As New York City and food pornographers elsewhere embrace raw meats, one country with a strong culture of raw beef is moving to ban some dishes.

In 2011, E. coli O111 in raw beef killed four and sickened at least 70 in Japan. On Friday, a health ministry panel proposed banning all raw beef liver served at restaurants, after it was discovered that it contains E. coli O157.

Japan Times reports the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry will swiftly refer the matter to the Food Safety Commission under the Cabinet Office. Once the commission compiles a report, the new ban could be incorporated in the Food Sanitation Law and come into effect as early as June.

Violations regarding raw liver, considered a delicacy, would be punishable by up to two years in prison or a maximum fine of ¥2 million.

Can pathogens like E. coli or Salmonella be internalized by growing fresh produce like lettuce, spinach and tomatoes?

Depends.

Researchers from the University of Delaware and the U.S. Department of Agriculture report in Foodborne Pathogens and Disease that enteric pathogens localized at subsurface sites on leafy green plant tissue prevent their removal during washing and inactivation by sanitizers. Root uptake of enteric pathogens and subsequent internalization has been a large area of research with results varying due to differences in experimental design, systems tested, and pathogens and crops used.

The potential for uptake of foodborne pathogen, both bacterial and viral, through roots into food crops is reviewed. Various factors shown to affect the ability of human pathogens to internalize include growth substrate (soil vs. hydroponic solution), plant developmental stage, pathogen genus and/or strain, inoculum level, and plant species and cultivar. Several mechanisms of internalization (“active” vs. “passive”) of bacteria to plant roots have also been hypothesized.

The authors do conclude:

• uptake through internalization is a plant–pathogen specific interaction;
• the plant growth substrate used plays a large role in the uptake of both
bacterial and viral pathogens in plants;
• intact, healthy, non-injured roots seem to discourage the uptake of bacteria cells and viruses into plants; and,
• generally, the presence of internalized pathogens in roots of plants does not directly correlate with internalized pathogens in the edible or foliar tissues of crops.

The authors also note that contaminated soil, for the most part, resulted in little to no observed internalization as compared to contaminated hydroponic solution.

The Packer reports a series of recalls related to salmonella contamination of jalapeño peppers has left officials with the grower, South Florida Produce LLC, wondering about the federal government’s notification process.

Leslie DiStefano, director of sales and food safety for South Florida Produce, Boynton Beach, Fla., said March 30 that the experience has been frustrating because of delays in notification about the possible contamination.

No illnesses have been reported in connection to the jalapeños and DiStefano said that the peppers should no longer be in the supply chain.

“We distributed a total of 500 boxes March 6 to six of our customers, who then distributed the peppers to their customers,” DiStefano said, confirming that Castellini Co. LLC, Wilder, Ky., was one of the six customers to receive the jalapeños from South Florida Produce.

“Six days later there was a random test at a grocery store in Ohio that showed possible contamination, but we were not notified until March 20. It was our customer who notified us, not FDA. We still haven’t heard whether the contamination was confirmed.”

The Castellini Co. issued a recall March 26 of several lots of jalapeños, expanding the recall March 29 to include more lots.

South Florida Produce issued its own recall March 27, but the FDA did not send out notification of the grower’s recall to subscribers until March 30.

Erica Pitchford, director of communications for the Ohio Agriculture Department said the Ohio department got tentative positive results on all three swab samples that were taken in the grocery store’s back room. She did not know if the actual jalapeños were swabbed, or if the samples were taken from boxes or other surfaces.

On March 16, Ohio officials got laboratory confirmation that the samples were positive for salmonella.

“We sent the information to the USDA that day,” Pitchford said. “The USDA told FDA and FDA contacted us on March 23 and told us to go back to the store to find the supplier information.”

FDA officials did not immediately respond to inquiries about the situation.

The New York City Health Department is investigating one confirmed and one suspect case of botulism amongst Chinese-speaking Queens residents who had recently purchased unrefrigerated fresh bulk tofu from the same store in Flushing.

