Posts tagged food safety
How to Wash a Chicken
Imagine if folks put this much energy into washing off the Salmonella.
LIFEHACK TIP: Use this three bucket method to make yourself presentable for conference talks. A little glycerin goes a long way to bring out that shine!
via swiss miss
Sorenne’s school is doing the hatching-chicks-thing in anticipation of Easter (which is a surprisingly big deal in Australia) and I’ve been doing my best Dougie-Downer about handwashing, Salmonella, pestilence and death.
I don’t know what the hell they put in the water in Australia, but Doug needs to bottle some and bring it back for me.
Our zoo has a petting zoo area in it. Makes me nuts. The kid loves it. I walk him through like we’re late for a flight. “Feces, feces, EVERYWHERE!” is what I almost say to him.
In a previous post, I asked:
Here’s a common sense test for whether lean finely textured beef should be labeled. If you put a pile of ground chuck in front of a consumer, and also a pile of lean finely-textured beef next to it, would the consumer be able to tell the difference?
This was unfair. The reason it’s unfair is because LFTB is probably never blended with ground chuck. It’s blended with “ground beef” and there is a world of difference between “ground chuck” and “ground beef.”
Zirnstein said it is more than an additive. He calls it “an adulterant.”
Well, if you’re going to go in, you might as well go all in.
I was going to take Zirnstein to task for using the word “adulterant” since it’s got a very specific definition under FSIS statute that means the food is unsafe.
So I looked up the statute, and indeed, Section 601(m)(1) of the Federal Meat Inspection Act says that meat is “adulterated” if it “bears or contains any poisonous or deleterious substance which may render it injurious to health.”
Which really is a preposterous definition of lean finely textured beef.
Except it turns out this is but one definition of nine. Number eight is that meat is considered “adulterated”…
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
So, um, yep.
Well played, sir.
I love it when Doug quotes me.
And a good quote, too:
I don’t see that there is a scientific or health benefit from the point of microbiology or even toxicology. The reason why it’s resonated with people is not so much that it’s unsafe, but the idea that we’re putting ammonia in our food is unpalatable to people. — Don Schaffner
I couldn’t agree more. I also agree with this:
Choice is a good thing. I’m all for restaurant inspection disclosure, providing information on genetically-engineered foods (we did it 12 years ago), knowing where food comes from and how it’s produced. But I want to choose safe food. Who defines safety or GE or any other snappy dinner-table slogan drop? Removing pink slime hamburgers reduces my choice to buy microbiologically safe food. — Doug Powell
The problem is, I also agree with this:
You look through the regulations and a lot of that stuff was never approved for hamburger. It was under the radar. It’s cheating. It’s economic fraud. — Gerald Zirnstein
I am not a food activist, but I do believe people should be able to make decisions about what food they put in their body, and that they have every right that those choices be fully informed.
Consumers might be irrational, but that doesn’t make them wrong. It’s their bodies that they’re putting the food in. They might be fickle, but it’s their lives.
I have a lot of sympathy for BPI. I think they are being held up unfairly as a scapegoat by a bunch of activists who are looking for any reason to attack corporate food. Activists have used framing to slant discussion, they have waved the “ammonia” flag to freak people out, they have made untrue statements about microbiological safety, and they shout “save the children!” at the top of their lungs.
And, wow, has this campaign been effective. Vote with your dollar and all that. Apparently, BPI is suspending production. About 200 people in Waterloo, Iowa, have been laid off, with more to come.
Was there something BPI could have done differently? Maybe.
The messaging coming out of BPI and the beef industry has been horrible. Defensive and angry and incredibly condescending. Just read the statement from Eldon Roth in yesterday’s WSJ ad in this image at barfblog
How is all this rage and media blaming going to get your customers back?
Maybe there were simply too many walls to defend, too much misinformation, too many myths. BPI couldn’t address them all at once. Personally, however, what didn’t work for me AT ALL was the staunch “beef is beef” defense, summarized by BPI’s Jamie Puckett:
Our product is 100 percent beef that through enhancement is made safer for the consumer.
