Tag Archives: video

JBS adopts video auditing at US beef plants

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In April 2009, Cargill Beef announced it had implemented a third-party video-auditing system that would operate 24 hours a day at its U.S. beef plants to enhance the company’s animal welfare protection systems. All of Cargill’s U.S. plants were expected to have the program in place by the end of 2009.

In Feb. 2010, Cargill announced its expanded remote video auditing program will monitor food-safety procedures within its 10 beef-harvest facilities in North America.

Angie Siemens, Cargill technical services vice president for food safety and quality, said,

“We’re working to eliminate the opportunity for cross-contamination. We want to have the right steps at the beginning of our process to enhance the efficacy of our intervention technologies later in the process. The major objective of the video auditing application is to design a ground-breaking program that can further reduce the E. coli and Salmonella contamination.”

Yesterday, Meatingplace.com reported that JBS USA’s beef division is installing remote video-surveillance camera systems at all of its eight beef plants to enhance food safety, product quality and animal handling.

John Ruby, head of technical services for JBS USA’s beef division, said in a news release the system helped the company improve the accuracy of its auditing within weeks of implementation. JBS uses the system to measure the performance of its workers and give them immediate feedback, ultimately helping to improve its food safety systems.

UK supermarket chain wants cameras in abattoirs to control cruelty

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In early 2008, the Humane Society of the United States released video documenting animal abuse at Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. of Chino, Calif., secretly shot by an undercover employee.

That $100-million-a-year company does not exist anymore – brought down by someone using an over-the-counter video recording device.
In April 2009, Cargill Beef announced it had implemented a third-party video-auditing system that would operate 24 hours a day at its U.S. beef plants to enhance the company’s animal welfare protection systems. All of Cargill’s U.S. plants were expected to have the program in place by the end of 2009.

In Feb. 2010, Cargill announced it would expand its remote video auditing program to monitor food-safety procedures within processing plants.

Last week, a new undercover video investigation by a national animal welfare group claimed to show disturbing conditions at a Texas farm operated by the country’s largest egg producer and distributor.

?The Humane Society of the United States said that one of their investigators documented a range of filthy, unsanitary conditions while working at a Cal-Maine Foods operation in Texas over a five-week period this fall. A five-minute video produced by the group shows hens confined in overcrowded cages with rotting corpses, dead and injured birds trapped in cages, eggs covered in feces, and escaped hens floating in manure pits.?

The images are a stark contrast to the clean white birds and eggs featured in the video on the Cal-Maine corporate website.

On Nov, 19, 2010, The Independent reported that Morrisons became the first U.K. supermarket to promise to install CCTV at its abattoirs to reassure the public. The RSPCA called for other chains to follow suit. The supermarket said CCTV images from its Colne and Turriff abattoirs would be stored for 30 days and made available to the Food Standards Agency (FSA). Spokesman Martyn Fletcher said: "Our customers want to know that animals are treated well through the slaughtering process and we believe installing CCTV cameras is the best way to demonstrate we have the highest possible standards."

Slaughterhouse cruelty has been under the spotlight after Animal Aid captured breaches of welfare laws at six out of seven randomly selected abattoirs – including one supplying organic meat, where pigs were kicked in the face.

September’s footage from F Drury & Sons reinforces the suspicion many, if not most, of the 370 abattoirs in England and Wales break the rules.

Speaking on behalf of F Drury & Sons, the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers said the 20-second rule had been designed for religious slaughter when animals are not stunned. "The likelihood of a stunned animal being conscious is extremely small," said its veterinary officer Stephen Lomax. "This is not an animal welfare issue."

He blamed government vets for not alerting owners to the "deplorable" abuse found elsewhere. He said: "There’s no excuse for all the self-serving arguments the FSA gives about these vets [monitoring abattoirs] not having enough time. They spend a great deal of time phoning their boyfriends, reading the newspaper or filling in useless forms. The system has failed."

The FSA initially denied illegality at F Drury & Sons, but changed its mind when challenged.

Companies would protect their brand and build trust with the buying public by having their own video to supplement claims of humane handling and food safety.
 

FSIS issues draft guidelines on in-plant video monitoring – technology could strengthen humane handling, food safety

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Apparently the U.S. was paying attention to that whole video-in-slaughterhouses-to-improve-animal-welfare-and-food-safety discussion. They just never let me in on the details.

Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) issued draft guidelines to assist meat and poultry establishments that want to improve operations by using in-plant video monitoring.

(They’re saying we’re from the government, we’re here to help; run).

