While watching Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings lose to the Green Bay Packers last night (for about 5 minutes), and while wondering if Brett was a naughty boy with those text messages (for about 12 seconds), the 
Sunday Night Football broadcast crew paid homage to fall in Wisconsin with apple cider.
A series of vignettes showed a dude with a small apple press, lovingly grinding up the apples and them pressing the pulp into cider. Yummy. But I prefer mine mulled, pasteurized or fermented.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, author Douglas Adams recommended a towel — always take a towel. I carry a small one in my knapsack along with a spare diaper (not for me), identification 
documents, an adapter cord to hook my Mac computer up to a projector, computer, and an array of cords.
None of these would help if I was about to barf in a taxi, although a bigger towel may.
The New York Post reports that a Manhattan (not in Kansas) mom became worried sick when her 6-year-old son vomited in the back seat of a taxi — and then even more upset when the crabby cabby called the cops after she refused to pay a whopping $120 cleaning surcharge.
Shamie Cuthbert, 29, said she and son Jacob hopped in the cab near Lincoln Center on Saturday night and were heading home to Washington Heights when the boy said he wasn’t feeling well and threw up.
"I leaned over into the front of the cab and said [to the driver], ‘As soon as we get home, my husband will come down with cleaning products, and I will clean everything up,’ " Cuthbert told The Post.
"I expected [the cabby] to be polite about it. Instead, he went sort of crazy and screamed, ‘This isn’t right! You need to give me $120, or I can’t use my cab! I am going to lose a lot of money today!’ " the stunned mom said.
She said cabby Nahidul Islam, 33, dialed 911 as soon as he pulled up at their building.
As they waited for the cops, Cuthbert began scrubbing the seat with the Seventh Generation cleanser, paper towels and Febreze that her husband had brought down.
"[Islam] was standing there angrily smoking a cigarette while I cleaned the cab," she said. "The mess wasn’t atrocious, and when I was done, it was much cleaner than when we got there."
Police arrived, and an officer informed the driver he could make no demand for $120.
The cabby did not receive a ticket over the incident.
Islam told The Post that Cuthbert merely pushed the mess around and that it would cost $120 to pay a crew of "Mexican cleaners" in Queens who specialize in removing vomit from taxis.
If a New York cab can have video-display advertisements in the back, maybe they can invest in some barf bags – like on airplanes.
It was Spooktacular this weekend at Manhattan’s Sunset Zoo, which is about a 2-minute drive from our house (because it’s in Kansas).
We splurged on the Wicked Witch of the West costume for Sorenne (right, exactly as shown) and used our year-long family pass for a discounted 
candy grab.
The purple pail quickly filled with treats and many of the kids were digging in as they entered a small pavilion where a volunteer was encouraging children – many of whom were eating candy – to pet a couple of tortoises.
There were no handwashing facilities or sanitizer dispensers at this particular pavilion.
I said petting a tortoise while actively or about to eat candy was a bad idea.
On Aug. 17, 2008, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and Maple Leaf Foods, Inc. finally got around to telling Canadians they should avoid serving or consuming certain brands of deli meat as the products could be contaminated with L. monocytogenes. In the end, 23 
deaths and 57 cases of listeriosis were linked to contaminated cold-cuts made by Maple Leaf.
In July 2009, investigator Sheila Weatherill who was appointed directly by the Canadian Prime Minister, issued a 181-page final report about the listeria crapfest, with 57 recommendations grouped into four broad categories:
– more focus on food safety among senior officials in both the public and private sectors;
– better preparedness for dealing with a serious foodborne illness with more advance planning for an emergency response;
– a greater sense of urgency if another foodborne emergency occurs; and,
– clearer communications with the Canadian public about listeriosis and
other foodborne illnesses, especially at risk populations and health professionals.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
On Oct. 21, 2010, CFIA issued a couple of public reports, responding to the Weatherill report, all this over two-years after people starting barfing and dying from Maple Leaf meats. Buried within the bureaucratese are a few nuggets that show Canadian food safety types are trying to say the right thing – but really don’t get it.