This kind of tofu, commonly sold in an open, water-filled bin, is highly suspected to be the source of these cases; however it has not yet been confirmed.

WABC reports the tofu was not made at this store, and its source is still under investigation.

As the investigation continues, the Health Department is advising all individuals to discard all fresh bulk tofu purchased from any New York City store that has been kept at room temperature at the time of purchase.

The Health Department is also warning consumers to throw away tofu that has not been stored in a refrigerator at home.

Cooking this type of tofu is not a definite safeguard against botulism; the organism's spores can still remain in the tofu and, if the tofu is improperly handled, the spores can produce a toxin that causes illness.

New York City has seen only one other case of foodborne botulism in the past 15 years.

The number of suspected cases of cryptosporidium linked with Duluth’s Edgewater Resort and Water Park has risen to 41, a state official said on Thursday.

Meanwhile, a second outbreak of cryptosporidiosis has been linked to a water park in the Brainerd area, the Lodge at Brainerd Lakes.

Trisha Robinson, an epidemiologist for the Minnesota Department of Health, said it wasn’t a surprise that the number of suspected cases linked to the Edgewater grew from the six that were listed when reports became public Tuesday. It is believed that for every confirmed case in a crypto outbreak, there are 98.6 additional cases, Robinson has said.

The number of confirmed cases remained at three on Thursday. Robinson said it’s probable that some, but not all, of the suspected cases eventually will be confirmed as crypto.

The outbreak of the same illness linked to the Lodge at Brainerd Lakes so far is not as extensive as the Edgewater outbreak, Robinson said. As of Thursday, one case had been confirmed and 14 cases were suspected.

Robinson, whose specialties include crypto, said she typically investigates between one and three outbreaks of the disease each year. To have two outbreaks occur simultaneously is “unprecedented,” she said.

All of the people who became ill in the Duluth outbreak had spent time at the Edgewater Resort’s water park sometime in March. The victims included children and adults and residents of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

 Dude it’s beef.

That’s the slogan Midwestern governors came with to a press conference after a tour of the Beef Products Inc. plant in Nebraska yesterday, much like the background audience at a Today Show taping on the streets outside 30 Rock.

It’s beef, but is it meat?

The safety of pink slime, or lean finely textured beef, and the operations of BPI don’t seem to be in question: choice, right-to-know, and what constitutes meat are in play.

Food safety type Michael Batz and others have noted the original beef was whether this beef constituted an adulterated product. According to the regs Batz found, there are nine definitions for meat that is considered “adulterated.” One states, “If any valuable constituent has been in whole or in part omitted or abstracted therefrom; or if any substance has been substituted, wholly or in part therefor; or if damage or inferiority has been concealed in any manner; or if any substance has been added thereto or mixed or packed therewith so as to increase its bulk or weight, or reduce its quality or strength, or make it appear better or of greater value than it is.”

I don’t know. Others can inform on that one. But the PR goes on, laying bare the bicoastal political landscape of the U.S.

Meatingplace.com reports that during an emotionally charged 45-minute news conference that followed a media tour of a Beef Products Inc. plant in South Sioux City, Neb., governors from beef-producing states alternately appealed to and browbeat the media on its coverage of lean finely textured beef.

Nancy Donley, president of STOP Foodborne Illness, whose 6-year-old son died of Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome caused by eating an undercooked hamburger said she was there to “stand tall and in support of our dear friends Eldon and Regina Roth” and their company. She praised BPI’s food safety innovations in keeping the types of pathogens that killed her son out of meat products. “These folks save lives.”

Gov. Rick Perry (Texas) asked ABC News Senior National Correspondent Jim Avila to justify his news reporting which is seen by many as a tipping point in media and social media coverage that led to food retailers and school districts rejecting the product, even though it has never been implicated in a consumer illness.

Avila at first refused to answer, but later pointed out that ABC had never reported that the product was unsafe, but focused on the fact that ground beef products were not labeled to indicate the presence of LFTB. To this point, many of the speakers said the product is simply beef and not a filler or an additive.

The emotional pinnacle of the event came when Avila questioned Donley on her organization accepting financial donations from BPI.