What does that even mean? If the criticism is that your meat is full of connective tissue, cartilage, and nerves, this kind of PR bunk does not pass muster.
Because, look, if this lean finely textured beef wasn’t a lower quality beef than “normal” ground beef, why are you hiding it? Why are you insisting it doesn’t need to be labeled? If this stuff were of higher quality, you know the front of the label would should in all-caps, “NOW WITH MORE BLBT!”
It’s probably violating rule #1 of PR for a large animal processor, but I think BPI should have come clean about the specifics of their process, even if it would have skeeved people out. Because there is literally nothing worse than this image:
BPI needed to convince people that their product made the world a better place, and I don’t think they ever managed to do it. In hindsight, everything’s 20/20, but I think BPI would have been best served by arguing that, in fact, their lean beef trim was safer than the ground beef with which it was being mixed. They have the food safety record for that. They have data. They have test and hold programs that are stronger than their competitors. They should have made this about one thing: saving lives.
I started a full-on press release on what I think BPI should have said, but of course, Doug beat me to the punch and wrote something better than I ever could.
“And that’s why you always leave it to the risk communication experts!”
That’s what I said to a reporter last week when he asked me about “pink slime.” Then I reconsidered, asked him not to use the quote, and gave him the name of someone else with more expertise.
Well, so much for passing the buck; he called me back on Wednesday. Since this quote is likely going to make it to print, I figured I might as well expand on it.
It’s obviously a bit more complicated than these seven words, but I stand by them. In the past week, however, I’ve come to realize that this whole controversy can actually be reduced to one word: transparency.
If the food industry was more transparent about what goes on behind closed doors, I don’t think consumers would be as easily surprised or disgusted, and I don’t think they’d have anyone to blame for their lack of understanding other than themselves. If the government made decisions with more direct public engagement and properly labeled these products, it wouldn’t look like it was doing industry’s bidding at the expense of consumers’ health. Lastly, if the critics of “pink slime” didn’t warp the issue so dramatically for maximum yuck factor, maybe could have a real conversation about how we can improve things rather than chalk up a minor win that could actually make things worse in the long run.
What’s in a name?
It’s impossible to have a rational conversation when you call it “pink slime.” Before you can even describe it, just about every listener or reader is already vomiting in their own mouth. It’s annoying that reporters are so willing to throw around such a prejudicial word, but do you really think they’re going to use the industry terms “boneless lean beef trimmings” or “lean finely-textured beef?” These are obtuse, insidery terms that are misleadingly vague and completely unintelligible to consumers. It boggles my mind that AMI thinks thinks statements like this are reassuring: “The fact is, BLBT is beef.” Darn, I thought it was a BLT with double-bacon.
So we either have derogatory slang or corporate nothing-to-see-here jargon. Neither is honest, frankly. I want to say, let’s just call it BS for beef stuff, but I guess that’s only one step away from pink slime.
Is it gross?
Part of me wants to roll my eyes at all the fist-shaking. Like, how do you really think food is made? Do you eat chicken nuggets? How do you think they make bologna? Deep down, we know that our hot dogs are made of eyeballs and anuses, but we eat them anyway.1
What makes lean finely textured beef different from hot dogs is obviously that people do think they know what’s in their ground beef, and it doesn’t involve a product that requires a paragraph to describe and all sorts of defensive statements. And, the fact is, when you describe this process to consumers, they think it’s gross.
And that’s it. It’s subjective and unfair, but there you have it.
And sure, maybe consumers should bear some responsibility for being ignorant about how their food is produced, but let’s be honest: it’s not like we do a good job explaining it to them. Our discussions of food and agriculture in schools are naive and nostalgic, and most food companies, particularly those in large-scale animal production, aren’t eager to show what goes on in these operations. You may or may not be grossed out by the sight of animals being cut apart into meat, but few find it actually appetizing.
In fact, the only people who want to talk to consumers about modern food production are the activists who seek to destroy this system. So, what do you expect?