Most of the media coverage focused on meat inspection protocols and complaints by the union of too few inspectors. There’s this big debate about who needs to do what and whether the federally-mandated Compliance Verification System (CVS), which sets out the procedures to be used by inspectors to verify the design and implementation of a plant’s food safety plan, is any good.
However, within the Oct. 2010 food safety progress report, the feds are apparently trying to come up with guidance on when to go public about food safety risks.
“Health Canada is developing a federal guidance document on the weight of evidence needed to take action to protect consumers during foodborne illness outbreak investigations. The weight of evidence takes into consideration the microbiological information gathered through food sample testing and human illness reports, as well as the information collected from the follow-up investigation at food processing plants. Federal, provincial and territorial partners have been consulted on the (1)(1).jpg)
draft guidance document. Health Canada also shared the document with selected international counterparts in June 2010. Once finalized, the document will be used by Health Canada, CFIA and PHAC during outbreak investigations.”
I look forward to the public availability of such a document, 14 years after the feds were criticized for the erroneous implication of California strawberries rather than Guatemalan raspberries as the source of a 1996 North America-wide cyclospora outbreak.
The Weatherill Report makes a number of recommendations to improve communication between government and the public on food safety and foodborne illness. The Government has taken steps to improve how and when it communicates with Canadians in general and with at-risk populations and key stakeholders, specifically. These steps take into consideration how it communicates food safety information in periods when there is no outbreak as well as during a national foodborne illness event.
In February 2010, the Government of Canada launched an online Food Safety Portal that offers a one-stop source for information about food safety and foodborne illness (www.foodsafety.gc.ca). The food safety and foodborne illness information initiatives developed by CFIA, PHAC and Health Canada and described in this report can now be found on the Portal.
To raise awareness of the Food Safety Portal, CFIA sent out a social media news release that encourages individuals to share information about the Portal online by using social media book-marking and tagging options, thus ensuring the broadest possible outreach.
CFIA has also been using social media tools, such as Twitter, to reach a wider audience on food safety issues and recalls. The Agency has gained over 400 followers on Twitter, including representatives from the media, health organizations, consumer groups and cooking/food allergy bloggers. In addition, CFIA has developed a recall widget to automate further distribution of notices. Food safety stakeholders have been invited to embed the CFIA widget on their websites, blogs, or social media pages to display live content from CFIA on food recalls.
The Consumer Centre section of the CFIA website has also been redesigned to clearly explain the roles that consumers, government and industry play in food safety, and to provide more information on important food safety issues. In addition, CFIA is participating in six .jpg)
food-related events between May 2010 and March 2011 to promote the Food Safety Portal and raise awareness of safe food handling practices and recall procedures.
And it goes on and on.
Creating a new web site doesn’t mean anyone reads it. And using social media is of no use if the messages still suck. People dying from deli meat is not a food handling concern.
PHAC has developed a risk communications strategy that will guide how the Agency communicates to Canadians during a national foodborne illness outbreak. PHAC has begun to implement various components of the strategy so that it can communicate to the public, key stakeholders, and targeted at-risk populations (older adults, pregnant women and those with weakened immune systems) more effectively. The strategy uses a variety of traditional and innovative formats, such as media events, web- and audio-casts, the Food Safety Portal, and stakeholder briefings. PHAC also collaborates with Health Canada to ensure that PHAC’s information for Canadians during a national outbreak is consistent with the food safety information that Health Canada provides.
There’s more but it’s tortuous. No evaluation of effectiveness, no indication that fewer people are barfing, no evidence that dieticians at care facilities won’t keep giving out cold deli meats to at-risk populations, no evidence that medical types at place like the Toronto Hospital for Sick Kids won’t keep dispensening stupid advice about listeria risks to pregnant women.
And for all the bureaucratese, no mention was made by anybody about Weatherill’s recommendation for precautionary labeling – warning labels – for listeria-vulnerable populations like pregnant women and old folks.
There must have been hundreds of fully salaried government types at all the meetings and in the report prep and website building and travel.
