I spent the morning hanging out with a couple of visiting food safety types from Jordan. What was striking was how much we agreed that arguments about government turf, the inadequacy of audits, and the failure of food safety messages with consumers and other humans was a global phenomenon.

Beth Weise writes in tomorrow’s USA Today that if you've never heard of a third-party food-safety audit, you're not alone. Few Americans know or care what they are. To the companies that produce much of our food, they're an important tool to make sure it's safe and wholesome — but critics say the certificates the auditors issue often aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

Recent foodborne illness outbreaks have raised questions in Congress and elsewhere about the effectiveness of these audits and the impartialness of the process.

Auditors are the eyes and ears of a company buying food from a producer. A frozen-pizza maker hires an auditor to make sure the company it buys tomato sauce from has a clean, safe and well-run plant. But many problems — including dead chickens, rats, manure and salmonella — can fall through the cracks of their visits.

Last year, the Peanut Corp. of America, whose products sickened over 600 and may have killed as many as nine, got a "superior" rating at its Texas plant even as it was churning out peanut paste tainted with salmonella.

And last week Congress showed that one of Wright County Egg's egg-packing plants got a "superior" rating from the same company on June 8, just two months before Wright became part of the largest known egg recall in the United States.

The company, AIB International (of Manhattan, Kansas, sigh), lists five standards on its website that inspectors expect to see in a "facility that maintains a food-safe processing environment." They are: ensuring that raw materials are safely stored and handled; equipment, buildings and grounds are properly maintained; cleaning and sanitizing is adequate; pests monitored and managed; and staffers are working together to deliver a safe final product.

When FDA inspectors actually went into Wright County's henhouses at its Galt, Iowa, plant, they found vermin, filthy dead chickens and manure oozing out of doorways. More than 1,600 people were sickened in a salmonella enteritidis outbreak linked to the farm, and over 550 million eggs were recalled due to contamination at this plant and at nearby Hillandale Farms, where lesser problems were found.

"Superior" clearly doesn't mean much, says Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich. "How many dead mice do you have to find in your food before you get an 'Excellent' rating?"

Third-party food audits, like restaurant inspection, are a snapshot in time. Given the international sourcing of ingredients, audits are a requirement, but so is internal food safety intelligence to make sense of audits that are useful and audits that are chicken poop.

The third-party food safety audit scheme that processors and retailers insisted upon is no better than a financial Ponzi scheme. The vast number of facilities and suppliers means audits are required, but people have been replaced by paper.

Audits, inspections, training and systems are no substitute for developing a strong food safety culture, farm-to-fork, and marketing food safety directly to consumers rather than the local/natural/organic hucksterism is a way to further reinforce the food safety culture.

After the salmonella-in-peanut paste crap, Costco, a retail store, which previously limited AIB’s inspections to its bakery vendors, has now instructed suppliers to not use AIB at all.

“The American Institute of Baking is bakery experts,” said R. Craig Wilson, the top safety official at Costco. “But you stick them in a peanut butter plant or in a beef plant, they are stuffed.”

Or as Mansour Samadpour of Seattle said at the time,

“The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education.”

I asked weeks ago, who were the buyers of DeCoster eggs who used AIB audits to justify putting salmonella on grocery store shelves? Any retailers want to step forward?

And market food safety at retail so consumers can choose the poop they wish to purchase.
 

A new report says more than 60 per cent of restaurant employees choose to show up for work instead of staying home when they’re sick because they have no insurance and no paid sick time.

Kim Severson of the New York Times writes the report, called “Serving While Sick,” is based on more than 4,000 surveys and hundreds of interviews with employers and employees. It is intended to put pressure on the restaurant industry to improve conditions for its workers. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is one of two groups presenting the report at a Congressional briefing today.
 

From http://www.buzzfeed.com/peggy/the-main-ingredient-of-pumpkin-pie

“Hi, I’m from the government, I’m here to help” is the worst thing to say to a farmer.

We discovered that decades ago by hanging out with farmers, and help them develop meaningful, but non-intrusive on-farm food safety programs.

I don’t understand why a whole bunch of food safety types waste enormous amounts of energy and goodwill lobbying Washington and asking the feds to do more.

Walmart, Costco and McDonald’s do more to advance food safety in a day than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does in a year. All those people doing the Potomac two-step in Washington, wanting more food safety inspections, and ignoring the advice of former Food and Drug Administration food safety czar David Acheson, who last year said there is a lot more to ensuring a food supply than writing laws, and that “food safety is cultural,” are getting exactly what is to be expected.