Let’s remember that this all started with Food, Inc.. There is a three-minute segment starting at about the 36 minute mark in which Eldon Roth, founder of Beef Products, Inc. (BPI) talks about his product. You can see he’s proud because he views himself as a leader in food safety (more on that in a minute), and he’s eager to show off how much work they’ve put into making meat safer. But all the viewer takes away is scale, industrialization, and detachment: the cameras float through massive facilities, full of pipes five feet in diameter and conveyer belts going this way and that dumping piles of meat into huge grinders. Portal windows with ammonia (maybe) sloshing about. Square cubes of pink stuff that looks like thick, pink pudding.
The way BPI’s product is presented has nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with scale.
But moreover, without this 2008 Food, Inc. segment, would Michael Moss have penned his Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times article in December of 2009? Would Jamie Oliver have taken it up as a cause célèbre on his TV show in April of 2011? Would McDonald’s have stopped using it, as reported in January 2012? Would The Daily have run a story on LFTB in school lunches in March of 2012? Would there now be a petition on Change.org with over 240,000 names on it?
By letting some folks with an agenda and a videocamera into their facility, BPI is now (maybe) facing economic ruin. What lesson do you think the food industry takes away from that?
Because all they see is downside, what is the food industry to do? Be more transparent with consumers? Or try to lock out the video cameras? Well, all you have to do is look at the ag-gag laws that are being passed, which criminalize the act of taking a job in an agricultural job in order to document or film illegal or otherwise egregious behaviors, to know the answer.
Is it safe?
Yes.
I know folks are skeeved by the word “ammonia” but can we step back and acknowledge that maybe decades of scientific studies have some merit? We can’t just run around in circles shouting chemical names. Some people just know it’s bad, but considering that this ammoniated beef trim is supposedly in 70% of our ground beef, tell me: where are all the people sick from ammonia? There are none, because ammonia is fairly benign until you start concentrating it into household cleaners. It’s an abundant gas. It’s in your body. It’s in plants. It’s in baked goods, cheeses, chocolates, soy products, puddings, and other things you probably eat all the time.
FSIS’s list of “Safe and suitable ingredients used in the production of meat, poultry, and egg products” is 52 pages long. How do you feel about the fact that sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid are used in poultry chill water to kill bacteria during slaughter? Should that be on labels, too? Where would you draw the line?
And for the record, ammonia isn’t even a carcinogen, unlike say, nitrites. Bacon will give you cancer, but the ammonia in pink slime won’t.
But what about pathogens?
My understanding is that the trim this product is made from is more likely to be contaminated with pathogenic bacteria, or as Alexandra Petri put it: “If microbes were hipsters, this would be Williamsburg.” But this treatment, while found to not always be perfectly implemented, is understood to be very effective. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if you found that, on average, this processed beef trim contained less pathogens than the untreated ground beef it’s being mixed with.
Anti-industrial food types might not like Beef Products, Inc., but they are recognized as a leader when it comes to microbiological food safety. BPI was the first meat company to test and hold for E. coli O157:H7, way back in 1998, and last year they became the first meat company to test for the “big six” non-O157 STECs (Shiga-toxin producing E. coli). I cannot overestimate the importance of this leadership.
Food safety advocate and litigator Bill Marler named Eldon Roth as one of the good ones in his 2011 naughty and nice list. Nancy Donley, the president of STOP Foodborne Illness, an organization that represents victims of foodborne illness, and the mother of a child who died from infection with E. coli O157:H7, penned a strongly worded op-ed in support of BPI. Carol Tucker-Foreman of the Consumer Federation of America has been supportive, too.
So this stuff is safe, or as safe as any raw ground beef product.
Is it meat?
Ah, but here’s where it gets interesting.
The beef industry says boneless lean beef trim is not all that different from ground beef, that it’s nutritionally very similar, and therefore, there’s no need to label it. But how am I supposed to trust a website called beefisbeef.com?2 So, there’s no difference between oxtail and filet mignon? Come on over here so I can kick you where your shank meets your flank. There is high-quality high-value meat and low-quality low-value meat, and pretending otherwise is wrong.