The purpose of the draft guidance, Compliance Guidelines for Use of Video or Other Electronic Monitoring or Recording Equipment in Federally Inspected Establishments, is to make firms aware that video or other electronic monitoring or recording equipment may be used in federally inspected establishments where meat and poultry are processed. Establishments may choose to use video or other electronic recording equipment for various purposes including ensuring that livestock are handled humanely, that good commercial practices are followed, monitoring product inventory, or conducting establishment security. Records from video or other electronic monitoring or recording equipment may also be used to meet FSIS’ record-keeping requirements.

The draft guidance can be found at: www.fsis.usda.gov/Significant_Guidance/index.asp.
 

UK regulator wants cameras in slaughterhouses to curb animal abuse, industry says, hang on mate

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In Feb. 2008, the U.S. Department of Agriculture shut down a meat processing company after concluding workers committed egregious acts of animal cruelty, about a week after the Humane Society of the United States released video showing employees of the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. of Chino, Calif., tormenting cows that were too injured or weak to stand.

That $100-million-a-year company does not exist anymore – brought down by someone using an over-the-counter video recording device.

An employee of the Humane Society of the United States worked undercover inside the company for about six weeks in the fall, secretly recording what went on.

His video shows what appear to be crippled cows dragged with forklifts, sprayed in the face with a high-pressure water hose and poked in the eye with a stick.

The images sparked concern not only from animal-welfare advocates, but from food-safety experts, who feared the company might have used the tactic to prod sick animals to slaughter in violation of state and federal regulations.

At the time I said maybe it was time for USDA to adopt some new inspection and investigative techniques if the HSUS can so easily document such grotesquely poor treatment of animals.

In April, 2008, Dr. Richard Raymond of USDA said the department needed neither video cameras nor more inspectors to police slaughterhouses after the country’s largest beef recall earlier this year.

Everything was just fine.

In March 2009, Cargill Beef decided to do their own thing – probably because when an outbreak or outrage happens, the USDA or any other regulatory types, don’t lose their jobs, it’s the producers, processors and employees who lose money and their jobs — and implemented a third-party video-auditing system that would operate 24 hours a day at its U.S. beef slaughter plants to enhance the company’s animal welfare protection systems.

A year later, Cargill announced it was expanding its remote video auditing program to monitor food-safety procedures within processing plants.

Mike Siemens, Cargill leader of animal welfare and husbandry, said at the time,

“The early results with our animal welfare program have been terrific … In addition to the positive results on compliance rates, we have observed healthy competition among plants on performance scores, as well as a general theme of collaboration among plants on how to attack specific operational challenges. The ability to share data and video easily is extremely valuable.”

If the U.S. regulators aren’t listening, the Brits are.

The U.K. Food Standards Agency tabled a proposal last week to introduce CCTV (closed circuit television) cameras into slaughterhouses in a bid to tackle animal welfare abuse.

Food Production Daily cited FSA director of operations Andrew Rhodes as saying the agency is calling for the voluntary introduction of surveillance cameras after undercover filming by animal rights group Animal Aid in the last year had highlighted abuses in U.K. slaughterhouses. The proposal is due to go before agency chiefs next week for approval.

The report said that while there is no legal requirement to fit CCTV, food business operators (FBOs) may come under pressure from retailers to install systems. The FSA acknowledged there were practical issues – such as how the footage in monitored, who has access to it and how long film is kept – that must be addressed.

Agreed. There are lots of issues involved. So figure them out. What slaughterhouse or processor wants to be held hostage by each new hire that may be carrying a video device.

Today, Food Production Daily cited Stephen Rossides, head of the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA), as saying that proposals to fit surveillance cameras in UK slaughterhouses to combat animal welfare abuses must remain voluntary as violations are relatively rare.

I don’t know about the U.K., but at the time of the Westland mess, Julie Schmit of USA Today reported that newly released government records show such animal mishandling in past years was more than a rare occurrence.

The Animal Welfare Institute, an animal-protection group, said that more than 10% of the humane-slaughter violations issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the 18 months ended March 2004 detailed improper treatment of animals that couldn’t walk — mostly cattle.

USDA records obtained by the Animal Welfare Institute describe 501 humane-handling or slaughter violations that occurred at other slaughter plants. At one plant, a downed cow was pushed 15 feet with a forklift. Other companies were cited for dragging downed but conscious animals, letting downed cattle be trampled and stood on by others and, in one case, using "excessive force" with a rope and an electric prod to get a downed cow to stand, the enforcement records say.

Beyond reaction and regulation, producers and processors who say their food is safe should be able to prove it. Producers and processors who say they treat animals humanely should be able to prove it.

Restaurant inspection disclosure sucks in Maryland

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Foodies wanting to know how clean their favorite restaurant is must file public records requests in Wicomico County.

For several years, the health department has sought to change that by posting details of restaurant inspections online. But budget cuts, combined with opposition from restaurant owners, have made that an elusive goal, said Stuart White, supervisor of community health in the environmental health division.

"I think it would promote better practices. You’d want a better grade if it would be posted," White said.

