Tag Archives: Rinse

Lettuce rinse with cheese whey can reduce pathogens

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Cheese whey fermented by an industrial starter consortium of lactic acid bacteria was evaluated for its antibacterial capacity to control a selection of pathogenic bacteria. For their relevance on outbreak reports related to vegetable consumption, this selection included Listeria monocytogenes, serotype 4b, Escherichia coli O157:H7, and Salmonella Goldcoast.

cheese.wheyOrganically grown lettuce was inoculated with an inoculum level of ∼107 colony-forming unit (CFU)/mL and was left for about 1 h in a safety cabinet before washing with a perceptual solution of 75:25 (v/v) fermented whey in water, for 1 and 10 min. Cells of pathogens recovered were then counted and their number compared with that obtained for a similar treatment, but using a chlorine solution at 110 ppm.

Results show that both treatments, either with chlorine or fermented whey, were able to significantly reduce (p < 0.05) the number of bacteria, in a range of 1.15–2.00 and 1.59–2.34 CFU/g, respectively, regarding the bacteria tested. Results suggest that the use of fermented whey may be as effective as the solution of chlorine used in industrial processes in reducing the pathogens under study (best efficacy shown for Salmonella), with the advantage of avoiding health risks arising from the formation of carcinogenic toxic chlorine derivates.

Preliminary study on the effect of fermented cheese whey on Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli O157:H7, and Salmonella Goldcoast populations inoculated onto fresh organic lettuce

Maria I.S. Santos,1,2,3,4 Ana I. Lima,4 Sara A.V.S. Monteiro,4 Ricardo M.S.B. Ferreira,4 Laurentina Pedroso,3 Isabel Sousa,2 and Maria A.S.S. Ferreira1

1Microbiology Laboratory, Department of Natural Resources, Environment and Territory, DRAT, LEAF, Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.

2Eco-Processing of Food and Feed, CEE, LEAF, Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.

3Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Universidade Lusofona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon, Portugal.

4Disease & Stress Biology, DRAT, LEAF, Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.

Foodborne Pathogens and Disease, doi:10.1089/fpd.2015.2079

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/fpd.2015.2079

Fresh Express makes marketing missteps

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That’s the headline on Greg Johnson’s column in The Packer today, criticizing the way Fresh Express’ announced its super-duper new produce wash.

I’m all for marketing food safety, but only if it can be thoroughly backed up.

Johnson complains this kind of promotion violates the generally agreed upon, though nonbinding, industry standard after the 2006 E. coli spinach outbreak that the produce industry is in food safety together. ?

Once companies say they’re safer than others, consumers can infer that some produce is less safe or worse, unsafe, and they stop buying.

Tom Stenzel, president and CEO of the United Fresh Produce Association, said, “Food safety should never be a competitive advantage. If a new product improves food safety, we should share it with the whole industry.”

Ed Loyd, director of corporate communications for Chiquita, said the company isn’t marketing its method as safer than others because it’s offering FreshRinse technology to competitors.

Several competitors say Fresh Express’ claims about its new wash are exaggerated or flat-out false, and they have not been verified by any third party.

Bagged salad: press release before publishing a bad idea

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In Sept. 2000, I called Procter & Gamble to substantiate claims their consumer-oriented FIT Fruit and Vegetable Wash removed 99.9 per cent more residue and dirt than water alone.

The PR-thingies hooked me up with some scientists at P&G in Cincinnati, who verbally told me that sample cucumbers, tomatoes and the like were grown on the same farm in California, sprayed with chemicals that would be used in conventional production, and then harvested immediately and washed with FIT or water. The FIT removed 99.9 per cent more, or so the company claimed.

One problem. Many of the chemicals used had harvest?after dates, such as the one tomato chemical that must be applied at least 20 days before harvest. Residue data on produce in North American stores reveals extremely low levels, in the parts per million or billion. So that 99.9 per cent reduction was buying consumers an extra couple of zeros in the residue quantity, all well below health limits.

I also asked why the results hadn’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the P&G types said it was an important advance that had to be made available to consumers as soon as possible, without the delays and messiness of peer-review.

Maybe Chiquita Brands, the owners of Fresh Express and also based in Cincinnati, are using the same PR flunkies as P&G because the public relations around the new produce rinse – FreshRinse – is strikingly familiar and equally lame as FIT in 2000.

For the most part, pathogens and chemicals in fresh produce need to be controlled on the farm, and in transportation and distribution.

The new rinse, for use in the packing shed and which the company says removes microorganisms from leafy greens more effectively than conventional chlorine sanitizers, was unveiled yesterday at a news conference at the Produce Marketing Association Fresh Summit to gushing reviews.

