Tag Archives: Tragically Hip

When all these people say food safety is their top priority, ‘I swear, I swear I’m on the verge’

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It’s sort of a Hip morning here, letting the hockey adrenaline run through the system.

The_Tragically_Hip_FireworksFSIS Notice 04-16, 1/20/16

  1. Purpose

On January 25, 2016, FSIS will launch a year-long pilot project to assess whether retailers are using the recommendations in the FSIS Best Practices Guidance for Controlling Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) in Retail Delicatessens (FSIS Retail Lm Guideline).This notice provides instructions to the Office of Investigation, Enforcement and Audit (OIEA), Compliance and Investigations Division (CID) Investigators, on how to complete the Ready-To-Eat (RTE) Retail Deli Tool, a questionnaire in the Public Health Information System (PHIS) that will help Investigators compare the practices observed in retail delis to the FSIS Retail Lm Guideline in the following areas: product handling, cleaning and sanitizing, facility and equipment controls, and employee practices. This notice also provides instructions to Investigators on how to conduct outreach at retail firms that slice or prepare deli products during their in-commerce surveillance activities.

  1. Background
  2. The FSIS Retail Lm Guideline provides specific recommendations that retailers can use in the deli area of their operations to control Lm contamination of RTE meat and poultry products. The guidance highlights recommendations based on an evaluation of retail conditions and practices documented in the Interagency Risk Assessment–Listeria monocytogenes in Retail Delicatessens (Interagency Retail Lm Risk Assessment). The FSIS Retail Lm Guideline includes information from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Code, scientific literature, other guidance documents, and lessons learned from FSIS verification sampling and from reviewing sanitation programs for Lm controls in meat and poultry processing establishments. The FSIS Retail Lm Guideline sets out recommendations rather than requirements.
  3. As mentioned above, FSIS is launching a year-long, nationwide pilot project to measure the status of retailers’ voluntary adoption of the recommendations in the FSIS Retail Lm Guideline. FSIS will not perform sampling at retail. The Data Analysis Staff, Office of Data Integration and Food Protection, will analyze the results monthly, and the quarterly results will be posted on the FSIS Web site in a Constituent Update.

 III. Outreach

  1. When conducting in-commerce surveillance at a retail firm that slices or prepares deli products, Investigators are to provide the firm’s management with the tri-fold brochure, Guidance for Controlling

Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) in Retail Delicatessens. The brochure is available in English and Spanish on FSIS’s Web site at http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/regulatory-compliance/listeria . Printed copies of the brochure can be obtained through supervisory channels. Investigators are to provide this information as part of the education and outreach they perform to provide regulatory food safety, food defense, and other compliance information to in-commerce businesses, owners and operators, employees, and others.

  1. In addition, Investigators are to provide the firm’s management with a copy of the letter that explains FSIS’s pilot project. The letter can be obtaion through supervisory channels.
  2. RTE Retail Deli Tool

When conducting in-commerce surveillance at a retail firm that slices or prepares deli products, Investigators are to complete the RTE Retail Deli Tool in PHIS.

Investigators are not to ask the firm’s manager or employees to answer the questions in the RTE Retail Deli Tool. Investigators are to make independent observations. Investigators may request records in addition to those required to be kept under 9 CFR 320.1 or 381.175 (e.g., records that show the firm is cleaning every four hours or rotating sanitizers) in order to identify industry practices and to determine whether the firm is following the FSIS Retail Lm Guidelines. Investigators may also make inquires to clarify their findings.

After completing the RTE Deli Tool in PHIS, Investigators are to discuss any vulnerability that they observed with the firm’s manager or employees.

  1. Questions

Refer questions regarding this notice through askFSIS. When submitting a question, use the Submit a Question tab, and enter the following information in the fields provided:

Subject Field: Enter Notice 04-16

Question Field: Enter your question with as much detail as possible.

Product Field: Select General Inspection Policy from the drop-down menu.

Category Field: Select Sampling: Listeria from the drop-down menu.

Policy Arena: Select Domestic (U.S.) Only from the drop-down menu.

When all fields are complete, press Continue and at the next screen press Finish Submitting Question.

Daniel Engeljohn

Assistant Administrator

Office of Policy and Program Development

 

Pilot project: control of Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) in retail delicatessens

20.jan.16

USDA FSIS

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/f519e2b4-1aff-4b80-beff-dba497a7338f/04-16.pdf?MOD=AJPERES

 

‘We don’t have any magic’ Kathy Glass on Listeria in apples

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Kathleen Glass started working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Food Research Institute 30 years ago, studying various microbes — primarily those turning up in the meat and dairy industries — and assisting with food safety investigations.

caramel.appleShe added her first fruit case last year with a Listeria monocytogenes outbreak in caramel apples.

