Tag Archives: Barf

Food safety standards for fast-food far better than for school lunches

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Every semester I give a couple of lectures in an introductory food science class at Kansas State University and every semester I ask the same question: what is safe food, and what retailers come to mind when thinking about safe food?

Safe food is food that doesn’t make you barf; food that doesn’t make you barf is based on food safety programs validated with microbiological testing. Whole Foods Markets may be trendy and a nice place to shop, but they suck at food safety. Good food safety programs can be found at places like McDonald’s, Burger King, Costco and WalMart.

Students are generally surprised.

As will be readers of today’s USA Today, which once again slams the U.S. school lunch program as behind the times and proclaims that “McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day. And the limits Jack in the Box and other big retailers set for certain bacteria in their burgers are up to 10 times more stringent than what the USDA sets for school beef.”

David Theno, who developed the safety program at Jack in the Box before retiring last year, says,

"We look at those (measures) to gauge how a supplier is doing.”  If shipments regularly exceed the company’s limits on indicator bacteria, "we’d stop doing business with them.”

Mansour Samadpour, a Seattle-based food safety consultant and microbiologist says the AMS approach to sampling "is not robust enough to find anything."
 

14 Brits stricken with E. coli O157 after returning from resort in Spain

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The U.K. Health Protection Agency is investigating a number of cases of the gastrointestinal infection E. coli O157 associated with travellers returning from the resort of Benidorm in Spain.

So far the HPA has been made aware of 14 confirmed cases of E. coli O157 among travellers returning to the UK, with onset dates ranging from 12th – 21st November. All laboratory confirmed cases are adults. Four people are known to have been admitted to hospital after returning to the UK. Two have since been discharged.

I’m sure the sick people will be relieved to know, “there are some simple measures that people visiting Benidorm can take to protect themselves and their families against this infection” like handwashing and avoiding food that has been cross-contaminated. Should the people be roaming the kitchens looking for cross-contamination?
 

Potluck again sickens hundreds; this time it was the home-prepared turkey; no biggie says New Mexico official

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Barfing and crapping for days on end is not a minor issue; ask Chapman.

But Deputy County Executive Officer Kim Carpenter of Bloomfield, New Mexico, said that when 150 of the 300 county employees who attended a potluck last week at the County Administration Building became sick later that day,

"This really is a minor issue."

The suspected cause was a poorly prepared turkey.

The turkeys all were prepared at home by volunteers, but officials plan to change to a safer option for future events.

"In the future, the turkeys that we cook for our meal will be done at the correctional facility," Carpenter said.

The San Juan County Adult Detention Center prepares meals for hundreds of inmates and annual events, such as the annual Salvation Army Thanksgiving meal.

It is unclear what caused the illness, but officials believe it may be undercooked turkey.
 

Caf?? Rotavirus – a barf poem by John Estes

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There’s an upside to getting written up in Slate magazine, as barfblog.com did last week, and it’s that a new audience can be reached.

Like the barf poetry crowd.

John Estes, who teaches at the University of Missouri, wrote me this morning to say he discovered barfblog.com through the Slate article, and that,

“Since you have no barf poetry (it’s a niche genre) I wanted to offer my poem, ‘Cafe Rotavirus.’"

So here it is (and that’s John’s son, Jonah, with their dog, Sophie, right)..

Cafe Rotavirus

Last time we all
ate here, a Sunday, after
the baby played with
—chewed on—
their toys: six
days and nights
of puke and diarrhea.
This stuff kills
starving kids in Africa,
underdeveloped as
electrolyte industries
are there.

But I cannot stop
returning and returning.
What pathogenesis
makes me weak
for, so consoled by,
this biscuits and gravy—
though I cannot
stop imagining
trillions of rotifer-driven
microbes racing
around this apparent
locus amoenus
like, but not like,
animated soap
bubbles scrubbing up
bathtub scum?

To believe in history,
now that fixed
stars are not so fixed,
might be to believe
each instant struggles—
fatally, hopefully—
to loose itself from
some unoriginate whole.
But, and this makes
instinctual sense
so long as instinct is
nothing but undigested
experience, it may also,
or maybe instead,
be the collective orgy
clearing its gorge,
suffusing each instant
with the particles
of every other
but in tastier order,
because nothing is real
until it means
and nothing means
until it returns,
returns like a dog returns,
as it will with verve,
to a baby’s vomit.

John Estes teaches at the University of Missouri and lives in Columbia. Recent poems have appeared (or will) in West Branch, Southern Review, New Orleans Review, Tin House, and other places. He is author of Kingdom Come (C&R Press, forthcoming) and two chapbooks: Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoön (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and Swerve (Poetry Society of America, 2009) which won a National Chapbook Fellowship.  See his website for more poems and prose.

You barf, you pay; $50 vomit tax for Chicago cabs?

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Chicago cab drivers are demanding that riders who throw up in their cabs get slapped with a $50 fee.

The cabbies said Thursday they want to the city impose the penalty because of the work — and hours lost — that comes with cleaning a passenger’s vomit.

Mayor Richard Daley said his administration will listen to the drivers’ request and review their recommendations.

