The quest for discounted groceries has hit the news again with South Carolina news reporter Larry Collins asking,

“Stores slash prices about 50% - 60% on meat when it is nearing the date on the packaging. But, is that food safe to eat?”

According to registered dietitian Charlotte Caperton-Kilburn, such meat is typically safe to consume as long as you cook or freeze it as soon as you bring it home… and it smells okay.

“If the meat smells even remotely strange it should be returned to the store or thrown away,” Caperton-Kilburn told the news station.

In Ireland, Darina Allen wrote in an opinion piece for the Irish Examiner that, just the other night, she found a vac-packed duck in the back of her fridge that smelled “good and high.” Rather than throw it out, she “gave it a good wash inside and out and rubbed a bit of salt into the skin and roasted it.”

Her guests said it was delicious.

Allen reminisced about life before modern conveniences like electric refrigeration and explained, “We learned from our mothers how to judge with our senses whether food was safe.” She asserted that, “in just a few years, many people have lost the ability to judge for themselves when food is safe to eat.”

While most groceries sold in the US have a date consumers can read and use, the USDA only requires manufacturers of infant formula and baby food to determine and display a “Use by” date on their products—and this is mainly for the sake of ensuring nutrient quality. The others are voluntary and only describe when the food will probably taste best. Assessing safety is still up to the consumer.

Modern technologies like stamped dates and color-changing barcodes can help consumers with that assessment, as can the senses of sight and smell. The most reliable safeguard, though, is cooking to a temperature that studies have found will effectively kill pathogens. For poultry, this is 165F.

Chefs may tell you to use your senses to figure temperature, too, but only by using a tip-sensitive digital thermometer can you know for sure.  It’s the consumer’s choice, as always, but I’d rather be sure than be positive for salmonella.
 

With Doug and Amy on the Bite Me ’09 tour, it’s just me and the pets here in Manhattan (Kansas). Having never lived with pets before it took me a while to warm up to the cats and dogs, but with the humans gone they’ve quickly become my only friends.

Today The Boston Globe reports that both cats and dogs are safe to live with. Phew.

Many of the germs carried by pets are far more likely to be transmitted through contaminated food or water than from a pet, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the benefits of pet ownership are legion - lower blood pressure, reduced stress, even better social lives.

Dr. Lisa Moses at MSPCA Angell Animal Medical Centre in Boston, continues,

"The reality, fortunately, is that transmission of infectious diseases from pets to people is a relatively rare event.”

Neither cats or dogs are completely risk free, and pet owners should wash hands after cleaning up after pets or handling pet food.
 

Amy, Sorenne and I (right, not exactly as shown) started out this morning on our Spring Food Safety Speaking Tour – Bite Me ’09.

First stop is North Carolina State in Raleigh, but it’s 1,200 miles from an apparently snow-covered Manhattan (Kansas) and, with a three-month-old in tow, the stops are frequent.

One of those stops was at a Panera Bread in Columbia, Missouri. The restaurant rated an A according to the sign in the window (below, left) but when I went to the bathroom, the toilet handle was broken and wouldn’t flush. And I really should have flushed.

There are several shows I love to hate, and The Millionaire Matchmaker is one. On the episode tonight Hatch, an ex-NFL player, dated Maya. The two made dinner together with the help of Top Chef Ryan, flirting childishly throughout the process.

As the two entered the restaurant I noticed a restaurant inspection disclosure card in the establishment's window: a bright blue A. The Millionaire Matchmaker must only select A-rated restaurants for her rich lads.

Amy and I are fortunate we get to spend most of our time with baby Sorenne. Both of us do most of our work at home, Katie’s been a great help, and we have a student babysitter come to the house twice a week for a total of five hours.

If we were in a different situation and had to use a day care, I’d be there checking out the food safety. The Cannock House Day Nursery, Chelsfield, U.K., would be an excellent model of how not to do things.

In March 2007, the nursery was closed after 147 people contracted salmonella, including 139 children. Yesterday, a court was told salmonella was found on a chopping board and three mixing bowls in the kitchen at the premises.

Prosecutor Rob Sowersby said the cleanliness of the kitchen was found to be poor and cleaning facilities were too small, being appropriate for a home rather than a business.

Mr Sowersby said there were insufficient procedures relating to washing hands, changing nappies and organising cleaning.

Mr Sowersby added there was no toilet paper in the toilets and that children were handed some when they had to go.

There must be awards for everything.

Whenever a university or company talks about recreating itself to be more excellent, I’m reminded of Homer Simpson winning the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.

