Food porn was on the menu last night as the new season of Top Chef kicked off. That’s me watching for about 30 seconds (right, not exactly as shown).

Earlier in the day I got a press release about the Grilled Australian Lamb Burger with Brie Cheese, Cranberry Compote and Roasted Jalapeno Aioli, “America’s new favorite upscale burger” created by Anthony Jacquet, executive chef of The Whisper Lounge in L.A. (left, exactly as shown).

The burger won the “Make Australian Lamb America’s New Favorite Burger” contest, sponsored by Plate Magazine and Meat & Livestock Australia.

The cooking constructions state:

To prepare burgers, place patties on hot grill. Cook for 2 minutes and then turn a quarter turn and cook for another 2 minutes. Flip burger and cook another 2 minutes. Turn a quarter turn and cook another 2 minutes. Add brie cheese and cover with a stainless steel mixing bowl for another minute. Pull burgers off of grill and let rest. They should be medium rare.

I don’t know what medium rare is. If Australia wants to increase consumption of lamb burgers, require clear cooking instructions, like using a tip-sensitive digital thermometer to ensure the burger reaches 160F so people won’t barf and consumption of lamb doesn’t plummet.

Susan Burton of Slate Magazine required almost 2,000 words yesterday to say she likes meat – well-done – and that she hates the food thermometer.

I honed in on the modern American history of doneness, in large part because it can be tracked precisely—thanks to the meat thermometer. This early-20th-century invention brought about a giant cultural shift: the reliance on a gadget—rather than instinct, or experience—to assess our meat. The thermometer was promoted to home cooks as a tool of scientific precision. It was also an instrument of relaxation, something that freed you from worrying about misjudging the meat: "A roast thermometer makes for carefree roasting," advised the 1959 edition of Fannie Farmer's famous tome. By midcentury, temperature measurements were a common feature of cookbooks.

Our standards for doneness changed rapidly when, thanks to Claiborne, Julia Child, and others, we discovered, and began to venerate, cooking methods that originated abroad. Once American palates adjusted to the European style of underdone meat, guidelines fell even further. (Child's leg of lamb: rare at 140 in 1961; 125 in 1979.) Times writer Florence Fabricant took note of this development in a 1982 article called "A Trend Toward 'Less Well Done.' " Fabricant called overcooking "a tradition in this country" and attributed the change to the influence of "Oriental" and "French nouvelle" cuisines. She also connected the trend to the then-new vogues for crisp-tender vegetables and for raw foods, like sushi. But eating rare meat wasn't simply a matter of evolving taste. It was a means of signaling something about yourself, an ethos. When Fabricant's article was published, serving your guests rare meat showed you were sophisticated.

These days, it shows you're cool. (Look no further than the title of Bourdain's forthcoming bad-ass memoir: Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.)

Somehow, author Burton manages to simultaneously trash the precision of a meat thermometer and propagate food safety myths about so-called factory farming.

She’s so cool, she likes food well-done and doesn’t need a thermometer.

I’ll continue to stick it in.

Nikki Marcotte, a new student, tries out her translation skills on a piece from French food safety blogger, Albert Amgar.

In Conseil National de l’Alimentation’s newsletter No. 13, dated June 11, 2010, we learn about health safety: an increased effort between the three unions of the Groupement National de la Restauration.

“Given the issues with health safety and nutrition in the catering business, these three entities (the National Institutional Restaurant Services Union, the National Fast-Food and Food Union, the National Union of Themed and Commercial Restaurants, all three members of the GNR) have decided to combine forces and work together on these common problems. Three work groups have been created, each with two representatives from each syndicate, all experts in issues of ‘hygiene’, ‘nutrition’ and ‘quality’.”

One of the work groups has devoted their time to food safety. What is their objective?

The goal of the work group, in regard to regulatory requirements and their recent developments, is to pool together technical skills and the scientific expertise required to validate certain methods of disease control common to various restaurant activities: time-temperature combinations/storage temperatures of foods in certain conditions, microbiological monitoring methods…

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, “Industrial and restaurant catering is comprised of commercial food services (approximately 15% of meals served) and collective food services (85% of meals served). The latter represents close to 4 billion meals.”

Collective food service professionals contribute to three different areas: education (school catering, 1 billion meals, and university catering), health and social services (hospital, nursing home and prison catering), and the workforce (business and administrative catering). Likewise, process hygiene criteria have been implemented.

The ministry also tells us that there are more than “…30,000 inspections conducted annually in the three large collective food service sectors, including nearly 13,000 in the school catering area. In particular, these checks are aimed at ensuring:
- good food preparation practices (in terms of the hygiene and handling of the equipment), transport and storage (with respect to the hygiene and handling of the equipment);
- the cold chain;
- the recommendations concerning the use of pasteurized eggs to prevent foodborne illnesses associated with salmonella.”