The New York Times reports this morning that a delay in sending safety inspectors to egg farms after this summer’s salmonella outbreak and egg recall can be traced in part to a parking mistake outside a pair of Pennsylvania henhouses, according to industry executives and state government officials.

Marilyn F. Balmer, a top egg expert for the Food and Drug Administration, was training inspectors in July to enforce the agency’s new egg safety rule when she parked the van she was driving near a henhouse at a farm in Manheim, Pa. She did it again during another session at a farm in Lancaster.

Ms. Balmer was in Pennsylvania to teach inspectors about how to keep germs away from poultry flocks, known as biosecurity. But the industry executives and state officials said she was breaking a basic biosecurity rule: keep vehicles, which may have driven through manure on rural roads or other farms, as far from the hens as possible.

All of that prompted the F.D.A. to re-evaluate the training program, contributing to a delay in preparing the inspectors to enforce the new safety rule. The rule went into effect July 12, but inspections began only last week at farms not involved in the recall.
 

Food safety has never been Mark Bittman’s strong point. But food porn triumphs, so who cares if a few people barf.

In the on-going saga of demonstrating that most so-called chefs are food safety morons, Bittman, a columnist with the N.Y. Times who apparently has a new book out, blogged about his experience ordering a burger in Toronto (that’s in Canada) the other night night, where he said to the staff,

“I begged the waitress for a really rare burger and she said, “When you ask for rare they make it medium rare,” and I said, "I know, that’s how it often is, and though I'd prefer it rare I don’t mind it medium rare, but if it's medium I'm going to be unhappy," and she said, "Then you’ll be very happy." And it came out well done. And I wasn't unhappy at all, I just didn't eat much of it. I ate fries and roasted beets."

Bittman has also said in the past that "if you grind your own beef, you can make a mixture and taste it raw," adding that, "To reassure the queasy, there’s little difference, safety-wise, between raw beef and rare beef: salmonella is killed at 160 degrees, and rare beef is cooked to 125 degrees."

This is food safety idiocracy. Any food safety advice in Bittman’s book should be disregarded as fantasy.

Former President Jimmy Carter is reportedly resting at Cleveland hospital after feeling ill with symptoms resembling a norovirus infection.

Carter's grandson, Georgia state Sen. Jason Carter, said his 85-year-old grandfather was doing fine. 

"He's definitely resting comfortably and expected to continue his book tour this week," Jason Carter said. "I haven't talked to him, but nobody in the family is concerned."

Carter is scheduled to appear tonight in Durham NC as part of a national book tour.

Chipotle is the furthest thing from fine dining, but Twitter is helping to open up the voice of consumers.

Graham Elliot, a judge on Fox's reality television competition MasterChef and owner of the Graham Elliot restaurant in Chicago, is known to - in his words - "publicly humiliate" customers who complain about the restaurant online.

But if he thinks the complaint is genuine, Elliot said he will send a private message or call to invite the customer to try the restaurant again.

"It's the democratisation of fine dining," he said.

According to this AP story, many U.S. eateries have been tweeting about specials or other events for a while. But recently restaurants - locals and chains - have started Twitter conversations with customers.

US chains like Chipotle and Pei Wei even have full-time social media employees.

Previously corporate-sounding restaurant Twitter feeds now are filled with streams of replies directly to diners, in some cases performing nearly instantaneous customer service.

Chris Arnold, one of the several people who Tweet for Chipotle, said the volume of Tweets is the greatest challenge for such a big chain, adding,

"You can either pretend that (the conversation) isn't happening or decide not to be part of it. To us, it just really makes sense to use those as tools."

That’s nice. Now, all those consumers out there, start tweeting or e-mailing the local health department every time you see some dodgy food safety practices or claims.
 

In November, 1998 along with the tragically flawed consumer food safety education program, FightBac, Canadian government-types repeatedly stated that, “Research shows that improper food handling in the home causes a major proportion of foodborne illnesses.”

I had a research associate first e-mail the Canadian Food Inspection Agency via its web site, because the federal agriculture minister had used the line. She was referred to Health Canada. After a few messages, a couple of tables with an explanatory note arrived.

At last, the data. Except it showed that known outbreaks happen pretty much everywhere except the home.

Of the 23,322 known cases of foodborne illness in Canada between 1990 and 1993, 18,450 or 79 per cent were of unknown origin. Of the cases of known microbiological origin, 70 per cent were traced to food service; 11 per cent were traced to the home; four per cent were retail in origin.