Fernando Aguirre, Chiquita’s chairman and chief executive officer, said,

"Based on our extensive research, we are proud to introduce the biggest invention since the creation of prepackaged salads. … Compare FreshRinse technology to current wash standards. Chlorine is the abacus and FreshRinse is the iPad. An abacus is what people use with the beads, a great thing at the time, just like chlorine rinse was. We believe FreshRinse sets a new standard in food safety.”

Also jumping aboard the metaphor train, Mike Burness, vice president of global quality and food safety said,

“As a matter of magnitude, that’s the equivalent of chlorine walking a mile and FreshRinse making two round trips to the moon. If chlorine walked one mile, FreshRinse would have walked a marathon. We have seen a significant reduction of potential foodborne organisms that cause disease.”

Scientific advisors who gave more qualified endorsements included project advisor Dr. Michael Osterholm, a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, Dr. David Acheson, managing director of food and import safety for Leavitt Partners and the former the Food and Drug Administration associate commissioner for food protection and chief medical officer, and Dr. Robert Buchanan, director and professor, University of Maryland Center for Food Safety & Security Systems.

Did any of you esteemed science types say to Fresh Express, we should publish these results in a peer-reviewed journal first, because that’s the way this credibility thing works?

I told Ilan Brat of the Wall Street Journal yesterday that I couldn’t judge whether the new wash worked better or not without publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Fresh Express had three recalls of its bagged salads this year, and was the source of a Salmonella typhirmirium outbreak that sickened eight people in May, but decided it wasn’t worth telling anyone about it.

Metaphor-man Burness, told the Journal the company chose to market the product before submitting supporting research for publication in peer-reviewed journals because "anything that advances food safety, we believe we need to leverage that for our consumers."

Sounds familiar.

He added that the company plans to submit its research to the Journal of Food Protection by the end of the year.

Dude, I’ve got a bunch of graduate students who say they have papers they are going to prepare for the Journal of Food Protection. I have about a dozen in my head too. Except that doesn’t count for shit.

If the company had instead spent the time it used coming up with terrible risk communication metaphors preparing the results for publication, they would at least have a paper submitted. Until then, I’m thinking cold fusion.

"All this data is nice—why isn’t it published in a peer-reviewed journal?" Powell said.

Still, he added, "if it does what it says it can do, that would be important, because it would be an additional tool to lower the risk" that eating salad greens could cause outbreaks of disease.

Fresh Express, you’re an industry leader and this year’s winner of the International Association for Food Protection’s Black Pearl award for food safety leadership. But I don’t get this. I’m all for marketing food safety, but with a strong caveat: be able to back it up.

A table of leafy green foodborne illness outbreaks is available at:

http://bites.ksu.edu/Outbreaks%20related%20to%20leafy%20greens%201993-2010
 

UK consumers still washing whole chicken –they shouldn’t, cross-contamination risk

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An estimated three quarters of consumers who buy whole chickens wash them, potentially spreading bacteria on to work surfaces for up to a 3ft radius, research by Which? has revealed.

The Telegraph reports the most recent figures from the Food Standards Agency (FSA) suggest that 65% of raw shop-bought chicken is contaminated with campylobacter.

And while most government agencies now advise against washing chickens, cookbooks and Internet recipes are full of it (bad advice and poop).

An FSA spokeswoman said,

”Washing raw poultry is a common kitchen mistake, and it simply isn’t necessary. … By washing your raw bird, you’re actually more likely to spread the germs around the kitchen than get rid of them.”

Here’s another common kitchen mistake, courtesy of the FSA: piping hot is not a food safety indicator and color is a lousy indicator. Use a tip-sensitive digital thermometer.
 

Shurley some mistake: should packaged salads be washed again or not? (Not)

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There’s some merit in ignoring garbage food safety news stories so they don’t take on too much credibility.

But then, garbage should also be crushed, quickly, factually, and mercilessly, so it doesn’t get repeated forever.

The Consumers Union theatrics about bacteria found in bagged leafy greens has found new legs in Canada – always a week behind — in stories with quotes like, “If you buy ready-made salad greens, wash them before eating.”

This is bull poop.

The March issue of Consumer Reports says that tests on 208 samples of salads sold in bags or plastic containers, conducted by Consumers Union revealed that 39 per cent of the salads analyzed revealed the presence of several types of bacteria, including total coliforms and Enterococcus, both found “in the human digestive tract.”

The Canadian wire story says: “Translation: poop.”

Not quite.