“More than 30,000 inspections…” of which we know nothing about, not even one annual statistic… (transparency, where are you?).

This blog, which is always ready to help food service professionals with these excellent initiatives, wishes to make a contribution with this recent publication from the barfblog team, see, “Food safety information posted in restaurant kitchens can improve meal safety.” Source: Chapman, Benjamin; Eversley, Tiffany; Fillion, Katie; MacLaurin, Tanya; Powell, Douglas. Assessment of Food Safety Practices of Food Service Food Handlers (Risk Assessment Data): Testing a Communication Intervention (Evaluation of Tools). Journal of Food Protection®, Volume 73, Number 6, June 2010, pp. 1101-1107(7).

This blog could also suggest to the Ministry of Food less opacity in these inspections so that the consumer is fully informed, and to maybe also think about the scoring system or grades on the doors of restaurants or to start slowly putting the inspection results online. Also look at the “smiley” example in Belgium (above right).
 

The New York City Health Department published its new restaurant letter-grading rules Tuesday so next month, for the first time, signs bearing A, B or C ratings will be issued to the city’s more than 24,000 restaurants to publicly announce their cleanliness.

The 8-by-10-inch placards are to be dated, and operators will be compelled to post them in windows or restaurant vestibules, making customers aware of inspectors’ ratings that were previously available only at the health department or on its Web site.

The department offered details of a fourth grading sign that diners will soon be seeing — the black-and-white “grade pending” placard. After an initial inspection, if a restaurant is given a B or C, it can publicly post those grades — or the owner can seek an administrative hearing to request an upgrade. The restaurant can then post a “grade pending” sign as an explanation to diners for the absence of a letter grade in the restaurant.

The new rules are available online at nyc.gov/health.

Dr. Thomas Farley, the health commissioner, said during a press conference Tuesday, June 15, 2010

“We hope that when people are making choices where to eat, they will eat at an A restaurant.” The restaurant industry “has often made dire predictions,” including when the city banned smoking in bars and restaurants and required calorie counts be posted at many eating places. “And none of those predictions came true.”

Like in Toronto eight years ago, where a red, yellow, green restaurant inspection disclosure system was implemented. Same thing is being said in London, Ontario, as the city contemplates a similar red, yellow, green disclosure system.

Todd Lewis, a Smoke’s Poutinerie diner, said seeing a yellow sign would make him think twice about eating at a restaurant, but he would want to know what the exact infraction is before making a final decision.

But some patrons think the signs are unnecessary and can at times be misleading.

Meagan Zettler, a regular at Yo-Yo’s Frozen Yogurt, said diners concerned about a restaurant’s infractions should check online to see if the eatery has any current health violations.

She thinks the signs can unnecessarily drive business away because they don’t list the exact health infractions.

For now, Londoners worried about a restaurant’s violations can visit http://inspection.healthunit.com to check it out.

Valid concerns, and the worst way to doom a disclosure system is to oversell the system, something the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest does routinely, like when they said yesterday Los Angeles has been doing restaurant grading for over 10 years with great results—including a documented 20 percent decrease in hospitalizations due to foodborne illness.

Correlating restaurant inspection disclosure with incidence of foodborne illness is fraught with difficulties. Disclosure provides some information – and it is just a snapshot in time – but helps enhance a culture of restaurant diners that value microbiologically safe food.

Filion, K. and Powell, D.A. 2009. The use of restaurant inspection disclosure systems as a means of communicating food safety information. Journal of Foodservice 20: 287-297.



Abstract

The World Health Organization estimates that up to 30% of individuals in developed countries become ill from food or water each year. Up to 70% of these illnesses are estimated to be linked to food prepared at foodservice establishments. Consumer confidence in the safety of food prepared in restaurants is fragile, varying significantly from year to year, with many consumers attributing foodborne illness to foodservice. One of the key drivers of restaurant choice is consumer perception of the hygiene of a restaurant. Restaurant hygiene information is something consumers desire, and when available, may use to make dining decisions.
 

It’s Groundhog Day again for the Brits who once again have a report that public health types were too clueless about their jobs so a whole bunch of people became unnecessarily sick with E. coli O157.

Scotland, 1996. Wales, 2005. Now this. At least Prof. Hugh Pennington didn’t have to do the same report again.

Don’t eat poop, and if you do, make sure it’s cooked.

Raw animal feces usually are not cooked when children go play with them at petting zoos.

A report into Britain's largest outbreak of E. coli O157 at an open farm last year concluded it could have been avoided if visitors had been kept away from animal feces.

Duh.

The outbreak, which affected 93 people mostly children, was made worse by the slow reaction of health authorities before the petting farm in Surrey was closed, the investigation found.

Only 33 people would have fallen victim to the infection had authorities acted sooner, it said.

