Flash in the Pan

Giant Food has announced a recall of Giant Nonfat Dried Milk, 9.6 ounce size, UPC number 6-8826707833, code FEB 0511S.

The items were removed from store shelves because they were produced with nonfat dried milk that is part of a national recall by Plainview Milk and may have the potential to be contaminated with salmonella bacteria.


Customers who have purchased the product should discard any unused portions and bring their purchase receipt to any Giant Food for a full refund. To date, Giant Food has received no reports of illnesses associated with consumption of this product.

If you need more information, you can call Giant's corporate brands at 1-877-846-9949, M-F, 9 a.m. -1 p.m., or Giant's customer service line at 1-888-469-4426, M-F, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Giant Food operates 182 supermarkets in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia, and employs approximately 22,000 associates. For more information, see www.giantfood.com.

Labels: dairy, food safety, recall

Last week, Whole Foods had to recall a whole lot of ground beef because of E. coli contamination. This week, the Washington Post has a story on what happened. The problem, it seems, was that the ground beef was made from cuts of meat that could also have been used for steaks and roasts. USDA restrictions on contamination of such meat are looser because if there is E. coli, it's probably on the outside and going to be destroyed as you cook. But with ground beef, the bacteria get incorporated throughout the mixture, allowing some to keep some distance from the heat, and potentially making people sick.

Coleman, a trusted supplier for Whole Foods and many other retailers, had sold its beef business and the right to sell under the Coleman Natural Meat brand on June 1 to Meyer Angus Natural. Coleman said Meyer hired Nebraska Beef to process its meat. Meyer did not return phone calls.

The E. coli strain that sickened the Whole Foods customers matches a strain found in primal cuts that Nebraska Beef produced on July 8, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As a result, Nebraska Beef on Friday recalled 1.2 million pounds of beef, its second recall this summer.

But so far as I can see, that's not the end of the story for consumers. Have you ever ground your own high-end hamburger, or maybe made some sausage? This story is certainly giving me second thoughts.

After the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak that killed four children, the USDA declared it illegal to sell ground beef and any beef products intended for use in ground beef that are contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. But consumer advocates and meat inspectors have long criticized the USDA for not enforcing that policy equally when it comes to primal cuts even though they are sometimes used to make ground beef.

The beef industry has argued that steaks and roasts should be treated differently because they are less likely to make people sick.

It's the less likely wording that bothers me. How much of a chance should I and my family have of getting sick to preserve the profits of a corporation? Up until now, I had assumed that all meat would be treated the same. But it isn't, and the processors cannot have any idea of what consumers ultimately might be doing with their purchases. That should be clear on labeling, because clearly there aren't any stores that can be certain of what they have. If labeling is a burden, too bad. Being dangerously sick is even more of one.

Labels: E. coli, food safety, meat

The New York Times science Q&A section has a question on mold: If there's some on the surface of food, has it permeated throughout? Their answer, quoting the US Department of Agriculture, is yes, it may well have. By the time you see the surface mold, root threads are embedded.

Some molds can cause strong allergic reactions, including respiratory problems, in susceptible people. And in some varieties, the threads produce toxic substances called mycotoxins, which can make people very sick.

Eww, not good. If you're really feeling adventurous, go for a "safe" mold: blue cheese.

Labels: food safety, mold, science

The New York Times has a short science piece on whether mayonnaise increases the danger of food poisoning as the weather gets warmer. The good news: a number of studies suggest that commercial mayonnaise is not at fault, as the degree of acidic ingredients makes the substance pretty unpopular with the microbe crowd.

One prominent study published in The Journal of Food Protection found, for example, that in the presence of commercial mayonnaise, the growth of salmonella and staphylococcus bacteria in contaminated chicken and ham salad either slowed or stopped altogether. As the amount of mayonnaise increased, the rate of growth decreased. When temperatures rose to those of a hot summer day, the growth increased, but not as much as in samples that did not contain mayonnaise.

However, summer brings another danger - cold drinks and condensation that can leave water marks. Luckily, mayonnaise can bring a solution. You smear mayonnaise over the spot, leave it overnight (or even a day or more), wipe it off, and the spot is gone. There are a number of sites online that describe this technique; I know about it because my wife read it in some book, tried it, and was delighted to find that it worked. No, adding bacon, lettuce, and tomato is not necessary.

Labels: food safety, mayonnaise, science

The New York Times has an article today about food films - thin coatings designed to prolong food life and improve food safety:

If their work pans out, thin films woven with a thyme derivative that can kill E. coli could line bags of fresh spinach. The same material in powder form might be sprinkled on packages of chicken to stop salmonella.

Strawberries could be dipped in a soup made from egg proteins and shrimp shells. The resulting film — invisible, edible and, ideally, flavorless — would fight mold, kill pathogens and keep the fruit ripe longer.