 

A barf story for barfblog

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Last Friday the family and I embarked on a journey from Raleigh, NC to Port Hope, ON (Canada) to visit with our folks and celebrate our son Jack’s 1st birthday. Dani and I had a strategy to limit the potential baby-craziness aspect of the 14-hour trip: leave mid-day and drive late into the night to perhaps let Jack’s internal schedule take over and allow him to sleep for the majority of the ride.

Surprisingly, that plan worked perfectly.

Jack fell asleep around 7pm and did not wake until Dani abruptly woke him up with some spectacular barfing somewhere around Scranton, PA. She had been feeling car sick since about 30 minutes after we left and had fought it for a few hours, in her words, it "just came up". It surprised her enough that she felt she didn’t have time to roll down the window, or even open the door. Sitting in the passenger seat, she turned to her left and decided to try to catch the barf in an empty cup she had sitting in the console. Bad idea. She filled the cup, and then both cup holders on the console. And then all over my leg and shoes.

Reminiscent of Lardass Hogan (see Stand By Me clip, below) I had a sympathy puke.

This ranks pretty high in my all-time vomit memories. It’s up there with puking in Doug’s flower bed; trying to catch vomit in my hands while sitting in a car and throwing it out the window (didn’t work); deep-sea fishing induced illness and another Dani car story where she opened the window but decided to puke on the inside of the door instead. The most recent has made the top-5.

Jack fell back asleep soon after we stopped to clean up. But the car still smells like barf.

Celebrity chef dumbass: Fat Duck felled by norovirus in raw oysters; ‘weaknesses in procedures – delayed response to incident’

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Chapman occasionally comes up with a good line. Usually, I do all the work on a piece (at least in my mind), and he’ll put in one sentence, but it will be the one that is remembered.

Why didn’t I think of that?

Chapman described celebrity chef and molecular gastrologest Heston Blumenthal (below, right) as the love child of Alton Brown and longtime Toronto Maple Leaf hockey player Mats Sundin (right).

Why didn’t I think of that.

Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant – which is consistently rated as the best in the U.K. – was the source of over 500 illnesses in early 2009. At the time, Blumenthal said, “tests for viral infections and food poisoning have proved negative and there is speculation that the winter outbreak of norovirus could be the real reason why they became sick.”

Way to blame the consumer, those paying hundreds of pounds for the privilege of barfing.

The U.K. Health Protection Agency published a report on the outbreak today that concluded:

*       There was a large outbreak of food poisoning among diners at the Fat Duck Restaurant in January and February 2009, with more than 500 reporting illness – over 15% of those dining there during this period

*       The organism responsible was norovirus which was probably introduced via shellfish (more diners who ate shellfish dishes reported illness). Oysters were served raw; razor clams may not have been appropriately handled or cooked; tracing of shellfish to source showed evidence of contamination and there have been reports of illness in other establishments associated with oysters from the same source

*       The outbreak continued for at least six weeks (between January 6 and February 22) because of ongoing transmission at the restaurant – which may have occurred through continuous contamination of foods prepared in the restaurant or by person-to-person spread between staff and diners or a mixture of both

*       Several weaknesses in procedures at the restaurant may have contributed to ongoing transmission including: delayed response to the incident; staff working when they should have been off sick and using the wrong environmental cleaning products

*       Delays in notification of illness may have affected the ability of the investigation to identify the exact reason for the norovirus contamination

It’s the chef’s responsibility to source food from safe sources. And if the chef thinks raw shellfish is a smart thing to serve, and to have sick workers working, then, customers get what they pay for.

 

New Zealand cricketers felled by food poisoning

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I don’t understand cricket — other than it may be as boring as baseball —  but I do understand barf.

Tillakaratne Dilshan achieved the milestone he narrowly missed in Sri Lanka’s first innings to post an unbeaten 123 as New Zealand became increasingly dependent on rain to stave off defeat in the first cricket test in Galle last night.

New Zealand had little to enthuse about once it became apparent morning rain would not stall the start of play for the first time since a delayed toss.

Their mood darkened further when Brendon McCullum and Jesse Ryder called in sick at breakfast, the worst affected of eight players struck down by food poisoning.

Only Ross Taylor, Martin Guptill and Iain O’Brien were immune from the bug that provided Auckland wicketkeeper Reece Young with his first experience of test cricket.

 

Barth and the Health Inspector featuring Alanis Morissette

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Canadian actor Les Lye passed away in July at the age of 84, but Don Scaffner just sent me his classic bit, Barth and the Health Inspector featuring Alanis Morissette, from the Ottawa kids TV show, You Can’t Do That On Television.

For those unfamiliar, the premise of every Barth sketch is as follows: Barth is the proprietor of a burger joint, Barth’s Burgers, frequented by the show’s cast presumably by government mandate as Canada, of course, is widely known for its socialized burger program. The burgers are of such vile quality that the kids are compelled to speculate as to the source of the eponymous meat, to which the ill-sanitized restauranteur responds “D’Iyyyyyyye heard that!” then betrays his recipe as being primarily human-based. Then everyone vomits theatrically and with exaggerated gesticulations.