Donley said STOP Foodborne Illness has been grateful to BPI’s support “with no strings attached.” She said BPI has never asked her “for anything — ever.” Her voice shook as she said, “No price can be put on my son’s head. I cannot be bought,” to a round of applause.

Gary Acuff, director, Center for Food Safety Texas A&M University addressed the ammonium hydroxide pathogen intervention BPI uses by noting ammonia is used as a leavening agent, in coffee creamers and in chocolate products. He said tofu contains about four times the ammonia that LFTB does.

Acuff also noted that recovering the extra beef from each animal that is made possible by BPI’s process is a sustainability issue. By some estimates, it would take an additional 1.5 million head of cattle to produce the beef that will be lost if the product is no longer in the market. Gov. Perry said the process extracts 10 to 12 extra pounds of beef from each carcass.

Gov. Terry Branstad (Iowa), who yesterday announced he had convinced Hy-Vee supermarkets to return to carrying products with LFTB, said he planned to engage every other major supermarket chain in similar conversations.

How many scientists wouldn’t have loved that level of government and individual support with technologies such as rBST, genetic engineering and irradiation?

The complete press conference can be found at
http://www.livestream.com/argus_leader_tv/video?clipId=pla_93f78142-699e-44cf-ab00-62f4e864a162.

Uh-huh.

Members of the Nova Scotia Agriculture Department (that’s a province in Canada) told the public accounts committee no one in Nova Scotia has become ill because of problems in the province’s meat inspection program.

The Herald News reports the health types were there to give an update on their response to a report from the auditor general in November that said the department wasn’t doing a good job keeping watch over the province’s slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.

In the report, Jacques Lapointe said, among other things, there was a lack of monthly inspections and inconsistent followups when deficiencies were found, and there didn’t seem to be any enforcement action taken when deficiencies weren’t corrected.

Mike Horwich, the director of food protection with the department, told the committee, "We’ve accepted all the recommendations (of the auditor general) and we’re working toward each and every one of them. Some are further along than others, but we hope to implement them by at least the end of next year."

He described the system that prevents bacteria from getting through the slaughter process and into the consumer food supply as a series of fences along a track, and said that even if something happened that allowed the bacteria to get past one barrier, it would be stopped by another.

He said the department is working toward having regular monthly inspections. "We strive to achieve those, but again, those monthly inspections are just one barrier, they’re not the be-all and end-all. We are confident that the system that we have now and the process that we have now, with inspectors on site, ends up being part of a system that produces a really good product."

Political fodder is comedic gold.

Satirists, like others, also eat.

Jon Stewart loves cheeseburgers.

The ingredients of public outrage over pink slime melded like a savory stew last night on the Daily Show to produce a potpourri of insights on how not to chat with people who eat.

And it was so easy because the politicians and industry seem so hapless.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Iowa Governor Terry Branstad held a press conference in Des Moines Wednesday afternoon to address concerns and educate the public about the processing of lean, finely textured beef, or LFTB.

"That's why we're going to have people from Iowa State University and Texas A&M and knowledgeable people from USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) counter the smear and counter the misinformation with the facts," said Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad.

Facts are never enough. Otherwise rBST would be routinely used in dairy production, genetically-engineered foods would be flaunted not shunned, and irradiation would make pink slime redundant.

Science is never enough in the public arena.

Vilsack, a former Iowa governor, said education is especially important when a growing number of people are increasingly farther removed from agriculture.

"The reality is a very small percentage of America's population produces 85% to 90% of what we consume.”

I’m not sure what being a beef farmer has to do with meat processing that involves centrifuges.

Stewart reasoned, "any food can be disgusting if you take its ingredients out of context." Perhaps the same thing was true of pink slime burgers?

Stewart cut to an animated news report that explained the process for making pink slime: Waste trimmings are gathered, simmered at low heat to make it easier to separate fat from muscle, then put into a centrifuge, sprayed with ammonia gas to kill bacteria, compressed into bricks, flash-frozen and finally shipped to grocery stores nationwide, where it's added to ground beef. Yummy!