The second table contained data on foodborne illness cases due to mishandling. Of the cases of known microbiological origin, 61 per cent were due to mishandling at the food service level; 11 per cent in the home; six per cent at retail; and six per cent on farms or dairies. I remain unconvinced.

Things don’t change, and making fun of Health Canada is like shooting ducks in a barrel – except for the millions of taxpayer dollars wasted.

The food safety geniuses at Health Canada said in Sept 21, 2010 press release advising pregnant women to be super-extra careful about food safety and that of the 11 million cases of foodborne illness that strike Canadians each year,

“Many of these illnesses could be prevented by following proper food handling and preparation techniques.”

I blogged and wrote,

Please, please, oh please. Show us mortals the data on which that statement is based?

And since Health Canada advises pregnant women to “make sure to cook hot dogs and deli meats until they are steaming hot before eating them,” please, please, oh please, stand up and say the advice provided by the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children Motherrisk program is complete nonsense.

After posting, I decided, it’s unfair to expect important government types to read my musings, so I called media relations at Health Canada at 1:40 pm central time on Sept. 21.

My call went to a machine, and I left a detailed message.

They called back a couple of hours later. I told them I wanted to know the scientific evidence to support the claim, “Many of these illnesses could be prevented by following proper food handling and preparation techniques” and that my deadline was in two days.

Two days later, someone from media relations at the Public Health Agency of Canada called to tell me she was working on my request, and she understood my deadline was early next week (this was Thursday); I said it was today, but could wait. She said she was working on it but couldn’t promise anything.

I said the statement, “Many of these illnesses could be prevented by following proper food handling and preparation techniques,” was a line in your press release, so maybe you’d have the supporting documentation handy.

The senior media relations thingy at the Public Health Agency of Canada (seriously, the senior bit is in her sig) e-mailed me today to say (and I don’t want to edit anything to take it out of context):

Below, please find the responses to your questions about the following statement: "It’s estimated that there are approximately 11 million cases of foodborne illnesses in Canada every year. Many of these illnesses could be prevented by following proper food handling and preparation techniques.."

1. What is this statistic based on?

The estimate of 11 million cases of food-borne illness per year in Canada is based on research from the National Studies on Acute Gastrointestinal Illness (NSAGI) combined with literature from the United States.

From the NSAGI population surveys, it was estimated that on average there are 1.3 episodes of acute gastrointestinal illness (AGI) per person per year in Canada. Using this estimate and given the size of Canada's population along with estimates from the United States (Mead et al, 1999) that 25% of AGI could be due to respiratory infections and that 36% of enteric GI is foodborne, there would be an estimated 11 million episodes of foodborne disease in Canada annually.

The calculation is 1.3 episodes of AGI per person-year X 32 million Canadians = 42 million episodes of AGI per year X 0.75 due to enteric pathogens X 0.36 foodborne = 11 million episodes of foodborne disease in Canada annually

2. What report? Looking for the scientific basis behind this statement.

You may wish to review the reference document for this estimate found in the Public Health Agency's Canada Communicable Disease Report (Vol. 34, Number 5) at this link: http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/ccdr-rmtc/08vol34/dr-rm3405b-eng.php

Yes, I get the 30 per cent of people get sick from food and water each year. We use that number and cite it endlessly. Yes, I’ve reviewed the report. No where does the report or the PR thingy answer the claim, “Many of these illnesses could be prevented by following proper food handling and preparation techniques.”

For all the salaries involved these people really suck at their job.

An internal Canadian Food Inspection Agency audit, dated July and quietly posted on the agency's website this week, found that the safety of imported foods in Canada is at risk because of multiple "deficiencies" with the agency's oversight system.

Sarah Schmidt of Postmedia News reports the audit also found that the agency never full implemented its 2002 Import Control Policy and that it leaves it up to foreign countries to inspect exports bound for Canada, even though there are no foreign country equivalence controls in place for food commodity programs, other than meat, fish and eggs.

These foods include maple (it’s a staple of the Canadian diet), honey, fresh fruits and vegetables, processed products and non-federally registered products. Non-registered products include beverages, infant formula, confectionary, cereals, spices and seasonings and baked products.

Opposition parties jumped on the findings, accusing the Tory government during question period of failing to protect the health of Canadians while the volume of imported foods has risen to more than $21.8 billion annually.

"Today we learned that the government has no strategy to ensure that health hazards are not entering Canada,” said NDP health critic Megan Leslie.

Canada has no strategy to ensure health hazards are controlled in homegrown foods.

Agriculture Minister Gerry listeria-is-funny Ritz was not in the House of Commons to respond to the attacks.