Tag Archives: spin

Really: Is it safe to spin-dry leafy greens in a washing machine?

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Back when we started on our TV cooking video paper about 2000, we were appalled to watch a British celebrity cook drying carrots in the dryer.

Some of the nearly 1,000 small farmers in New England who grow leafy greens apparently dry the fresh veggies after a triple dip in water in a conventional home washing machine.

The spin cycle of a retrofitted washing machine wicks the water off the greens to dry and keep them fresher longer. This discovery by farmers offered a way to automate the drying process without investing in a prohibitively expensive, commercial-grade spinner. 

An important question lingers about this practice, which University of Massachusetts Amherst food scientists hope to answer: Is it safe?

“This has been a common practice among small producers of greens,” says Amanda Kinchla, a UMass Amherst extension associate professor of food science. “There are no regulations against this, but there is no data right now on the risk.”

Kinchla, a co-director of the USDA-funded Northeast Center to Advance Food Safety, and UMass Amherst food science colleagues Lynne McLandsborough and Matthew Moore have received a $71,000 grant from the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study and address the microbial safety risks of processing leafy greens in washing machines. The Northeast Center to Advance Food Safety, led by the University of Vermont, promotes food safety education and technical support to small- and medium-size producers and processors in the northeast region.

The UMass Amherst team is building on work at the University of Vermont Extension, where the agricultural engineering program has been conducting workshops and creating posters for farmers on how to follow a hygienic design to convert washing machines into greens spinners and use them safely.

“My work is more impactful if I can address real-world stakeholder issues and leverage what already has been done,” Kinchla says.

Andrew Chamberlin, UVM Extension agricultural engineering technician, explains that bacteria and grime have the potential to accumulate if farmers don’t know how best to spin the greens and clean the machines. “We are trying to share best practices for food production,” he says.

For example, placing the greens in baskets that fit inside the machine results in fewer points of contact, reducing the risk of contamination, compared with putting the greens directly into the washing machine.

Kinchla’s team has converted four washing machines, based on Chamberlin’s directions, to study in the lab how contamination may occur, what kinds of microbes are present and how best to safely maintain, clean and sanitize the machine.

“We are examining whether the spin cycle on a washing machine has any more risk than commercially available, post-harvest leafy greens spinners,” Kinchla says.

Foster Farms, forget the soundbites and PR; market food safety at retail so consumers can choose

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According to state-sponsored jazz, Foster Farms, California’s biggest chicken producer, has been accused of poisoning people with salmonella bacteria. After an outbreak last fall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture threatened to shut down three of the company’s plants.

foster.farms.salmonelleaSince then, though, the company has reduced its rates of salmonella contamination dramatically. Some food safety experts are now saying that the whole poultry industry should now follow this company’s example

Last summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found evidence that chicken from Foster Farms had caused a wave of Salmonella infections. More than 600 people had gotten sick.

Inspectors from the USDA arrived at Foster Farms plants, and this time, they went much further than the standard safety test. Instead of just testing whole chicken carcasses, they took samples of what most consumers actually buy: the cut-up parts, such as breasts, thighs and wings.

What they found is now shaking up the whole poultry industry. Their tests showed salmonella on about 25 percent of those cut-up chicken parts.

David Acheson, a former associate commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration, says this pattern has been discovered at other poultry companies, too. Whole carcasses are largely free of salmonella, but then the bacteria appear on nearly a quarter of the chicken parts.

It’s a mystery that the poultry industry is now trying to resolve.

“What happened?” says Acheson. “Did this bug come in from the environment? Did something contaminate it during the process – the equipment, the workers, something weird like that? Or were we missing it the first time?”

Probably, we were missing it, Acheson says.

Others, like Seattle attorney Bill Marler, who makes his living suing companies when their food makes people sick, say it’s not good enough. “The standard is, it’s still OK to have a pathogen on your product that can sicken and kill your customers. And as long as that’s the way it is, we’re always going to limp from outbreak to outbreak to outbreak,” he says.

Marler believes that the FDA should take the same stand against salmonella that it did against another dangerous microbe: disease-causing E. coli.

When the FDA declared these E. coli bacteria illegal adulturants in food, the meat industry complained, but it also found new ways to prevent them from poisoning people. “It used to be 90 percent of my law firm’s revenue, and now it’s nearly zero. It’s a success story,” says Marler.

Eliminating salmonella altogether would be difficult — it’s much more common in the environment than disease-causing E. coli.

So for now, the FDA is asking companies to reduce salmonella contamination, but it’s not requiring chicken meat to be completely salmonella-free.