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with this on the surface, pardon the pun. We seen many food safety problems over the last few months, and food distributors have been spraying edible wax on fruits for years to keep them fresher, or at least looking so.

But I wonder whether all this is wise in the long run. The problem we face in food safety is mishandling, driven by the demand for food to be cheap. That results in cutting corners and things ultimately going wrong. It may be that we've always had these problems, but as the food chain gets more complex and more production gets centralized by economic forces, we're at increased risk that when something goes wrong, it does so in a big way. Look at this paragraph for a moment:

Most coatings are made from gluten, cellulose, starch and various proteins approved by the Food and Drug Administration as safe for consumption. They line ice cream cones and coat battered frozen food. A layer of film in some frozen pizzas keeps moisture from the sauce from seeping into the crust. Fresh sliced apples and other produce get coatings of ascorbic acid to keep them from turning brown.

Gluten? From wheat, perhaps? You might remember stories about the pet food problems with wheat gluten from China. Ascorbic acid? What nation has pretty much priced everyone else out of manufacturing that substance? China.

Films based on organic material are, themselves, subject to food problems. Perhaps there is some processing that make them absolutely safe, but my notion of safety has changed over the years. I don't trust that something is safe because some agency or corporation claims it is, as I've seen too many cases of fabrication of information.

Trying to find high tech ways of working around problems is only treating the symptom. We might be better off demanding that things change - not by complaining, but by investing our dollars elsewhere. Buy locally produced food by people you can chase down if you need to. When products don't need to ship and sit for weeks, they need less processing, and less processing should mean some price containment. When you don't optimize for distribution, farmers can focus on other aspects of food, like nutrition and taste. And we can all pay less attention to safety and more to living.

Labels: China, films, food safety, local

Zheng Xiaoyu, former head of China's food and drug administration from 1998 to mid-2005, was removed from the position. The reason? Bribery and corruption. And on Tuesday, after pleading guilty to the charges, he was given a death sentence.

Before writing this off as Chinese indifference to the individual and having an unbalanced view of justice, realize that this situation with bad products hitting the market has been serious. For all the problems the U.S. has seen with Chinese food imports and deadly pet food, it's nothing compared with the deaths that China has experienced as the result of bad antibiotics and drugs. Then a key ingredient in antifreeze appeared in cough syrup and tooth paste shipped to Central and South America, with 100 dying last year in Panama alone, according to the New York Times account. (However, USA Today puts the number at 51, once again showing the collective objective accuracy that is the United States press.)

Zheng got richer to the tune of $832,000 ($850,000, according to the Times), not that it will do him any good now. China is under huge pressure to reform its safety record. According to USA Today, "Zheng's sentence requires review by a higher court and approval by China's highest judicial panel before he can be executed."

It could be that this is window dressing, as USA Today reports:

Qiu Feng, an independent scholar and columnist for China Newsweek magazine, wrote on the website Southcn.com that Zheng's sentence would do little to end deeply entrenched graft.

There's also a problem of counterfeit food that the papers and some other accounts mention in passing. Counterfeiting of products is an enormous problem, and one of the big categories is in food, particularly packaged Asian foods. Those simply won't be touched by improved official inspections because, by definition, counterfeit products are outside the official manufacturing and inspection systems. The deaths and injuries we've seen will likely to continue until counterfeiting itself is reduced, separately from increasing regulation.

Labels: Asian, China, Chinese, counterfeit, food safety, government

If you didn't catch the report on today's Morning Edition on NPR, you should check it out. It has a reasonably comprehensive view of how much danger Chinese food imports could present and how the current situation got to where it is. Kudos to the reporting and research.

Labels: China, food safety, NPR

According to a Washington Post story, the Food and Drug Administration actually knew about the problems at a peanut butter plant and spinach farms that led to some deaths and many illnesses.

Overwhelmed by huge growth in the number of food processors and imports, however, the agency took only limited steps to address the problems and relied on producers to police themselves, according to agency documents.

Apparently FDA officials are saying that there was nothing they could have done. Well, other than sit on their backsides, but it appears that they already did that.

The outbreaks point to a need to change the way the agency does business, said Robert E. Brackett, director of the FDA's food-safety arm, which is responsible for safeguarding 80 percent of the nation's food supply.

"We have 60,000 to 80,000 facilities that we're responsible for in any given year," Brackett said. Explosive growth in the number of processors and the amount of imported foods means that manufacturers "have to build safety into their products rather than us chasing after them," Brackett said. "We have to get out of the 1950s paradigm."

Now just what paradigm is that? That someone has to make sure that food manufacturers do adequate jobs in keeping such things from happening? And all this time I thought that's what the agency was supposed to do.

Labels: FDA, food, food safety