A growing number of health departments across the U.S. are initiating programs aimed at improving the transparency of restaurant inspections, said Robert Pestronk, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. He said many health departments are putting information online, and others are placing scores — in the form of letter grades, numerical scores or color-coded decals — in plain sight at restaurants.

"It really makes the public part of the inspection work force," he said.

A study in June’s Journal of Food Protection suggests cross-contamination violations — which can lead to illnesses — may be more widespread than previously thought, and they may occur more frequently during peak hours.

Researchers from North Carolina State University used video cameras to monitor 47 food handlers at eight volunteering kitchens and found that the workers committed an average of one cross-contamination violation an hour.

"It really changes how we think about training," said Ben Chapman, the lead author of the study and assistant professor and food safety specialist in the Department of 4-H Youth Development and Family & Consumer Sciences at NCSU. Researchers from Kansas State University and the University of Guelph in Ontario co-wrote the study.
 

Consumer with a camera turns in mozzarellas turning blue

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There aren’t a lot of blue foods.

There was blue string soup in that Bridget Jones movie.

Food safety police in northern Italy seized a batch of 70,000 mozzarella cheeses that turned blue once they were removed from their packaging.

The agriculture ministry announced emergency control measures on the cheese, which was made in Germany for an Italian company that sold it to discount supermarkets in the north of the country.

The cool part is that a consumer alerted authorities in Turin by sending images from her mobile phone of the soft, white cheese immediately turning blue once it came into contact with air.

Those mobile image devices are everywhere and some people know how to use them (not me). So use them when food appears shoddy.

The name of the discount chain that sold the cheese was not disclosed, because it had "managed the situation well" and immediately removed the cheese in question from its shelves, a police statement said.

Managed it well after their cheese was fingered by a consumer with a camera?

Lots can talk, but can they actually deliver food safety video without classroom command-and-control

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It’s been almost 10 years since me and the ex-wife and the four kids got in the family van for our outsized family to drive to Atlanta for the annual meeting of what is now know as the International Association for Food Protection (that’s Carl Custer, right, going to deliver his Ivan Parkin lecture a few years later and trying to convince Randy Phebus to buy a decent bike)..

I was to give the Ivan Parkin lecture at the gala opening, and then would be supervising my kids as they grabbed as many freebies as possible when the trade show opened.

But we never made it.

We got to Detroit about 8 am on the Saturday morning after a 3-hour drive, and the kindly border guard said, sir, have you ever been arrested?

I sais yes, and said I have been in the U.S. about every other week for the previous three years, and she said , that’s nice, go on over there.

The dreaded secondary inspection.

I was subsequently informed after a couple of hours hanging out with my 5, 7, 10, 13-year-olds – and wife – that the U.S. had changed it’s border policy I would have to apply for a waiver to enter the U.S. and that would take six months.

But I’m supposed to talk in Atlanta tomorrow?

Six months.

The hungry family and I retreated to an IHOP in Windsor (that’s on the Canadian side of the U.S. border with Detroit), they ate syrupy stuff and I called IAFP leadership types in Atlanta.

We had been doing some consumer research at a farm market selling genetically engineered and conventional sweet corn and potatoes, and decided to start videotaping stuff, even though youtube.com didn’t exist and we weren’t sure what to do with the tapes. But we had bought a video recording device. So I suggested we tape the talk, e-mail it to Atlanta, and they could broadcast it.

There was no way I was getting across the border.

Because I like to be prepared, I hadn’t really done anything for this big-shot talk, so the ex-wife drove the three hours back to Guelph, I made up my talk, and Katija came over and taped me talking in my kitchen. That talk was broadcast as the Ivan Parkin lecture at the IAFP annual meeting the next night.

Now, it’s sorta routine. I’ve given at least 20 keynote speeches and presentations via programs such as Skype and iChat since 2000, using a combination of live video feeds and pre-recorded video, for crowds ranging in size from five to 800 people.

As reported in a campus publication this week,

According to Powell, there are many advantages to using this form of technology in delivering speeches, such as eliminating the costs and stresses of travel and increasing a professor’s overall availability. Although, it does come with additional challenges, he said, such as the ever-present possibility of disrupted Internet feed and a lack of feedback from the audience.

"I actually find it forces me to be more creative," he said. "If you’re giving a talk in person, you can tell when people are sort of zoning out or falling asleep and you can modify it. You don’t get that on video because you’re talking to a camera."

Powell said to help spice up the video feed he often integrates action segments into his pre-recorded speeches, for example, utilizing cooking as a form of demonstration.

Apparently Republican Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty agrees with me, which is somewhat creepy. Pawlenty was on The Daily Show last week, and while poorly declining his presidential aspirations, said some decent stuff about education:

“For example, higher education. … Do you really think in 20 years someone’s going to put on their backpack, drive a half-hour to the University of Minnesota from the suburbs, haul their keester across campus, to sit and listen to some boring person drone on about Econ 101 or Spanish 101?

Is there another way to deliver the service other than a one-size fits all monopoly that says show up at 9 a.m on Wednesday. for Econ 101, Can’t I just pull that down on my iphone or ipad whenever the heck I feel like it and wherever I feel like it, and instead of paying thousands of dollars, can I pay $199 for iCollege instead of $0.99 for iTunes.

Pawlenty says this stuff about 5 minutes into the clip. Bricks and mortar just isn’t necessary for a lot of so-called education.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive – Tim Pawlenty Unedited Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Abuse is shocking and it’s all on video; Ohio dairy farm worker charged with animal cruelty

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Billy Joe Gregg Jr. – a man with not two but three first names and of course, it’s Billy Joe – an Ohio dairy farm worker has been charged with 12 counts of cruelty to animals after a welfare group released a video it says shows him and others beating cows with crowbars and pitchforks.

He’s in jail, pondering his 15 minutes of fame.

Associated Press reports the County sheriff’s office says Gregg was fired from Conklin Dairy Farms in Plain City on Wednesday.

Conklin calls the mistreatment shown on the video "reprehensible." Chicago-based Mercy For Animals says the undercover video was shot between April 28 and Sunday.

The video is available at:
http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DgYTkM1OHFQg

It is graphic and disturbing.

People handle food any way they want

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Some form of direct observation is the only way to do meaningful food safety behavior research, and the phrase, consumer food safety education, should be banned.

Or at least try something new – the stuff that is out there just doesn’t work.

That’s what I take from a preliminary summary of research led by Christine Bruhn, director of the Center for Consumer Research at the University of California, Davis, and Ho Phang, prepared by Meatingplace.

Sure, those are a couple of my primary messages, so it’s easy to agree with someone who agrees with me, but nice to hear it confirmed.

Bruhn and colleagues videotaped 200 volunteers in their homes while they prepared burgers and salad. She observed their methods of defrosting the meat — frozen, preformed burgers — their refrigerators’ temperature, whether or not they put themselves at risk for cross-contamination and how they determined whether the meat was done.

Of those in the study:

* Twenty-five percent said they prefer their burgers pink.
* Eighty-three percent said they used visual clues, rather than a meat thermometer, to determine the doneness of their burgers.
* About half owned a meat thermometer, but almost all of those participants said they used it on larger cuts of meat, not burgers.
* Seventy-five percent said they were unlikely to use a meat thermometer on burgers.

Even though participants knew they were being videotaped, many did not follow recommended guidelines when preparing their burgers:

* Although 90 percent of consumers were observed washing their hands prior to food preparation, the average hand-washing time was just seven seconds, and only 31 percent dried their hands with a clean towel (either a paper towel or a cloth towel that had not been used previously).

* Potential cross-contamination — defined by the study as "an event in which pathogens could be transferred from one surface to another as a result of contact with a potential source of contamination" — occurred in 74 percent of the households.

* While a bar graph showing the temperature distribution of the finished burgers demonstrated that many were at or near the recommended 160 degrees F, a few of the burgers’ temperatures were recorded to be much lower — as low as 112 degrees F. (Study coordinators observing consumer behavior made sure all burgers were cooked to 160 F before volunteers consumed them.)

Even after the exercise, only 23 percent of participants said they would use a meat thermometer on burgers in the future.

Bruhn said,

"Consumer education is not sufficient. Take the extra step. It protects the public, and it protects you."

New US school lunch rules coming; companies should stay way ahead

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Tomorrow’s USA Today talks about the new school lunch rules coming from the U.S. Department of Agriculture by this summer (sorry, kids already in school).

USDA official Craig Morris told program suppliers at a National Meat Association conference here last week that much work remains to ensure that food purchased for the National School Lunch Program — in particular, ground beef — is "as safe, wholesome and high quality" as the best commercial products.

Beef industry representatives here said they could adapt to the new standards but pressed the USDA to move fast so they know what changes will be required.

The new standards follow a USA TODAY investigation that revealed that beef bought by the USDA for school lunches is not tested as rigorously for bacteria and pathogens as beef bought by many fast-food chains. The newspaper also reported that some food producers have been allowed to continue supplying the school lunch program despite having poor safety records with their commercial products.

But as I like to harp, the big news, repeated in the USA Today story, is that Cargill and a company it owns, Beef Packers, are trialing the use of third-party video audits not just for animal welfare but to enhance food safety systems.

However, the third-party bit really doesn’t matter — haven’t there been enough outbreaks involving third-party audited farms and facilities? Just create a credible and transparent system to enhance consumer and buyer confidence. And don’t wait for the government to do it.