President Bush met with the import safety working group yesterday and stressed,

"I’ve called together key members of my Cabinet to review the procedures in place, the regulations in place, the practices in place to make sure that our food supply remains the safest in the world. The world is changing, and in order to make sure that we can continue to have the confidence of our consumers, that we will continually review practices and procedures to assure the American consumer."

Uh oh. The world’s safest food supply? Where’s the data to back up that claim? Politicians in Canada, U.K., France, Australia and New Zealand have all at some point claimed that theirs is the world’s safest food supply.

Some of them are wrong.

And while it’s important to focus on imports, don’t forget to keep the home fires burning. As I said in USA Today this morning,

While it may be "psychologically comforting to blame others," what the U.S. needs is farm-to-fork food safety, said Douglas Powell, director of the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University. "Imports are a problem. So is food produced in the U.S. One should not distract from another."

A N.Y. Times editorial today said that "the Chinese government’s extraordinary decision to execute its chief food and drug regulator for taking bribes and allowing the sale of tainted drugs is a perfect example of all that is wrong with China’s approach to regulation."

The editorial also says that "the scope of the problem is too big, too complex and too urgent for the United States — with $300 billion worth of Chinese imports a year — to wait for Beijing to act. American importers need to provide the first line of defense. Companies like Wal-Mart should send inspectors regularly to visit the factories of Chinese suppliers, to ensure that products are up to acceptable standards. Ultimately the American government will have to enforce these norms."

That echoes what I told Elizabeth Weise in USA Today last Wednesday:

"Whether your food comes from down the street or around the globe, you want to verify that producers and processors are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing."

The Wall Street Journal also ran a great piece today on food safety being used as a protectionist trade barrier.

Safety standards have a history of being used as trade barriers, and observers in China and the U.S. worry that a pattern may be reappearing. The back and forth of blocked imports looks increasingly like a trade battle, one in which accusations of endangering consumers have taken the place of charges of unfair competition and dumping.

"We are likely to see these requirements increasingly being used, and abused, as a trade barrier," says Leora Blumberg, an international-trade adviser based in Hong Kong for the law firm Heller Ehrman LLP. Ms. Blumberg says that a series of global trade pacts has reduced import duties across the board and restrained the ability of nations to block trade through other means.

I adopted a similar line in the Washington Post yesterday:

"(I’ve) watched food safety long enough — 15 years — to know that one country’s scientific standard is another’s non-tariff trade barrier. Science gets used and abused all the time."

And the L.A. Times this morning:

"Food safety issues are often used for political means in times of strained trade relations. … Politically, it’s a standard tactic. They’ll say it is a food safety issue, but really it’s a political issue."

I do news.

And now, with 100 posts on barfblog, and food safety news as prominent as ever — that’s me doing an interview for the Today show on NBC while driving back from Florida on Wednesday in a shirt borrowed from a reporter — it’s time for a recap.

The Food Safety Network — the FSnet listserv — began in my basement office while I was a graduate student. In the aftermath of the Jan. 1993 Jack-in-the-Box outbreak of E. coli O157:H7, I started sharing electronic media accounts of food safety issues with some of my colleagues through the wonders of e-mail. I had an undergraduate degree in molecular biology, had worked for years as a journalist, and as communications thingy for the Information Technology Research Centre at the University of Waterloo.

By 1994, the e-mail distribution list was growing, and we undertook a research project to see if the daily FSnet mailings actually helped front-line workers.

This was before Al Gore invented the Internet, so it was nearly impossible to get e-mail access for the various government agencies participating in the trial. However, within months, the information superhighway was commonplace, my daily e-mail was converted to a listserv distribution system, and the daily FSnet postings went out beginning in May, 1995. FSnet and the other listservs are still available to whoever wants them in their e-mail; instructions are available here.
 
FSnet archives are available at foodsafety.ksu.edu dating back to Jan. 1, 1996. In Sept. 1996, I got a professoring job, and my lab began to expand. In 1998, the Food Safety Network website was launched, and by 2000, I had enough people working on news and in my lab that we started keeping track of things.

