I went on a date with my wife last week.

Not like that new movie, Date Night, which looks horrible, but at 1 p.m., when we have a babysitter. Anything later than that is too tiring to contemplate.

Being in Kansas, I ordered the mussels from Prince Edward Island (that’s in Canada) and the featured white wine from Australia, which, to our ultimate surprise, cost $15 a glass. The extent to which restaurants will go to rip people off, especially in a crappy economy, apparently knows no bounds. I take responsibility, but won’t be going back.

I’m also not alone.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the expensive "sheep's milk" cheese in a Manhattan market was really made from cow's milk. And a jar of "Sturgeon caviar" was, in fact, Mississippi paddlefish.

Some honey makers dilute their honey with sugar beets or corn syrup, their competitors say, but still market it as 100 percent pure at a premium price.

And last year, a Fairfax man was convicted of selling 10 million pounds of cheap, frozen catfish fillets from Vietnam as much more expensive grouper, red snapper and flounder. The fish was bought by national chain retailers, wholesalers and food service companies, and ended up on dinner plates across the country.

"Food fraud" has been documented in fruit juice, olive oil, spices, vinegar, wine, spirits and maple syrup, and appears to pose a significant problem in the seafood industry. Victims range from the shopper at the local supermarket to multimillion companies, including E&J Gallo and Heinz USA.

Such deception has been happening since Roman times, but it is getting new attention as more products are imported and a tight economy heightens competition. And the U.S. food industry says federal regulators are not doing enough to combat it.

Charleston is an awesome city. I've only been there once (to check out the location of The Real Estate Pros/Flip This House, hoping to run into Richard and Ginger) but I’d go back to visit anytime. One of the draws is that it’s a really cool old town that would be cool to hang out in either before or after a cruise (I can drive there in a few hours and take a cheap, last minute vacation to the Caribbean).

Ships departing the Charleston port have, according to AP, been hit hard with norovirus outbreaks, with the CDC reporting three straight cruises being linked to hundreds of illnesses.

The norovirus sickened almost 420 people aboard Celebrity Mercury, which returned to Charleston on March 18. Norovirus symptoms include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps.

The Mercury then underwent three days of extensive cleaning. There were no problems when the ship sailed on a fourth cruise last week.

The Celebrity was back in Charleston on Monday preparing to board another cruise.

On two previous cruises this year, hundreds of passengers were sickened by norovirus on the same ship. The norovirus can spread quickly in close quarters.
 

The New Zealand Food Safety Authority is doing something exceedingly proactive: it somehow got the publisher of The Happy Baby Cookbook to initiate a voluntary recall – not of a food but of the cookbook -- because it contained bad food advice for pregnant women.

Or NZFSA is following what New South Wales, Australia, did a couple of months ago for a book that has been available since Aug. 2009. Regardless, it seems extraordinary that government agencies are calling people on their food safety bullshit.

A recall is underway for a cookbook containing recipes for pregnant women made with ingredients the New Zealand Food Safety Authority (NZFSA) considers could be harmful in pregnancy.

NZFSA principal public health advisor Donald Campbell says while it is vital for expectant mothers to eat a nutritious and varied diet, it is important that they know which of the foods they might normally eat may require extra care or be avoided altogether during pregnancy.

“Hummus for example is packed with protein, but because most hummus is made with tahini which has been associated with Salmonella outbreaks, we recommend that pregnant women don’t eat it.”

Other foods that are unsuitable for pregnant women to eat include soft cheeses, ready-to-eat foods from delicatessens or smorgasbords, raw fish and shellfish, cold cuts, deli salads, sushi and foods containing raw eggs.

I can’t wait for my copy of The Happy Baby Cookbook to arrive. Will any other regulatory bodies take action against food safety silliness that can harm people?

I’m told everyone experiments in university.

My experiments consisted of getting married, having kids, and reading The Atlantic and Harper’s magazine. There were other experiments, like with that girl from Kitchener I met on the train from Toronto one time, the girl from Brazil who stalked me, Alison the model, Jo the squash player and Jo the vet, but they’re not fit to discuss in this family publication.

At some point, both magazines wrote about something I had studied, and I thought the articles were terrible. I don’t read those magazines anymore.

This is why: The Atlantic offers the Weston Price school of home dentistry up as an expert on whether to experiment with bi-curious raw eggs, stating that if you’re going to eat raw eggs, Rocky Balboa style,

“the egg MUST be organic and fresh, and you MUST know its origin. Ideally, it comes from your backyard hen house. Alternately, you procure it from a farmer you trust. Salmonella is a serious illness, but it is rarely found in the organic eggs of well-fed, free-range happy hens. Final warning: do not eat commercially-produced, grocery store eggs raw. Ever.”

The author, Carol Ann Sayle, has no microbiological basis for any of these statements. She also says chickens are in a Zen-state when they lay eggs, which may be like living in a Red State. And she writes with all-caps to emphasize points because her writing alone sucks.

In this piece of microbiological fantasy, Sayle states

“Glistening with antiseptic moisture, the egg pops out and falls a couple of inches to the straw. … As the moisture changed to chalk-dry "bloom" (the bloom protects the insides of the egg from bacteria), Jean Luc cracked open the egg, opened his mouth, and tossed in the yolk and white."