Trevor Suslow of UC Davis told the Perishable Pundit that “a normal head of lettuce is colonized, not contaminated with, a diversity of microbiota, including diverse types of bacteria. Only a small fraction of the total normal bacteria on lettuce can be grown or cultured in the lab. The total numbers of bacteria on a leaf far exceed the number of a single group like the Total Coliforms that were a prime target in the survey. A smaller subset of Total Coliform bacteria are the fecal coliforms. We eat lots and lots of microbes all the time. …

“I am certainly not a medical or public health expert and I am simplifying this quite a bit just to ensure that you are aware that a total coliform or fecal coliform doesn’t necessarily indicate fecal contamination in the plant world. Their numbers on a leaf or fruit do not relate well to risk of illness or true and serious pathogens being present. When one follows standard protocols, developed for dairy, meat, drinking water, and wastewater reclamation, for example, for enumerating total coliform populations from plants, one often gets high numbers of these plant colonizers. They are very tough to wash off…”

“Purchasing packaged salads or whole heads is a matter of personal choice. We do both in my family. I always wash loose leaf lettuces to remove any adhering soil. I never wash packaged salads. I do not support or believe that re-washing packaged salads should be a recommendation for the home consumer. A large and diverse panel of experts published a comprehensive article in 2007 detailing the scientific evidence for the lack of benefit and the greater risk of cross-contamination in the home.”

That report is available here. The conclusion is there is a greater chance of cross-contamination during the rewash of packaged greens. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also states, “… there is no need to wash fresh-cut leafy greens again if they are labeled as "washed," "triple washed," or "ready-to-eat" on the package. Although not recommended, if end users do re-wash RTE fresh-cut leafy greens, having appropriate sanitary washing and drying conditions in the foodservice, retail or in-home food preparation environment to reduce the potential for cross contamination of fresh-cut RTE produce with human pathogens. “

The U.K. Food Standards Authority made a similar statement about no need for rewashing after the Brits had a row about the issue documented in Salad Smackdown ’08.

The issue is complicated, but for Consumers Union to come out with a soundbite about washing greens is great PR and lousy public policy. For journalists not to check is becoming standard for an industry in decline. For the producers of bagged leafy greens, this is an opportunity to tout your food safety efforts and market them at retail so consumers can choose.

Whole Foods still sucks at food safety advice – Hosea from Top Chef edition

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In July, 1977, Fernwood 2Night, a satirical talk show like no other, began airing as a summer replacement for Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. I was explaining this to Amy the other night as Fred Willard showed up in a cameo in yet another movie – the guy’s everywhere – and I was telling her about this wildly satirical talk show featuring Willard as sidekick Jerry Hubbard, and host Barth Gimble, played by Martin Mull.

According to the wiki entry, “Fernwood 2Nite was set in the fictional town of Fernwood, Ohio. The show satirized real talk shows as well as the sort of fare one might expect from locally-produced, small-town, midwestern American television programming. Well-known actors usually appeared playing characters or a contrivance had to be written for the celebrity to appear as themselves. (In one episode, Tom Waits’ tour bus happened to break down in Fernwood.)"

Barth and Jerry came to mind as I watched the latest video entry from Whole Foods Markets, this time on how to cook a turkey for the upcoming holidays, featuring Hosea, some dude who won Top Chef Season Five.

I so wished it was satire.

Barth, or Martin Mull captured the essence of cooking turkey in his book and 1985 mockumentary, History of White People in America, volume 1, in which Mull and Mary Kay Place engage in a Thanksgiving discussion and conclude, “You can’t overcook turkey. That’s what the gravy is for.”

When it comes to offering bad food safety advice, Whole Foods never fails. They really suck at this food safety thing. As I’ve written before, Whole Foods Market has terrible food safety advice, blames consumers for getting sick, sells raw milk in some stores, offers up fairytales about organic and natural foods, and their own CEO says they sell a bunch of junk.

Leave it to Whole Foods to use a chef to offer food safety tips.

In a 5-minute video, Hosea says to rinse the bird in cold water – don’t you’ll just spread dangerous bacteria everywhere – and during prep manages to cross-contaminates everything by touching the raw bird, then the butter saucepan, the pepper mill, the salt container, the wine bottle and so on.

A chart of suggested cooking times based on weight and whether the bird is stuffed or not is provided – it’s useless – but at least Hosea says to use a thermometer. He also says or until the juices run clear. Ignore the juices part, use a tip-senesitive digital thermometer. Hosea also says cook to 165F (correct) but then let it sit for 20-40 minutes, which is also correct, but will also raise the internal temperature by about 20F. Bring on the gravy.

In Canada, where the laws of physics are somehow different, Health Canada continues to recommend cooking all the crap out of a bird until 185F. The U.S. changed its advice to 165F years ago. When asked why, Canadian government types won’t talk. It’s a secret.

We’ve got lots of turkey cooking advice and a video from last year. And in honor of Fernwood 2Night, a clip about natural foods, the kind you may find at Whole Foods. Along with bad advice. Except it’s been disabled for sharing. So here’s Tom Waits.