Homer is awarded $2,000 and agrees to loan the money to his bitter half-brother, Herb Powell (no relation) who becomes rich again by making a machine to translate a baby's babbling into actual English. Amy figures she’s already mastered the sounds of baby Sorenne and can differentiate the cries for “I need to be fed” and “I just had a huge dump.”

With that in mind, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was honored yesterday with the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement “Golden Checkmark” Award for his leadership and support of mandatory government inspection of food safety systems within the produce industry. 

Joe Pezzini, a leafy greens farmer and chairman of the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement Board said that with the creation of the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, a system is now in place which involves mandatory government inspections to ensure food safety practices are being followed by California leafy greens farmers.  Since the LGMA’s inception in April 2007 nearly 1,000 audits of California leafy greens farms have been conducted by government inspectors. 

The same government inspectors that visited Peanut Corporation of America in Georgia? Or William Tudor’s butcher shop in Wales?

I thought it was the producer’s job to provide a safe product, not the babysitter’s.

Back to Nature Foods Co., a Wisconsin firm owned by Kraft Foods Inc., issued a nationwide recall Wednesday on its Nantucket Blend trail mix because some of the pistachio nuts tested positive for Salmonella.

And the pistachios came from a supplier to the Georgia Nut Company, which found the Salmonella through its own testing.

The press release from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said,

This possible contamination is not connected with the recent outbreak associated with peanuts or peanut butter and no cases of Salmonellosis have been reported in connection with the recall.

Back to Nature Foods products are sold in Chicago area Dominick’s, Jewel, Target, Wal-mart, Whole Foods, Wild Oats, Hy-Vee, Kroger, Meijer and Woodman’s stores, as well as at military commissaries.

Casey did a quick search and found there have been no Salmonella outbreaks or reported positives associated with pistachios, although 2006 Good Agricultural Practice documents suggest limiting exposure of pistachios to irrigation water and carefully handling on-farm manure because of the possibility of microbial contaminants. It appears there's a widespread belief that the hull protects the edible parts, and drying and roasting further mitigate risks of contamination, although the GAP document and research on other nuts has concluded such assumptions remain unverified.
 

From the Honolulu Advertiser, 

The state Department of Health is warning restaurant and food establishment owners to beware of a scam letter alerting them of a requirement to purchase and post signs reminding employees to wash their hands.

Initially I thought this might be the work of a concerned citizen, trying to save the public from the dangers of ill food handlers, but the Hawaiian government believes it to be a credit card scam.

The letter contains an official looking state of Hawaii logo, claims that a new law mandates the display of hand-washing posters and threatens fines for those not in compliance…The DOH has no such requirement for mandatory hand-wash signage, and owners or managers of food establishments should disregard the notice.


 

Toronto’s Globe and Mail reports in tomorrow’s edition that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency often finds problems with bottled water, but doesn't tell the public about them.

CFIA food safety and recall specialist Garfield Balsom said there are no hard-and-fast rules on what requires public notification.

“There is nothing indicating what is to be made public or what's not.”

The way the story is written, it's difficult to tell whether this rather explosive quote refers to just bottled water or all food safety issues. The story does explain that an Access to Information Act request was required to determine CFIA issued 29 recall notices for bottled water products between 2000 and early 2008, but issued a public warning in only seven cases, two of which came after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made public its recall orders.

Balsom said that other countries follow the same approach and don't automatically issue notices because consumers would soon be overwhelmed by publicity over recalls, most of which would pose low risks.

“There are downsides to publicizing everything.”

True. But based on past case studies, people hate it when government-types are inconsistent or bureaucratic or less than forthcoming.

The agency has an internal hazard ranking system, known as class one, class two and class three, for products that respectively pose high, moderate and low risk. … But the access records show that there was no consistency in the agency's approach. There were cases of the same bacteria and same hazard ratings being treated differently, with some having public recalls and others not.

This is a persistent problem – when to go public. Suspicions remain that CFIA and Maple Leaf Foods were slow in responding to last year’s listeria shitstorm that killed at least 21 – and a public offering of who knew what when is still missing.

Same with the Salmonella in tomatoes and jalapenos last summer in the U.S. Many were frustrated by conflicting messages and finger-pointing. Same with cyclosproa in the U.S. in Canada in 1996, in which California strawberries were erroneously fingered when it was the Guatemalan raspberries.

Epidemiology, like humans, is flawed. But it’s better than astrology. The more that public health folks can articulate when to go public and why, the more confidence in the system. Past risk communication research has demonstrated that if people have confidence in the decision-making process they will have more confidence in the decision. People may not agree about when to go public, but if the assumptions are laid on the table, and value judgments are acknowledged, then maybe the focus can be on fewer sick people.