When was the last time you opened your fridge and saw this- the mold monster?  Hopefully never, but if you have, you’ve probably experienced some sort of sickness related to eating the food from the fridge.  Mold grows from decomposing organic material, and in addition to a foul order and slime, mold is a great indicator of food going bad.  But food can be decidedly “bad” before the mold fully appears.

Unfortunately the busy life of student has led me to find the mold monster lurking in my fridge on more than one occasion.  CNNHealth gives some great advice to college students this week: “Don’t eat mold.”  Not only is it unappetizing, but molds can cause allergic reactions and respiratory problems as well as produce mycotoxins, poisonous substances that can make you sick.

I’ve definitely never gone as far to intentionally consume mold.  I believe in labeling my leftovers with the date and smelling foods before eating them.  It’s not a foolproof way to avoid food-borne illness from moldy foods, but it’s better than eating leftovers blindly.

CNNHealth goes on to offer additional tips to enjoy a meal from the fridge: The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service recommends discarding moldy bread and baked goods, because of their porous texture.
Creamy dairy products like yogurt can easily spread mold and should be discarded. Soft cheeses with high moisture content -- including those that are shredded, sliced, or crumbled -- can be contaminated with both mold and bacteria. So throw those away, experts advise.
Hard cheeses can be saved, as long as the mold is cut 1 inch around the spot. Because of the cheese's hardness, the mold generally cannot penetrate deep into the product.

Mom taught me well, to throw away any bread with the slightest bit of mold, and to keep moldy hard cheese but to cut away the mold. (Within reason of course, I’m talking about cutting off a dime-sized piece of mold, not eating a furry piece of cheese.)  I also try to disinfect my fridge at least every six months.

What if the fridge doesn’t belong to you?  Office or community fridges can be hot spots for spoiled food and moldy surfaces.  The Pittsburg Post-Gazette cites a survey by the American Dietetic Association and ConAgra Foods which “found that 44 percent of office refrigerators are cleaned once a month and 22 percent are cleaned only once or twice a year.”

Clean out your fridge at home with a household kitchen cleaner – preferably something with bleach.  Institute a bi-weekly cleanup day for the office fridge.  These are two terrific ways to lower your risk of contracting a food-borne illness from fridge food.  You can also reference the USDA’s guide on moldy food when deciding what to trash or save.

Also, don’t forget to wash your hands after touching all that mold.

This isn’t a Chevy Chase-John Candy (right) kind of vacation.

The widow of an elderly British tourist who died after falling ill with salmonella poisoning at a luxury Italian hotel has called for better safety standards at holiday resorts.

The Birmingham Post reports that Jean Appleyard and her husband, Geoffrey, aged 71, were staying at the four-star Grand Hotel in the Gardone resort on the shores of Lake Garda last year when both began to suffer from fever and stomach pains.

An inquest at South Worcestershire Coroners’ Court yesterday recorded a verdict of misadventure after hearing evidence that the salmonella poisoning Mr Appleyard contracted contributed to his death.

Coroner Geraint Williams said:

“Although the hotel seemed very picturesque, there was a very dark side in the kitchen and cellars where there was a virulent contamination of salmonella in the foodstuffs. This was served to the guests and, as a consequence, a large number became ill. Mr Appleyard died because he was not able to withstand this infection.”

The Italian authorities confirmed that salmonella was detected at the hotel.

Mrs Appleyard said, 

“We went to the Grand Hotel for a luxury holiday. It is simply appalling that we fell ill and Geoffrey contracted something as serious as salmonella at a hotel like that. Tour operators have to ensure they are doing everything they possibly can to make sure holidaymakers are protected from outbreaks like this.”

Meanwhile, The Independent reports that 50-year-old Julian Hurley from South Yorkshire, U.K., said he was delighted today after being awarded nearly £300,000 compensation from tour operator First Choice following his diagnosis of shigella after eating "poor-standard" food at an all-inclusive hotel in Venezuela in August 2004.

Mr Hurley said.

"When we went to the hotel restaurant I tried a variety of different dishes, which included cooked meats. The food was of an extremely poor standard, a lot of the dishes were undercooked and some of them were almost cold. The impact that this hellish holiday has had on our lives has been devastating. I now struggle to walk long distances and find myself getting tired easily. I am still suffering from symptoms to this day and will do for the rest of my life, which has been very difficult to come to terms with.”

 

The Age in Australia posted some crack-up, some gross, reader responses to last week’s "Tables of horror” story, found below. My favourite is Spoon discrimination.