Salmonella can enter directly into the egg, long before it pops out. And will soon be coming out your other end, Jean Luc.

I'm not really a fan of oysters, raw or otherwise. The texture kind of bothers me, which is kind of weird because I love clams and mussels (a couple of years ago I toured around parts of New Zealand and sampled some of the green-lipped steamed mussels at a café in a tiny fishing community, right exactly as shown).

If I did like oysters and wanted to avoid risks associated with the raw type (see here, here and here – note bonus points for happening in months that have an ‘r’ in them), I probably would have leaned towards ordering the steamed variety. Not so much anymore.  A norovirus outbreak (over 280 ill) associated with steamed oysters occurred at a popular Raleigh restaurant, the 42 Street Oyster Bar in December 2009. It has been known for a while (check this 1996 paper out) that steaming oysters (even if the steamers are working properly and get meat temperatures above 160F or so) may not really impact the hardy norovirus.

Heath officials have found in some incidents that steaming oysters did little for pathogen protection. Depending on the thickness of the shell; density of the meat; and, the length of steam, internal temperature might only be raised to 80F-140F. Steamed oysters may essentially be raw oysters in disguise.

This week’s food safety infosheet talks all about oyster-related risks, you can download it here.

Americans don't get The Tragically Hip, but they seem to like the pop-oriented tunes of Nova Scotia's Sloan when introduced - although no one down here has heard of them.

The 1996 Sloan song, Autobiography, often comes to mind when I read dribble from the blog, Defending Food Safety, written by some lawyers somewhere.

When you find you're a conformer
Take pride and swallow whole
But if you're trying to climb the ladder
Don't let people walk over you
Because that's just what they'll do

The latest swallow had to do with an entry that begins,

“It's no secret that virtually all foods are safe if handled properly. Indeed, according to FDA, most food-borne (sic) illnesses are avoidable if consumers follow proper food handling techniques. This is true whether consumers are shopping for products, transporting them home or preparing them in their kitchen."

I’m not sure what consumers have to do with contaminated peanut butter, pet food, pot pies, frozen pizzas, bagged spinach, carrot juice, lettuce, tomatoes, canned chili sauce, hot peppers and white pepper.

And I’m not sure where such lawyerly assertions about the source of foodborne illness come from – we’ve written a peer-reviewed article about where foodborne illness happens and argue it’s the wrong question.

A young mum has revealed how a veggie burger and portion of chips consumed in Aug. 2009 and contaminated with E. coli O157 almost killed her.

Abby Alford of Wales on Sunday writes that days after enjoying the chip shop takeaway, desperately ill Karen Morrisroe (right, exactly as shown) had a seizure that temporarily stopped her heart.

Doctors warned her husband she had a less than 10% chance of survival as she slipped into a coma that was to last for five weeks.

The recovering 32-year-old has now revealed to Wales on Sunday that she is unable to sue the chip shop that almost claimed her life because the owner was not insured.

The librarian, who lives with her husband Paul Clutton and baby son Oliver, almost one, in Rhosnesni, Wrexham, said,

“There’s nothing I can do. He did not have professional liability insurance, but I’ve been told he wasn’t required to have it anyway. Environmental health are looking into legal proceedings, but we don’t know if they can do anything.”

Karen said her brush with death has had such a deep psychological effect on her that she compulsively checks restaurants’ food hygiene ratings on the Internet before eating out.

Karen and Paul are also fighting to raise awareness of how dirty premises like the Llay Fish Bar, which was identified as the likely source of the potentially deadly bug, can cost lives.

“The mind boggles as to how many establishments have zero star ratings but are still allowed to operate,” said Paul.

Star ratings from zero, the lowest, to five are a hygiene score awarded by environmental health inspectors. The Llay Fish Bar had been awarded zero stars in August 2008 and was due for another inspection when Karen and other customers, including toddler Abigail Hennessey, fell ill.

Premises given zero stars are generally allowed to remain open while they take steps to improve cleanliness.

"We just don't see that as an issue.”

That’s what Kathy Kramer, a so-called nutritionist and office manager at the Weston A. Price Foundation in Washington, D.C., told Mike Nichols of the Wisconsin Journal Sentinel Online when he asked, what if people get sick from drinking raw or unpasteurized milk?

I don’t really care what adults choose to do. I care about what they impose on their kids, and my role is to provide information that may result in fewer people barfing from the food and water they consume. That’s why it’s called barfblog.

Lots of foods make people sick. Some of these illnesses are easily preventable. For an organization such as Weston Price that is often quoted or cited as some sort of authority on raw milk (or dentistry) to publicly state that people getting sick isn’t an issue demonstrates their priorities – and it doesn’t have much to do with you.

A three-year-old girl living in North Point, Hong Kong, was diagnosed with E. coli O157:H7, the first case of the year, so the Centre for Health Protection (CHP) of the Department of Health decided, without providing any details of the how the infection may have happened, that if people cook their food, they could avoid the bug. And they should wash their hands.

That’s all good, but does little to address cross-contamination issues once the bacterium gets into a residence – if that’s where she contracted the bacterium – and once again sends the message that foodborne illness of the nastiest kind can simply be prevented by consumers.

It’s a lot more complicated than that, and why everyone should be seeking to reduce pathogen loads from farm-to-fork.