Now, Glass and other researchers are working to better understand the needs of the tree fruit industry in order to help growers, packers and retailers meet new food safety regulations and ensure the safety of their products.

“The meat and dairy industries had problems 20 years ago. That’s really when we found our religion when it comes to food safety,” Glass said.

Fruit growers didn’t have as much to worry

A couple of consecutive outbreaks with ready-to-eat meat products led to significant changes in cleaning and sanitation in that industry, Glass said, as well as the addition of growth inhibitors to meat products so that Listeria can’t grow during the normal shelf life.

The changes sparked a 42 percent decrease in cases from 1996 to 2012.

The World Health Organization estimates an infectious dose of Listeria at about 10,000 cells or more.

“Just a couple of Listeria in our food products probably is not going to make us sick. That means we need to focus on foods that support growth — perishable things you should refrigerate, those with the right amount of moisture and the right acidity level,” Glass told growers and packers at December’s Washington State Tree Fruit Association Annual Meeting in Yakima, Washington.

Investigators eventually tied the Jan. 6, 2015, Listeria outbreak to a specific supplier of Granny Smith and Gala apples in California, marking the first direct tie of fresh whole apples to a serious food safety outbreak.

road.apples .tragicallyhipBut there were some novel things about the case, Glass said. Healthy children were getting sick from an unusual food source: caramel apples.

The apples were sanitized, dipped in hot caramel, and the pH of the apples was too low for minimum growth of the pathogen, which raised several questions.

Is this the work of a superbug? Are conditions present to allow growth? Could damage to the apple contribute?

Preliminary studies suggest that damage to apples could encourage microbial growth, Glass said. In this case, puncturing the apple with a stick allowed Listeria to translocate to the core.

In addition, deep depressions in apples may protect Listeria from hot caramel. Storage temperature also is an issue, with the apples stored at room temperature at retail, enabling Listeria growth.

Glass said it’s clear the industry is stepping up its efforts in the food safety arena and in environmental testing, which is the best way to determine if there’s an area of concern.

The problem is knowing if disinfectants are as effective as hoped.

“We have to try things that have been done elsewhere and apply things in different ways,” she said. “It’s a tough, tough thing, because they don’t have a great kill step. We don’t have any magic at this point, and more research is needed.”

Smart as trees in Sault Ste. Marie; EH Booths withdraws roasted monkey nuts

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I normally don’t write about allergy recalls. Sure it’s part of food safety but there’s so many, and there’s so many other better sources of info.

road.apples .tragicallyhipBut when a company markets Monkey Nuts, I can’t help myself.

Might as well call them road apples (frozen pieces of horse shit in Canada).

EH Booths is withdrawing some batches of its Whole Hearted Roasted Monkey Nuts, because the presence of peanuts is not declared on the label. This makes the product a possible health risk to those who are allergic to peanuts. The Agency has issued an Allergy Alert.

While Three Pistols was the most popular song off the album, Road Apples, I was always a fan of Born in the Water, which is about when Sault Ste. Marie (that’s in Canada) tried to ban French. Amy may like that tale.

Locked in the trunk of a car: be kind to your food

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What better excuse to air one of the best – and most disturbing – videos by Canada’s Tragically Hip in honor of Canada Day (July 1) than a study of food being violated by temperature in the trunk of your car.

This study assessed the potential microbial hazard posed by temperature increases on refrigerated and frozen food stored in car trunk exposed to sunlight. The internal temperatures in the trunk and of food items (egg, milk, tofu, fresh meat, and frozen meat) stored in it during summer were measured at 10 min intervals for up to 3 h (12:00 PM to 15:00 PM). Trunk temperature steadily increased from 32.3 °C up to 41.5 °C, with longer exposure times. Food temperature also increased substantially during this period, reaching 33.5 °C (frozen meat), 35.3 °C (milk), 35.6 °C (tofu), 37.0 °C (egg), and 38.4 °C (fresh meat). Cloud cover and solar radiation affected car and food temperature, with lower cover and higher radiation associated with higher food temperatures (7.1 °C higher in the car trunk when compared to a situation of extensive cloud cover and low radiation, and 6.9 °C higher for eggs, 5.9 °C for milk, 5.0 °C for tofu, and 7.4 °C and 5.5 °C for fresh and frozen meat, respectively). The temperature of refrigerated foods (egg, milk, and fresh meat) reached 20 °C within 40 min (tofu: 60 min) and 30 °C within 90–110 min (tofu: 130 min). The temperature of frozen meat reached to danger zone (5–60 °C), which is associated with bacterial growth, after 90 min.

Consumers should therefore realize the importance of time–temperature control, particularly in warm and sunny weather. Purchased foods should be transferred to a refrigerated environment as fast as possible, and the car trunk should be avoided. The present results can be used for consumer education, contributing to the recognition of the importance of food safety.