He also expressed his admiration for the beef industry's preferred nomenclature, "lean, finely textured beef." "It makes it sound like something rich beef-eaters can buy from Hammacher Schlemmer," Stewart said. "It’s the cashmere of beef."

Stewart also marveled at the irony of pink slime: "McDonald's doesn't think it's an appropriate thing to eat? These are the people who molded a pork disc into a rib-shaped sandwich ... that contains no ribs. Nobody knows how they did it! But this stuff, pink slime? That's too fake for McDonald's?"

I can provide references for everything I say – that educating people is about the worst communications strategy because it invalidates and trivializes people’s thoughts. But that stuff is boring.

Stewart says the same thing but in a way that is much more entertaining.

Whenever a group says the public needs to be educated about food safety, biotechnology, trans fats, organics or anything else, that group has utterly failed to present a compelling case for their cause. Individuals can choose to educate themselves about all sorts of interesting things, but the idea of educating someone is doomed to failure. And it’s sorta arrogant to state that others need to be educated; to imply that if only you understood the world as I understand the world, we would agree and dissent would be minimized.

Or as Stewart said, “You got rid of it because we found out it was pink slime.”

Proponents of pink slime or any other technology shouldn’t expect consumers to roll over and accept it. They need to promote, brag and saturate microbial food safety claims in the marketplace. Otherwise, any farmer, processor or restaurant can be held hostage by a mere accusation – regardless of the science.

Shoppers will support honest information, instead of being told they have to become better educated about someone else’s limited perspective.

The Daily Show segment is available for U.S. viewers at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-march-28-2012/march-28--2012---pt--2.

Lawyers, prepare your briefs.

And put on clean ones.

The New York Post reports on Gotham’s burgeoning food porn trend to consume meat raw, and lining up for the privilege.

Takashi is one of a small but growing number of restaurants around the city catering to those who are rah-rah about consuming their animal flesh raw-raw.

The first dish to come out is the yooke, ground chuck prepared like a Japanese version of steak tartare. Topped with a raw quail egg, it’s adorned with Japanese seaweed and an enormous shiso leaf.

It’s also by far the tamest uncooked dish at Takashi, which gets its meat from some of the better purveyors around, such as Dickson’s Farmstand and Pat LaFrieda.

Maybe they have those CSI UV goggles that make dangerous bacteria visible. Otherwise, it’s hucksterism to charge a premium.

“Raw meats or undercooked foods leave you at risk of infection [of parasites or a slew of other illnesses],” says Dr. Michael Mansour of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital.

According to NYC’s Department of Health, restaurants must notify diners when food isn’t cooked to required temperatures — either verbally or by printing this on the menu. A diner may also request such a dish. Basically, it’s buyer beware — though the DOH says it will investigate complaints of people getting sick from eating raw food. But with so many New Yorkers obsessed with high-quality ingredients, meat so fresh it can be served raw is seen as a benchmark — not a danger.

Food porn trumps.

At downtown’s Acme, you’ll find endive leaves stuffed with a mix of raw bison and sweet shrimp. At Manzo in Eataly, Piedmontese beef is hand-cut and ground to order. Hakata Tonton, just a couple of blocks from Takashi, offers veal liver sashimi on its menu, as does EN Japanese Brasserie on Hudson Street. Last fall, Hecho en Dumbo in the East Village offered venison tartare on the chef’s menu. (It plans to bring it back next fall, too.)

And then there’s raw chicken, a dish not for the squeamish. “There are a lot of places in the city that serve raw chicken,” says Dave Pasternack, chef-owner of Esca in Hell’s Kitchen. But you might have to ask, with a nudge and a wink, to go off the menu.

For some, raw meat is uncontroversial. “It’s my soul food,” says Takashi’s Inoue, who grew up in Osaka. “That’s how we eat in my home in Japan. The meat is very, very fresh.”

Very fresh, except when it sickens and kills, like it did in Japan last year, leaving four dead and at least 70 sickened with E. coli O111 from raw beef.

Pick your poison.