For the last five years, we have collected approximately 25,000 media accounts, scientific papers, reports, press releases and now blog postings related to all things food safety, each and every year. That’s 125,000 individual items. About half of those items are edited and posted in the four daily listservs — FSnet, Agnet, Animalnet and FFnet.

After starting on a Mac computer in my basement, I’m now working with a small group of individuals passionately committed to reducing the incidence of foodborne illness. Wireless instead of dial-up means that we work in our living rooms or rooms around the world. And we have nicer Macs now.

From produce to peanut butter and pet food, imports and outbreaks, my colleagues and students provide commentary about food safety issues from farm to fork. We want to make food safety a pop-culture phenomenon and change the way the world thinks about food. Through barfblog, we comment daily on food safety happenings including such categories such as celebrity barf and the "yuck" factor. Through donteatpoop.com, we encourage people to wash their hands, and not eat poop.

The first 100 posts on barfblog are just a beginning. And thanks to Bill Marler for his on-going support of our blogging efforts.

That was the title of a talk I gave at the International Association for Food Protection annual meeting this morning in Orlando.

I spoke about the evolution and marketing of organic, genetically-engineered free and local food production systems, and commented on the rise of food pornography. The slides are available here. The abstract for a paper Katija Blaine and I prepared in 2004 on organic and conventional food safety systems is available here.

The formal abstract is below.

Douglas A. Powell, Katija Morley, Stacey Cahill, Benjamin C. Chapman and Amy L. Hubbell

Scientific Director and Associate Professor, International Food Safety Network, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, 66506, U.S.

Fresh fruits and vegetables have been identified as a significant source of microbial foodborne illness for at least the past decade. Outbreaks have been linked to both conventionally and organically grown produce.

Previous studies have identified gaps between U.S. Food and Drug Administration on-farm food safety guidelines and organic standards in terms of microbial food safety. Although microbial food safety standards are often achieved indirectly under organic production, organic standards are process-based, and have nothing do to with end-product safety. Specific omissions include worker hygiene and recommendations for safe use of processing and irrigation water. Further, any guideline or standard is meaningless without robust verification. The production of safe food is the responsibility of everyone in the farm-to-fork chain — conventional or organic — and food safety, especially with fresh produce, must begin on the farm.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection and the National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians have published an updated, Compendium of Measures to Prevent Disease Associated With Animals in Public Settings.

The package includes guidelines for animals in school settings, handwashing recommendations, suggested visitor handouts, and information for vendors and staff.

Sounds great. The challenge is, how to compel individual petting zoo operators to actually follow best practices, short of being sued by Bill Marler.

That’s the title of a great Rick Weiss piece in the July 4 Washington Post about U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s assistant commissioner for food protection — or, in the media lingo that he apparently abhors, "food safety czar."

The story says that climbing the ranks in public health can be a frustrating business because, as many on the front lines of public health know, nobody knows your name when bird flu is under control, when pets are not poisoned, when bacteria-laden burgers aren’t making kids sick.

The story also notes that Acheson eats a lot of organic food — not because he thinks it’s safer, but because his wife works at an organic food co-op in Clarksville (I hope he’s checking on the microbial safety procedures because organic is a food production system, not a food safety system) and that he watches a lot of the Food Network. I wonder if Acheson notices as many food safety errors on the TV cooking shows as we did (and I really want to update that study; any potential grad students who want to watch TV?).
The story goes on to conclude by citing Acheson as saying that education and creative training will also be crucial. The story says, Chinese-language Food Network, anyone?

Chinese Don’t Eat Poop shirt, anyone?

Robert’s American Gourmet Inc.’s  is blaming Chinese seasoning suppliers for the Salmonella Wandsworth contamination in their Veggie Booty pirate snacks.
The company reports that there was a positive sample of Salmonella Wandsworth found in the seasoning, though no reports from health officials have confirmed this yet.  Newsday is reporting that yesterday afternoon the great lab folks at the Minnesota Department of Ag reported finding Salmonella in the snack product, but didn’t suggest the source.

Reprints of the Washington Post story this morning suggest that the Chinese ingredients are to blame.  But without the data, maybe this is just a convenient shifting of the problem to a country that has been in the news a lot lately. 