Industry says that this stuff is made from small scraps from major cuts that they previously couldn’t do much with because it was simply too fatty. So they developed this spinning process to separate these valuable bits of meat from the fat. That sounds reasonable to me.
On the other hand, Carl Custer, a highly respected ex-USDA official who’s been quoted in a number of the news pieces on this, clearly thinks it is not meat.
His position is, basically, that it contains high amounts of connective tissue (tendons, ligaments, etc.), which is quite distinct from muscle meat. In an email forum, he points to this 1996 study done at Iowa State, which documents similarities and differences between lean finely textured beef and muscle meats. Here is the summary, in full:
Lean, finely textured beef (LFTB) is a lean product derived from beef-fat trimmings. Characterization of LFTB showed that, while it is high in total protein, the LFTB contains more serum and connective tissue proteins and less myofibrillar proteins than muscle meat. Because of the protein differences, LFTB has less functionality in processed meats, resulting in lower yields and softer texture. Appropriate use of sodium chloride, sodium tripolyphosphate, k-carrageenan, or isolated soy protein achieved desired stability and yields in frankfurters with FTLB. The softer texture may be used to advantage in high-protein, low-fat meat products where excessive toughness or firmness is often a problem.
Translation: this stuff ain’t meat, but you can add a bunch of stuff to it to make it seem like meat.
I guess what it comes down to is that, yes, this stuff includes pieces of sirloin and chuck that were left over from making large muscle cuts, but it also contains enough collagen to suggest maybe there’s a little ankle meat in there, too. I have no idea, and I’m frankly too goddamned lazy to make some phone calls to try to split the difference.
So in the end, I guess whether it’s meat depends on what the definition of “is” is.
Should it be labeled?
To me, this is the ultimate transparency question.
Here’s a common sense test for whether lean finely-textured beef should be labeled. If you put a pile of ground chuck in front of a consumer, and also a pile of lean finely-textured beef next to it, would the consumer be able to tell the difference? If you made a normal burger (ground chuck, sirloin, brisket fat, whatever) and a 100% “pink slime” burger3, would the consumer be able to tell the difference? My understanding is that they could, though maybe I’m wrong about that.
If the customer can tell the difference — if most people can easily see that one pile or burger is high-quality and that the other pile or burger is low-quality — then not labeling the blended product is fraud. If not in fact, then in spirit.
Let me put it this way: how is cutting ground chuck with a lower-grade low-value processed meat any different than cutting olive oil with low-grade oils and colorants and passing it off as extra virgin? How is it any different than cutting honey with corn syrup, or passing off escolar as tuna or tilapia as snapper?
To most consumers, it is not any different. Actually, scratch that, it’s worse because it’s sanctioned. I’ve talked to a number of consumers about this, and to them it looks like a conspiracy. It looks like corporate lobbyists colluded with government officials to defraud consumers and serve dog-food to their kids. There is very little that I can say to dissuade them.
So while I’m no labeling expert, to my eyes, yes, this stuff should be labeled.
I think the government made a huge mistake in making an “experts know best” decision here, and worse, they’ve opened themselves up to pretty stinging accusations of revolving door politics and conflict of interest.
While the lesson for industry may be “don’t let the cameras” in, I hope the lesson for government is greater transparency. It may very well have hindered the short-term bottom line for industry to have to label this product in order to introduce it, and maybe the market for it would have been very slow to grow, but at least it would have been honest.
Moreover, while business reaped all of the economic benefits of this decision, they will ultimately bear only part of the cost. At least a failed business can rebrand. ValuJet crashed a plane into the Everglades, was so tarnished it changed it’s name to AirTran, and is now part of Southwest. Government agencies, however, cannot rebrand. A new logo ain’t gonna do it.
Fairly or unfairly, this ordeal will likely further erode the trust that Americans have in the agencies that regulate their food. This loss of trust is real, even if it is impossible to measure, and moreover, pretty much irrecoverable.