Maple Leaf or any other processor, government can continue to dither, you’re the ones losing customers and profits.
Make listeria testing results publicly available, and put warning labels or some sort of information available on the package. And stop saying deli meat is a consumer handling problem.
Waiting for government is like waiting for Godot.
"’I refuse to buy shrimp in the U.S. We’ve inspected plants in Vietnam. Those plants are state-of-the-art. They’re certainly better than shrimp-handling in the US."
So says Roger Berkowitz, CEO of the Boston-based Legal Sea Foods restaurant chain, who insists Asian shrimp is gaining in the U.S., not .jpg)
because it’s cheaper but because it’s safer.
That food safety nugget was delivered in an otherwise mundane series of articles published this week by the Christian Science Monitor.
There’s also some sharp words for the two primary U.S. inspection agencies, the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. USDA is inspection-focused. US law requires it to inspect every carcass of meat and poultry that it’s responsible for, even though numerous scientific reports have questioned the effectiveness of those rapid conveyor-belt inspections.
"There is an awful lot of money being spent on guys standing around watching the chickens fly by," says Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and a former official at the Food Safety and Inspection Service at the USDA. "It’s hard to tell what you are getting for your money."
The USDA’s costly carcass-by-carcass inspection soaks up about 60 percent of US food-safety funding, even though it covers only about 20 percent of the food Americans eat (mostly meat). That leaves the FDA with only around 40 percent of the funding, even though it’s responsible for ensuring the safety of 80 percent of the food supply. With less funding, it’s difficult for the FDA to inspect food facilities on a regular basis.
"In my mind, [the FDA] doesn’t have an inspection system," says Scott Hurd, a veterinary professor at Iowa State University and former deputy .jpg)
undersecretary of agriculture for food safety at the USDA. "It has a ‘wander around and hope you bump into something’ " approach.
Numerous outbreaks linked to Mexican produce earlier this decade spurred the Mexican industry to clean up its image by developing various voluntary standards. For example, México Calidad Suprema is a generic brand that growers and packers commit to operate by high food-safety standards.
"Nobody ensures that" quality, says Frank Pope, who exports carrots produced in Queretaro, in central Mexico, to the US. "The market takes care of it."
Such faith in the market and voluntary efforts by the Mexican growers and packers have won over some U.S. wholesalers. "They’re working very hard to counteract that" taint, says Peter John Condakes, whose New England produce wholesale and distributing company buys more than half of its Roma tomatoes from Mexican companies. "Truthfully, in a lot of cases, the packing sheds are as strict or more strict than in the United States."
In spite of health dangers associated with meat butchered and fed on sidewalks, Baghdad butchers insist their meat is "tasty" and better than imported meat.
Butchers slaughter and sell meat in the open air on Baghdad’s sidewalks, hidden from sanitary controls. Doctors warn about 
contamination, but butchers defend their meat as healthy and tasty.
And it’s local.
The Kurdish Globe quoted butcher Hassan Sali as he dragged a lamb to slaughter as saying, "It is tasty and also clean. I feed the sheep with alfalfa grass."
But he ignored swarming flies and the stench. Salih does not work in a shop, but on a road side in the middle of Baghdad city. He is not the only one; many butchers operate the same way.
Not caring about expert opinion, the butchers defend their businesses and say they are "trusted" by their clients who see the animal beheaded in front of their eyes. "The danger is too invisible to be seen by bare eyes," said Dr. Kadhim, adding that the sidewalk meat can easily transport fatal diseases, let alone epidemic flues that are appearing.
BBC News reports that polish sausages contaminated with listeria have been found on sale in Doncaster, U.K.
The council said its food enforcement team had removed affected items from local delis and shops.
A number of contaminated products were found, some with levels of 
listeria up to 600 times the legal limit.
The products in question are Home Black Pudding Sausage or Grill Black Pudding Sausage produced by Sokolow in Poland.
A council spokesman said: "The sausage implicated in the Doncaster investigation is cooked and although many will cook it again, which should kill the organism, it is often eaten cold straight from the pack."