The shift of blame to suppliers has happened recently with a ground beef recall as well — both of these examples arise from processors who should know what their input suppliers do for food safety as part of HACCP prerequisite plans.

What does "food safety" mean?

To me and the other two thousand food safety geeks who will converge in Florida at the annual International Association for Food Protection meeting next week, food safety means keeping disease-causing microbes (along with chemical and physical hazards) out of food.

Ask your neighbor, and they’ll say food safety is something to do with nutrition, allergies, calories, and anything else.

So if food safety is a broad term, is food safety also a term that is broadly manipulated?

Despite the protestations of grocers and manufacturers and producers, food is already extensively marketed and differentiated on safety — or at least perceptions of safety.

The California Marketing Agreement covering leafy greens is talking about some sort of label representing certification on bags of lettuce and spinach. Is that implying safety?

Cauliflower, with a Primus Lab sticker that says, "When food safety counts," found in a large Guelph, Ontario, supermarket last year is pushing something.

Organic, natural, hormone-free, additive free: it’s all directed at implied safety.

Below are a couple of images of organic almond milk purchased in France while Amy and I were touring about.

The approximate translation of the small print is:

"Bjorg’s commitments

– Bjorg chooses organic agriculture, a mode of cultivation that uses natural methods and processing that forbids all artificial flavorings and colors.
– To take advantage of the best part of nature, Bjorg creates recipes to offer you unique nutritional virtues.

For your security: strict controls

From production through to marketing, these organic products are controlled by  certifying organizations that are independently registered. This product is certified by CCPAE Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 612-61E-08007 Barcelona."

Forget the implications. Provide meaningful measures of microbial food safety and American consumers, already inundated with food safety stories of the microbial kind, will buy it.

Canada Day (July 1) means beer, barbecues and baby back ribs.
For the Government of Canada, it means, Food Safety Can Be Fun!

"The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Health Canada and the Canadian Partnership for Consumer Food Safety Education (the Partnership) invite media to attend Food Safety Can Be Fun!, an exciting, interactive food safety event."

Maybe. Or maybe it was as numbing as the June 21, 2007 press release from Health Canada reminding Canadians of "four simple steps they can take to protect themselves from food-borne illnesses: clean, separate, cook and chill."

Food safety is not simple. And Dr. Sarah Wilson has been helping me spread that evidence-based message since joining my lab, the Food Safety Network, in 2002. When consumers, reporters, and agencies like Health Canada, CFIA and the Partnership had food safety questions that went outside the paternalistic cook, clean, chill and separate, they turned to Sarah and her staff in the Food Safety Network information centre.

Sarah has now moved on to a new job, and hopefully much greener pastures. When I left Guelph for Kansas State University in 2006, I publicly stated that FSN was expanding, and that Guelph and Kansas would work together. My new administration agreed; the folks at Guelph responded they wanted to separate — and maybe cleanse by cleaning, cooking and chilling  — and that there should be two Food Safety Networks.

There is one International Food Safety Network; one barfblog; one donteatpoop.com. We will miss Sarah Wilson.

Tyson Foods Inc. is the latest food company to spend a lot of money on feel-good advertising designed to enhance earnings. At a New York press conference yesterday, Tyson Chief Executive Dick Bond was quoted as saying he believes the conversion to antibiotic-free fresh chicken should "have a positive effect on our earnings," but he offered no projection. 

At the news conference, Tyson showed a commercial from that campaign in which an announcer says serving antibiotic-free chicken should help parents to "feel good about feeding your family." The Wall Street Journal reported that the products will be more expensive but the company provided no premium estimate beyond asserting that they would be "affordable for mainstream consumers."

The move is aimed at eliminating the sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in Tyson brand chicken. You probably can’t read the label below, but there is a full-page version in today’s USA Today that I saw while stranded at the Philadelphia airport. It says:

Chicken raised without antibiotics
No hormones administered
No artificial ingredients

Except Tyson will still use therapeutic antibiotics. And in the small print, it says:

Federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones in chicken.

Who says food isn’t marketed based on perceptions of food safety? Now if someone would start marketing based on microbial food safety.