The damage is done.
Update (3/30/2012): I made a few minor fixes to links and such.
Many fine hot dogs do not include these things, but my point is that everyone thinks hot dogs are made of these things and we eat them anyway. ↩
3/30/2012: The website has been overhauled since I originally posted this. ↩
This is an oversimplification, since there are all kinds of burger blends, and the fat ratio matters a lot. Lean finely textured beef is very lean (90%), which would make for an awful burger. So for this experiment, assume you blend the LFTB with brisket fat or something to bring it down to 75% lean, and you use a 75% lean blend for the “normal” burger. ↩
Cool Killers: The Beauty of Deadly Pathogens
1. Campylobacter
C. jejuni and C. coli are microaerophilic bacteria that have a characteristic corkscrew shape. This false-color electron-microscope image shows Campylobacter cells clumping together.
2. Listeria
Listeria monocytogenes, a rod-shaped bacterium, is one of the world’s deadliest foodborne pathogens. In this image, the bacteria (shown in red) are traveling around a cell using their bright actin rockets.
3. Cytomegalovirus
More commonly known as human herpesvirus 5 or HCMV, cytomegalovirus is the most frequently transmitted intrauterine infection. This multicolor immunofluorescence image shows human endothelial cells being infected by cytomegalovirus.
4. Streptococcus pyogenes
Streptococcus pyogenes, a spherical bacteria that typically grows in long chains, can cause minor infections like mpetigo to potentially deadly diseases like streptococcal toxic shock syndrome. In this image, human neutrophils—white blood cells that are one of the body’s first lines of defense—are engulfing S. pyogenes cells through a process known as phagocytosis.
(via thx1766)
That’s right, ostrich eggs are from Idaho, leaves are from Massachusetts, upside down piles of cannon balls are from California, and the Moon is from Florida. The more you know!
Wish I could be in DC to attend this event tomorrow.
Total humblebrag: I have no business being quoted alongside such experts as Doyle, Tauxe, Raymond, and Marler in a front page article in the Post. But I will take it.
The rate of outbreaks caused by unpasteurized milk (often called raw milk) and products made from it was 150 times greater than outbreaks linked to pasteurized milk, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 13-year review also revealed that the states where the sale of raw milk was legal had more than twice the rate of outbreaks as states where it was illegal. The study, published Feb. 21 in the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, reviewed dairy product outbreaks from 1993 to 2006 in all 50 states. The authors compared the amount of milk produced in the United States during the study period (about 2.7 trillion pounds) to the amount that CDC estimates was likely consumed raw (1 percent or 27 billion pounds) to determine the 150 times higher rate for outbreaks caused by raw milk products. Raw milk products include cheese and yogurt…
Since the press release doesn’t link to it, here is the article itself. This is a good follow up to my double facepalm raw milk vs kids on bikes thing last week. The crux of it is this:
To illustrate this point, it is useful if we provide a hypothetical weighting of the findings in this study by the amount of nonpasteurized and pasteurized dairy products consumed. Total milk production in the United States in 2010 was estimated at 193 billion pounds, suggesting that ≈2.7 trillion pounds of milk were consumed during the 14 years from 1993 through 2006. If 1% of dairy products were consumed nonpasteurized, then during these 14 years, 73 outbreaks were caused by the 27 billion pounds of nonpasteurized dairy products that were consumed and 48 by the 2,673 billion pounds of pasteurized products that were consumed. Therefore, the incidence of reported outbreaks involving nonpasteurized dairy products was ≈150× greater, per unit of dairy product consumed, than the incidence involving pasteurized products. If, as is probably more likely, <1% of dairy products are consumed nonpasteurized, then the relative risk per unit of nonpasteurized dairy product consumed would be even higher.
Put another way: Even though Americans consume about 100 servings of pasteurized dairy for every serving of unpasteurized dairy, raw milk products were still responsible for 60% of dairy-associated outbreaks.
