That outbreak was linked to Maple Leaf foods of Toronto.

Doug Powell, professor of food safety at Kansas State University, said Canada has no reason to brag about food safety, saying it’s in reactive mode — “and it’s largely driven by the U.S. All this food safety stuff, you think it’s about human health, really it’s about trade,” said Powell.

The XL Foods plant at the centre of the storm remains shut following an in-depth CFIA investigation at the plant. “The in-depth review determined that the company’s decision document requires updates and modification to address the disposition of production high event days,” CFIA said in a statement Tuesday.

CFIA’s move to suspend XL’s licence, announced on Sunday, followed a decision by U.S. officials to bar shipments from the Brooks plant on Sept. 13.

An independent audit of the Brooks plant commissioned by XL Foods last May found that the facility considers an “event day” for the purposes of product disposition if more than 10 per cent of tests are positive for E. coli. Under the N-60 sampling program, companies are required to test at least 60 pieces of beef trimmings per lot. This means that whether a lot weighs 4,500 kg, 2,000 kg or 100 kg, 60 sub-samples must be collected from the lot to be tested.

In the United States, the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) released a compliance guide in May for operators of large slaughterhouses, saying five per cent should be the threshold for the diversion of a batch of beef trimmings.

“FSIS intended to identify criteria that would indicate exceptional events of poor processing. FSIS did not select a higher target (e.g., 10%) because such a target we believe could result in many cases where poor processing, as defined by most in the industry, would not be detected as a ‘high event period,’ ” the U.S. report states.

Powell says government should be establishing minimum standards for all food-safety practices — and farmers, companies and restaurants should “go far beyond” these standards.

“You have to lower pathogen loads all the way through the system, and the way to do that is for everyone to take their food safety responsibility seriously, and that’s why we focus on a culture of food safety. Everything that I’m seeing in Alberta is ‘process as much meat and make as much money,’ ” said Powell.

“I watch these political debates emerge every time there’s a really tragic outbreak. People get really sick. There’s a four-year-old kid in the hospital with kidney damage. Nobody’s talking that. They’re talking about beef farmers losing money,” Powell added.

Kevin Allen, a food microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, says Canada should look south of the border for answers. He said, “Something wasn’t working right” at the XL foods plant, overseen by 40 government inspectors and six veterinarians.

“When you look at U.S. policy, they have a zero tolerance. They will simply not tolerate the presence of this organism in their beef and I think that’s a much more proactive approach, where food safety and the possible consequences are put first and foremost,” said Allen.

Rick Holley, a professor of food science at the University of Manitoba, disagrees with Allen on a zero-tolerance policy on E. coli 0157:H7, but he’s clear on one thing: beef eaters shouldn’t take huge comfort when the government talks about how much better equipped it is to prevent, detect and respond to potential food safety risks because it implemented all of the food-safety recommendations from four years ago.

“We’re no different from where we were four years ago,” said Holley.

New media in academic practice

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I’ve always wanted to be featured in nerdwallet.com, especially in the personal financial management section.

I say that new media allows for more interactions, and really, who doesn’t want more interactions.

“Writers also learn to write short and precise excerpts via social media, rather than the long, strung-out reports seen in traditional academic reporting. Professor Powell (right, not exactly as shown) describes this as the democratization of information: the accurate, to-the-point reporting conducted by academic scholars, which is accessible to the general public via social media. He reiterates that social media is great for quick, accessible information, but the traditional form of reporting is not outdated and remains very practical for in-depth research. Thus the two forms of communication are complementary, each supporting the other in order to supplement the academic community with reliable, up-to-date information.”