Cockroaches ‘no surprise’
I had a terrible experience at a Fitzroy restaurant. The meal itself was very enjoyable, until we noticed baby cockroaches crawling all over the table, our plate and our food… When I finally did bring it to the attention [of the wait staff] , the waiter initially responded well by apologising and not charging us for the food.
Then he did something that simply made our blood boil: he starting defending it, first by saying that customers should not, under any circumstances, get upset at restaurants! He said we did not understand the food business and his restaurant career was littered with such stories. The building was old, he explained, and therefore cockroaches should be no surprise… The waiter’s arrogance was even more upsetting than the cockroaches.
-Steven Yatomi-Clarke, West Preston

Maggots removed
Four years ago my wife and I went to a well-known vegetarian restaurant and in one of the dishes the dates contained maggots. We discreetly told the waiter, so as not to cause a scene. The dish was removed, but what came back didn’t appear to be a new dish, just the old one with the dates removed. We were given a free mint tea or a free dessert, but no particularly sincere apology from the wait staff for this rather obvious breach of health standards. We have never been back.
-David Sheehan, Oak Park

Too tough for what?
We ordered a lamb curry at a well-known Indian restaurant and the lamb was too tough to eat (this occasionally happens even in good Indian restaurants). On complaining to the waiter, the chef came out to our table, stuck his hand into the bowl, grabbed a piece of lamb, tore it in two with his bare hands and said: "There, it’s not too tough!" We weren’t convinced.
-Michael Rowell, Ararat

Great, but for the worm
WE WENT to a place in Brighton that was recommended. We ordered fresh oysters. We had a few. A friend held one of the oysters, when a pinkish red worm crawled out of the flesh of the oyster, climbed up the shell. She screamed…
-Caroline Arman, East St Kilda

Spoon discrimination
NOT really a tale of horror, but bizarre standards . . . I was recently having a regular lunch at a city restaurant, and on ordering dessert was surprised when the waitress placed a soup spoon in front of me. When I queried it, her reply was, "We don’t discriminate between spoons here, they are all the same to us." There was then a pause, and she rather grudgingly asked me if I wanted her to change it to a dessert spoon — to which I said yes. I was made to feel it was unreasonable to use a dessert spoon! Have the rules of dining changed?
-Claire Mitchell, Northcote

A blog posting on iamnuerotic.com was brought to my attention yesterday. Most of the postings are pretty interesting, whether you agree, disagree, or think people are crazy. And anyone can submit a neurosis to possibly be posted. Examples of my personal neuroses would include tying paper straw wrappers into knots and folding them into small pieces before I throw them away. Or eating sandwiches in a circular pattern because they taste better that way.

 “fake hand washing” was posted on September 29, 2008, so I know it's not recent, but I thought it was valid to talk about.

This person writes, “I don’t wash my hands every time after going to the bathroom because I don’t want to aggravate my dry skin too much. But I want everyone to think I’ve washed my hands so after I flush I turn on the faucet and let the water run for people to hear. I want it to be believable though, so I mime washing my hands to make sure I let the water run for exactly how long it would take me to really do it.”

If you’re going to take the time to fake handwash, why not actually clean your hands? And if it’s because of dry skin, why not use lotions? And if you think your hands didn’t touch anything, how do you know for sure if microbiological pathogens are too small to see?

The website will also be publishing a book, i am neurotic (and so are you), by HarperStudio on October 13, 2009.
 

Being an Office fan, "That's what she said" has not jumped the shark for me; but being an iPhone owner, "There's an app for that" has.

I'm not all loaded up with apps, and tend to stick with the low risk free ones. Today I splurged and spent $.99 on Poop the World (thanx Gonzo for the suggestion).

I just downloaded it and the opening screen says "Get started! Track your bowel movements in real-time, share with friends, and strive for recognition in a fun and civilized manner!"

Okay. You had me at bowel movements.

This app is a bit like playing Tony Hawk, there are achievement levels like "The Daily Quad" (4 poops in a day) and "Sir Deuce-a-lot" (20 poops in a week).

The poop database is also sortable. So I've got that going for me. If you wish to follow, I'm at Defender of the can.

It appears that you can follow the poops at pooptheworld.com. While it's all fun, maybe there is a google analytics/flu tracking aspect to this. Poop the world might be an early indicator of a national foodborne illness outbreak.

In 2007 owners of a St. Catharines, Ontario restaurant made the poor decision to continue preparing and serving food after water to the establishment had been cut off. The result: at least six people became violently ill, of which three children were hospitalized.

The owners of Yamen restaurant are appealing the court’s verdict regarding two lawsuits totaling 4.3 million in damages, reports The Standard.

Senan Daoud and Mahmoud Asaad are being sued by two families who say they were “violently ill” and continue to suffer after being fed contaminated food.

The Yaman Restaurant co-owners were in court Monday to argue they should be allowed to appeal a March 27 ruling that found them guilty of five counts each of selling food unfit for human consumption.