Eight of the children infected required dialysis and some have been left with permanent kidney damage. At one point during the outbreak last August and September victims were occupying all the children's acute renal support services in London.

A number of families of affected children are preparing to take legal action against the farm.

In a 250-page report, the investigation said an outbreak control team of officials from local councils, medical authorities and the Health Protection Agency (HPA) had convened "exceptionally late."

It made 43 recommendations but said it did not want to ban petting farms. It said there should be a code of practice to ensure farms kept visitors away from animal fecal matter.

In addition it said the public should be educated about the dangers of E.coli O157 and how its risks could be minimized by careful handwashing, particularly for young children.

No, no one wants to be educated, especially in British schools. But some of the government agencies and food providers could provide compelling and current, food safety information rather than the piping hot bullshit currently coming out of the U.K. Food Standards Agency and others who appear delusional about what can happen.

Again:

Eight of the children infected required dialysis and some have been left with permanent kidney damage. At one point during the outbreak last August and September victims were occupying all the children's acute renal support services in London.

Professor George Griffin, who led the investigation, said,

"This outbreak could very likely have been avoided if more attention had been given to preventing visitors being exposed to animal fecal matter. Once it had started, there is no doubt that even with prompt action this would have been a big outbreak. Nevertheless there was a lack of public health leadership by the Health Protection Agency and a missed opportunity to exercise decisive public health action and thereby restrict the size of the outbreak."
 

It was awesome when the Canadian women won ice hockey gold at the winter Olympics in Vancouver earlier this year – or for my World Cup obsessed South American students, the what Olympics? – and OK when the Canadian men won gold, but I still say Vancouver is a dump of a town. Always has been.

A new study reported by the Vancouver Sun found that failed handwashing audits for health-care facilities within the Vancouver Island Health Authority produced "disappointing" and "unacceptable" results, according to the head of patient safety.

Doctors were the worst, with a compliance rate of 18 per cent (same percentage seen in other studies).

The health authority improved over last year's scores of 15 per cent, but, considering the intensive handwashing campaign launched in the face of H1N1 influenza and the increasing number of outbreaks at various facilities, staff members need to do better, according to Dr. Martin Wale, executive medical director of quality and patient safety.

Sol Erdozain, the early-rising person who puts together the food safety news (left, pretty much as shown, without the lab rat) is a senior in psychology at Kansas State. She was born and raised in Paraguay (that's in South America, not Hawaii) and has been working with Powell and the barfblog gang for a couple of years.

Sol writes:

I don’t trust politicians. Maybe it’s because I’m from Paraguay and politicians there never look after the interests of the people they are supposed to represent.

This morning, reading an article from the Houston Chronicle, I was reminded of that distrust.

The article describes a bunch of policies that Republicans want to endorse or get rid of, among them only one addressing food safety;

“Protecting the right to access raw milk directly from the farmer.”

It stuck out for the wrong reasons.

What about protecting the right to be healthy? Especially for those who depend on others for protection, like children.

Recently, and not for the first time, raw milk has been linked to an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 and sickened people. Among them young children, who are at most risk of developing complications from E. coli.

So, how about protecting their rights too?

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.

Canada is so complacent that when a leading hospital provides terrible food safety advice, no one notices.

Although Canada’s track record with ridiculous things said involving listeria is hard to match.

There’s a recall of some pre-cooked meat products going on right now. No one is apparently sick, but this is how Canada’s version of state-sponsored jazz reported the event:

CBC News says a Winnipeg food processor is recalling its pre-cooked meat products after an Alberta customer raised concerns about possible contamination with listeria bacteria.

Smith's Quality Meats, which sells in provinces from British Columbia to Ontario, has voluntarily pulled a wide variety of its products from shelves.

I’m not sure customer is the best word. Maybe the customer walked into the store with those magic I-can-see-listeria goggles.

Smith's spokesman Andy Van Patter said,

"The discovery was made on one product at one location in Alberta through testing performed by our customer. There [is] no indication that other products are affected."

Oh, Smith’s supplied the meat to someone and they tested it and got a listeria positive. Got it.

CTV News reported that people with weak immune systems, pregnant women and the elderly are most at risk from listeriosis.

Unless you’re a medical professional at Toronto’s Sick Kids Hospital, where there is no risk of listeria to pregnant women or the elderly as long as food is bought from reputable sources. Their words, not mine.
 

A report in the U.K. Times says that celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal was just 19 years old when the way he thought about food was changed for ever. Food writer Harold McGee had just published a book at a time when people thought that science had very little to do with cooking, setting Blumenthal on what was to become his mission in life - using science to create his now famous culinary masterpieces.

A little more science may have informed chef that poop happens to oyster beds, it’s a good thing to check out suppliers, and people who are sick shouldn’t be serving food – that’s how to make over 500 people sick, like your restaurant did in 2009.