And there is the significant risk of cross-contamination in the kitchen.
The contamination was first discovered by Bolsover District Council in Derbyshire during routine checks on a shop.
Why are production standards marketed in grocery stores, but microbiological safety isn’t?
As reported by William Neuman of the New York Times, “shoppers in the supermarket today can buy chicken free of nearly everything but 
adjectives. It comes free-range, cage-free, antibiotic-free, raised on vegetarian feed, organic, even air-chilled.
“Coming soon: stress-free?
“Two premium chicken producers, Bell & Evans in Pennsylvania and Mary’s Chickens in California, are preparing to switch to a system of killing their birds that they consider more humane. The new system uses carbon dioxide gas to gently render the birds unconscious before they are hung by their feet to have their throats slit, sparing them the potential suffering associated with conventional slaughter methods.”
With so many options, why isn’t someone marketing microbiologically safer chicken – chicken with fewer of the bugs that make people barf?
With the slaughter system, David Pitman, whose family owns Mary’s Chickens, said,
“Most of the time, people don’t want to think about how the animal was killed.”
And retailers will say, you can’t market food safety because that would imply other foods are unsafe.
But as a shopper, I want to reward companies that pay attention to microbial food safety issues, and shun companies that are sloppy.
Americans are good at marketing, so why not get the Mad Men geniuses on the case and figure out how to brag about microbiologically safer food.
Anglia Autoflow, the company that is building the knock-out systems for the two processors, calls the process “controlled atmosphere stunning,” but Mr. Pitman said his company was considering the phrase “sedation stunning” for use on its packages. Also on the short-list: “humanely slaughtered,” “humanely processed” or “humanely handled.”
The trick, he said, is to communicate the goal of the new system, which is to ensure that the birds “not have any extra pain or discomfort in the last few minutes of their lives.”
Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and a prominent livestock expert, consulted with Bell & Evans as the company worked with Anglia to design its system. She said it was better because the chickens were not aware of what was happening to them. “Birds don’t like being hung upside down,” Dr. Grandin said. “They get really stressed out by that.”
Scott Sechler, the owner of Bell & Evans, said the system was designed to put birds to sleep gently, in the same way that a person undergoes anesthesia before surgery.
To evoke that image, he wants to put the words “slow induction anesthesia” on his packages and advertising, which already tell customers that the birds are raised in roomy conditions with natural light and given feed free of antibiotics or animal byproducts. Customers who want to know more will be able to go to the company’s Web site.
At least seven of the nine cases of salmonella reported at Clearview High School might be part of a larger bacterial outbreak, according to a Lorain County Health Department official.??
Or maybe not.
Health Commissioner Ken Pearce said in seven of the nine known cases, the same bacteria typing was found. After the health department 
contacted the Centers for Disease Control earlier this week, it was determined that the Clearview cases might be part of a common outbreak in other areas, Pearce said.??
A spokesperson for the CDC said the case is still under investigation and they are not aware of links to cases in any other states.??
The bacteria, Pearce said, is likely tied to a football team dinner served before a game three weeks ago.
That’s the headline on Greg Johnson’s column in The Packer today, criticizing the way Fresh Express’ announced its super-duper new produce wash.
I’m all for marketing food safety, but only if it can be thoroughly backed up.
Johnson complains this kind of promotion violates the generally agreed upon, though nonbinding, industry standard after the 2006 E. coli spinach outbreak that .jpg)
the produce industry is in food safety together. ?
Once companies say they’re safer than others, consumers can infer that some produce is less safe or worse, unsafe, and they stop buying.
Tom Stenzel, president and CEO of the United Fresh Produce Association, said, “Food safety should never be a competitive advantage. If a new product improves food safety, we should share it with the whole industry.”
Ed Loyd, director of corporate communications for Chiquita, said the company isn’t marketing its method as safer than others because it’s offering FreshRinse technology to competitors.
Several competitors say Fresh Express’ claims about its new wash are exaggerated or flat-out false, and they have not been verified by any third party.