The cases happened at the Merritt Street restaurant in May 2007, when Asaad and Daoud continued to run the business, despite the fact its water was cut off because of a water-main break. The restaurant was shut down by the Region after several people got sick in May 2007 and reopened in August 2007 with a clean bill of health.

Meanwhile, the families of three girls in St. Catharines and Niagara Falls who were hospitalized following the outbreak have launched lawsuits… Robert and Arlene Willis, with daughter Sara Willis, are suing after eating at the restaurant on May 25, 2007…Jennifer Boehm and 10- and six-year-old daughters Brooklyn and Kassidy Hamelin, ate at the restaurant the following day and are suing, along with the girls’ father, Robert Hamelin.

The court documents say the plaintiffs became “violently ill” within a week of eating at Yaman and were in need of “extensive” medical treatment for their injuries.
Some of those conditions included cramping, abdominal pain, bloody diarrhea, vomiting, fatigue, sleep disturbance, loss of appetite, nausea and headaches.

… [A]ll three children were admitted to local hospitals, while Kassidy was so ill, she was transferred to McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton and was hospitalized for two weeks.
 

I am from California. In California, it’s called a barbeque. I went to college in Alabama and graduate school in Kansas where both places call it a grill. The box labeled it a barbeque grill, so I guess everyone is right.

Regardless of the name, I purchased my very first barbeque this weekend. I put it together correctly and cooked chicken on it. I had never barbequed (or grilled) by myself, but I knew exactly when my chicken was done cooking: my tip sensitive, digital thermometer told me so. My chicken was cooked to a perfect 165°F.

And yes, I also thoroughly washed my hands before cooking and after touching any raw chicken.

When you’re barbequing, stick it in.

My flatmate Dan was away in Auckland (New Zealand) this weekend, and although the house was slightly quieter and cleaner with him gone, we’re glad to have him return. While updating us on his weekend up north Dan told of his search for an A-grade Indian restaurant.

His explanation went something like this,

“I didn’t want someone nasty handling my food – there were a lot of B places, but I wanted an A.”

He wandered the Auckland streets and after something like 5 restaurants found his A-grade premise.

Auckland assigns A (see right), B, D and E grades to restaurants, and awards excellent facilities a Gold A. Obviously Dan was unaware of the Gold A when searching for a place to eat. That’s one of the issues with restaurant grades – lack of consistency. While Auckland uses letter grades, Wellington awards Excellent cards. A consistent grading system may aid consumers like Dan in their quest for a safe place to grab a bite in a new city.

Restaurant grades in Auckland can also be found online, here.

Chapman got his obligatory profile as new faculty in one of the North Carolina State University publications this week; this is the bites/barfblog version.

When Ben Chapman arrived at N.C. State University in January as the new food safety specialist in the Department of 4-H Youth Development and Family and Consumer Sciences, he hit the ground running. …

Since arriving in North Carolina, Chapman has converted from a former Toronto Maple Leafs hockey fan to a Carolina Hurricanes fan.

Carolina has a good hockey team and tickets are easy to get. Toronto sucks and tickets are impossible to get. Carolina has also won the Stanley Cup once in the past 42 years. Toronto has not.

He says that he spends much of his free time discussing the virtues of hockey with his wife and son (that's Jack, below, left, at a Hurricanes game in about 4 years)..

Those who can, do. Others teach. Others talk. Others bore their families.

A player himself since age 4, he has even started playing hockey here in North Carolina with a group in Wake Forest.

If he’s been playing since 4 he really should be better.

Chapman has focused on finding the best ways to communicate food safety risk to the people who need to know. He is interested in how social media like Facebook and rapid communication technologies like Twitter might improve public safety around the issue of food risk.

It also helps to stay current on all the social media for fantasy baseball/football/hockey/cycling tips.

Chapman had a sense that the bathroom posters proclaiming that “employees must wash hands before returning to work” might not produce the desired results.

It was probably the sense of smell, coming from his hands.

Chapman even spent a semester working as a dishwasher in a restaurant to get a better sense of what the work climate was like.

I didn’t pay him enough as a graduate student and he had to moonlight.

Chapman noted that during busy times, employees tended to forget safe food-handling practices. “When it’s busy in a food-service operation, it gets really crazy,” he said.

That’s when the Pink Floyd is cranked.

In his new position, Chapman continues his quest to find the best ways of reaching food-service workers and consumers.

Go to a restaurant? A supermarket? It’s not like searching for a Holy Grail.

“We have a responsibility to get that information out there,” Chapman said. “The kind of things we’re doing here would have been hard to do in Canada — moving food safety forward.”

That’s what she said.

One way that Chapman has been moving food safety forward is helping agents develop training programs on home food preservation. Once a hallmark of extension programming through tomato clubs for girls, canning and other home food preservation techniques had largely fallen out of favor with consumers in recent years.

Ben Chapman: Defender of the can.