Highlights

? The temperature of foods stored in car trunk exposed to sunlight can increase severely. ? Refrigerated foods’ (fresh meat, egg, and milk) temperature quickly reached 20 °C within 40 min ? Frozen meat reached danger zone (5–60 °C) temperatures after 90 min in the car trunk. ? Cloud cover and solar radiation affected car and food temperature.

Temperature increase of foods in car trunk and the potential hazard for microbial growth
Food Control, Volume 29, Issue 1, January 2013, Pages 66–70
S.A. Kim, S.J. Yun, S.H. Lee, I.G. Hwang, M.S. Rhee
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095671351200299X

Where did the poop nuts come from?

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Sometimes, I write so fast I miss details.

While updating news on the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in walnuts imported to Canada, I focused on the distributor, Amira Enterprises Inc. of St. Laurent, Quebec (that’s in Canada), and their website which stated they import specialty food products from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

What I glossed over was this statement: “The raw shelled walnuts are imported from the U.S.”

Where did the nuts originate within the U.S.? And where did the nuts get pooped on in the farm-to-fork system?

BTW, Amira, it would be courteous if you put some information on your own website about the walnuts you voluntarily recalled.

Sometimes the faster it gets
The less you need to know
But you gotta remember
The smarter it gets the further it’s going to go
When you blow at high dough

Tragically Hip, Canadian national anthem, 1989.
 

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.


The Tragically Hip – Greasy Jungle
Uploaded by UniversalMusicGroup. – Watch more music videos, in HD!

What engineers can teach food safety types, learn from failure

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After bombing out as a genetics grad student and dabbling in journalism, I re-entered academia teaching risk analysis to engineering students at the University of Waterloo (that’s in Canada, down the road from Guelph). I taught a course called Science, Technology and Values to about 100 engineering undergrads twice a year.

I loved it.

We got to examine in real-time the assessment, management and communication failures of the 1994 Intel chip melt-down, which is now being repeated with the Apple iPhone. Engineers are big on failure analysis and figuring out ways to prevent future accidents.

The causes are usually cultural rather than technological failures.

As William J. Broad writes in the New York Times this morning, disasters teach more than successes.

While that idea may sound paradoxical, it is widely accepted among engineers.

They say grim lessons arise because the reasons for triumph in matters of technology are often arbitrary and invisible, whereas the cause of a particular failure can frequently be uncovered, documented and reworked to make improvements.

Disaster, in short, can become a spur to innovation.

Henry Petroski, a historian of engineering at Duke University and author of “Success Through Failure,” a 2006 book, said,

“It’s a great source of knowledge — and humbling, too — sometimes that’s necessary. Nobody wants failures. But you also don’t want to let a good crisis go to waste.”

What’s baffled me is that the food industry seems immune to such lessons. Or it takes forever. It took 29 outbreaks involving leafy greens before the California industry had a tipping point and decided to get serious about food safety? The same mistakes are repeated over and over and over and it’s boring (and really dangerous).

Canadian greats, The Tragically Hip, who are not engineers, just dudes from Kingston (that’s in Ontario) summed it up in their 1994 song, Titanic Terrarium:

An accident’s sometimes the only way
To worm our way back to bad decisions
 

Los Angeles drowning in road apples

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Not just the title of the 1991 album by Canadian rockers, The Tragically Hip, road apples is slang for horse shit.

And Los Angeles has lots of it (and doesn’t even freeze to use as a makeshit hockey puck).

Bloomberg reports that zoning restrictions have resulted in the closure of all the traditional "manure mulcher" businesses in Los Angeles County, forcing stables to haul their horse poop to ordinary land fills, which charge up to US$47 a ton, or roughly five times what the mulchers used to charge.

L.A. County is home to about 45,000 horses and almost 10 million people. Horses generate an estimated US$900-million a year in revenue from things such as riding lessons, blacksmiths, feed sales.

But more about the Hip.

Released in 1991, the original title of the record was Saskadelphia, but the record label considered it "too Canadian." As a joke, they re-titled it Road Apples, slang for horse dung. After the album was released, they created the Another Roadside Attraction festival — another joke referring to "road apples."

The album is often cited by fans and critics as the band’s finest work. As with most Tragically Hip albums, Canadian themes appear in the album’s lyrics. "Three Pistols" is an English translation of the name of the Quebec town Trois-Pistoles, and refers to Tom Thomson, a Canadian painter, as well as Remembrance Day, the Canadian commemorative day for its war dead. "The Luxury" refers to the fleur-de-lis, provincial symbol of Quebec, while "Born in the Water" is about the controversy surrounding Ontario municipalities (particularly Sault Ste. Marie) declaring themselves "English-only" in the dying days of the Meech Lake Accord debate.

Three Pistols is used in the opening and closing credits of our safefoodcafe videos. Like this one: