A Chicago eatery famous for “its rambunctious late-night crowd and foul-mouthed staff,” was closed after an inspection Thursday.

Wiener's Circle, an iconic hot dog stand on the North Side, was shut down by the city today after inspectors found several food safety violations, including finding no hot running water at the Lincoln Park restaurant. …

The inspection followed an inspection Dec. 12 after a customer called 311, claiming the restaurant had a rodent infestation. There was no evidence found of rodents, the release stated, but management was ticketed for having an overflowing garbage container.
 

The Maple Leaf makeover continued this week – a promotional video, settling all lawsuits for $27 million – yet some lingering questions remain. And neither Maple Leaf nor the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is rushing to answer the hard questions:

• who knew what when;

• why won’t Maple Leaf make their listeria test results public; and,??????

• what is Maple Leaf Food's advice to those folks vulnerable to listeria.??????

Rob Cribb of the Toronto Star reports today that thousands of pages of documents detailing the federal government's handling of this summer's listeria outbreak are being withheld.

The Star and the CBC are seeking the records, which include emails sent between officials with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Maple Leaf Foods and the City of Toronto, through an access to information request.

The CFIA has imposed extensions of a year or more on top of the normal 30-day deadline for responding to such requests.

The joint investigation used the federal access to information law in the hope that a request would yield records showing what went wrong, when officials first knew of the outbreak's potential impact and how quickly the system kicked in to protect Canadians.

None of the records first requested four months ago have been released.

Repeated requests for an interview with Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz have been denied.

“Doug. Oprah is cross-contaminating everything.”

Sure enough, there was Oprah on TV this afternoon in a repeat broadcast, with Christina Ferrare, who is supposedly cooking Oprah’s holiday meals.

In a three minute segment, Oprah and her gal pal managed to repeatedly touch raw poultry and then touch everything else on her celebrity kitchen set – including cooked poultry – never once washed their hands, incorrectly inserted a meat thermometer into the bird, and said the bird had to be cooked to 180-185F. The correct temperature is 165F.

Christina will not be cooking any of my meals. I’m sure she is relieved.
 

PhD student Ben is cursing me. I know he’s just finished watching Top Chef. So did I. So he had to endure smug stock-fixer Martha Stewart, who is constantly touching her hair when cooking. And the pretentiousness of food porn that is Top Chef.

But give credit when deserved. Two weeks ago some of the chefs served lamb and used a food thermometer – they just didn’t say anything about proper temp or whether the thermometer helped decide whether the lamb was done.

But this week, a refrigerator door was left open overnight and a bunch of pork and duck was sent to the trashbin after hours at room temp.

Said one aspiring top cheffie:

“I cannot serve meat that is not at a safe temperature. I could kill or make very sick everybody in the room.”

Oh, and 15 years before Top Chef showed up, Toronto comedy fabs, Kids in the Hall, were skewering the fascination with all things food porn.
 

Having 10-day old baby Sorenne means a lot of sitting around. Seriously, the kid must have breastfed for 12 hours yesterday. And that means a lot of bad TV for Amy and Sorenne. Lately, it’s been a Real Housewives of Orange County marathon. I don’t know who lives like that and I don’t know what’s real about those people, but those ladies need to get their botoxed faces and fake boobies and restylane lips down to the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

Despite a warning from the county grand jury, the Board once again declined Tuesday to impose a letter grading system designed to inform would-be diners about the health safety record of restaurants.

Supervisor Bill Campbell, who once owned a chain of Taco Bell franchises, said he thought it was unfair to punish restaurant owners with grades or color codes if they had corrected problems and met health standards.

Orange County does not require its 13,000 restaurants to post letter grades after health inspections. Instead, restaurants are required to post certificates showing that they have met food preparation and cleanliness standards or are scheduled for a reinspection because of past violations.

In May, the Orange County Grand Jury concluded that the county's current system essentially keeps the public "in the dark" about a restaurant's record and suggested the county's Health Care Agency require restaurants to post letter grades so the public knows how they scored in their last safety inspections.

After watching the mish-mash of federal, state and local approaches to restaurant inspection in a number of western countries for the past decade, I can draw two broad conclusions:

• Anyone who serves, prepares or handles food, in a restaurant, nursing home, day care center, supermarket or local market needs some basic food safety training; and,

• the results of restaurant and other food service inspections must be made public.

Publicly available grading systems rapidly communicate to diners the potential risk in dining at a particular establishment and restaurants given a lower grade may be more likely to comply with health regulations in the future to prevent lost business.

More importantly, such public displays of information help bolster overall awareness of food safety amongst staff and the public -- people routinely talk about this stuff. The interested public can handle more, not less, information about food safety.

And instead of waiting for politicians to take the lead, the best restaurants, those with nothing to hide and everything to be proud of, will go ahead and make their inspection scores available -- today. Demand it ladies.

The Brits and their piping hot. The Canadians and their 185F.

No one knows where this advice comes from, yet every holiday, the soundbites are trotted out like a recurring nightmare. It’s like a song by Journey or Styx or Bryan Adams – Don’t Stop Believing, I’m Sailing Away, Summer of ’69 -- it keeps playing and it’s horrible.

The UK Food Standards Agency came out with a computer screen saver yesterday that I couldn’t get to work, and just as well – it says “cook your turkey properly until the juices run clear.”

Color is a lousy indicator: use a digital tip-sensitive thermometer and stick it in.

Nevertheless, the communication experts at the Food Standards Agency say:

“These are the three main ways to tell if poultry is cooked:

* the meat should be piping hot all the way through

* when you cut into the thickest part of the meat, none of the meat should be pink

* if juices run out when you pierce the turkey, or when you press the thigh, they should be clear.”

Piping hot reminds me of Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Provide some scientific validation for these statements. And is it really so hard to recommend using a thermometer?

In Canada, where the laws of physics are somehow different, Health Canada continues to recommend cooking all the crap out of the 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. But then again, Canada has no Parliament. It goes away. Just keep on believing.
 

Reindeer, like other deer, are ruminants, and like other ruminants, about 10 per cent will carry E. coli O157:H7 and relatives at any particular time.

So when a farmer, or huckster, promoting tourism at his reindeer farm says,

"About the worst that could happen is she could poop on you, but that's not really a problem because they really just poop raisins," he said. Raisins are a favorite part of the reindeer diet at the farm.

"Or she could pee on you, but I wouldn't worry, because I think I've heard something about reindeer pee, Christmas and good luck."

They aren’t poop raisins. Don’t eat poop.

Doug wrote a book called Mad Cows and Mother’s Milk about a decade ago. I still haven’t read it. I feel bad about that, but I don’t think it has the answers to my recent nursing questions.

When we were meeting with the lactation consultant in the hospital (Melanie – you are fabulous, by the way), we asked her if foodborne illness could be passed on to the baby. She said no. She said not to worry about viruses such as flu or colds and that the baby cannot get Listeria or Salmonella from anything I eat.

Once home from the hospital, I immediately went for the pâté, brie, goat cheese (thank you Graduate Students!), and smoked salmon. Who knew that motherhood could be so delicious?
 

Friday we took baby Sorenne to her first pediatrician’s appointment. Everything was cool, we went and got some groceries, and on the way home a reporter from the Times of London rang me up. He wanted to chat about dioxin in feed in Ireland and had actually found a technical report me and a couple of students wrote almost a decade ago about dioxin in Belgian feed.

Indeed, I was the same person, oops, hang on a sec, removed the car seat from car, then chatted for about 20 minutes as I trugged the groceries up the hill.

The stories are running Sunday morning in London and my quotes are an excellent example of baby brain: some of the right words are there, but much of what I said comes across as gibberish. Nevertheless, the stories provide an excellent overview of the dioxin-in-Irish-feed crisis.

In the central science laboratory in York last Saturday, scientist Martin Rose stared in disbelief at his dioxin detector. He had injected a sample of Irish animal feed into the machine, and the results had gone off the scale. The level of toxic contamination was at least 5,000 times the legal limit.

Rose knew there was some urgency about the analysis. The Irish authorities had asked the laboratory team to work over the weekend to get test results in a few days; normally it would take four weeks.

At 3.40pm on Saturday last, Alan Reilly, deputy chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), was given the bad news. He called Brian Cowen and outlined the grim scenario. While only 8% of Irish pork was contaminated, it could not be isolated quickly.

Every minute that the taoiseach dallied, consumers were eating dioxin-laden Irish meat. How much damage that might be doing to people’s health was not known. Nevertheless, Cowen made his decision almost immediately. Aware of the damage it would do to Ireland’s pork industry, he ordered a full recall of all pork products from September 1.

“I actually can’t believe this decision is even being questioned,” said the FSAI’s Reilly. “I’m astonished by the people saying that we shouldn’t have ordered a recall. If we had left that meat on the shelves, leaving people to eat contaminated product, we would have been lambasted for being irresponsible, and in all probability we’d be out of our jobs.

Doug Powell, scientific director of the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University, said off-the-scale readings from the feed justified the action.

“When you get those kind of numbers the response should be ‘let’s pull everything.’ If the public perceive that the authorities knew there was a risk and didn’t do anything, then they’d be crucified. From a crisis-management point of view it’s clear they did the right thing. Compare that with [the similar contamination crisis in] Belgium and we see the mess that came out of that.” …

The International Food Safety Network’s Powell believes that the government’s policy of annual testing is insufficient. “One test a year is only a snapshot. How do you know what they are doing the other 364 days?” he said. “We talk ‘farm to fork’ food safety all the time, but are the guys making the feed taking it seriously? We need to get a culture where the manufacturer is saying ‘we can’t mess this up’ rather than waiting for somebody to catch you. Everybody needs to have a culture of food safety. The marketplace can be brutal but that’s why we need to change attitudes.” …

According to Powell, the way forward is to change the culture that led to the crisis. “There will be a stigma associated with the product for a while,” he said. “The marketplace is going to demand better. Supermarkets will want to know what is going into the feed of their pigs. The producers and the processors can’t just say they have testing in place; they’ve got to prove it.”

Below is the abstract from the technical report we produced on the dioxin in Belgian feed crisis of 1999. The entire report is available at http://www.foodsafety.ksu.edu/en/articledetails.php?a=3&c=9&sc=64&id=316

In the spring of 1999, dioxin was introduced into the Belgian food supply, including exports, via contaminated animal fat used in animal feeds supplied to Belgian, French and Dutch farms. Hens, pigs and cattle ate the contaminated feed and high levels of dioxin were found in meat products as well as eggs. What followed was yet another European food safety scandal filled with drama and public outcry. There were government investigations, the removal and destruction of tons of eggs and meat products and huge economic losses. The case study of this incident reported here illustrates how the crisis unfolded, and evaluates how the Belgian government managed and communicated this crisis, based on publicly available documentation. The government's major error, based on the unfolding public discussion of the events, was a perceived failure to publicly acknowledge the crisis, resulting in accusations of a self-serving cover-up. The government's poor crisis management and communication strategy became the focus of intense public and media criticism and blame. Moreover, the significant issue of poor quality control in the food and feed industries was pushed to the sideline. Not only was the reputation of the food supply tarnished but public confidence in the government was damaged, leading to the resignations of two cabinet ministers and the ousting of the ruling party in a national election. This study confirms the basic components required to manage food-related stigma:

• effective and rapid surveillance systems;

• effective communication about the nature of risk;

• a credible, open and responsive regulatory system;

• demonstrable efforts to reduce levels of uncertainty and risk; and,

• evidence that actions match words.