#Opinion & Contributed Articles
Publisher’s Platform: Food Safety Education Month starts Today – Here is what I want from government, industry academia and you
The National Restaurant Association created National Food Safety Month in 1994 through its Educational Foundation, to heighten awareness about the importance of food safety education.
Publisher’s Platform: The Secretary Is Right About Real Food. Forty Percent of Americans Say They Are Eating Less of It Because of Cyclospora. Here Are Six Things HHS Could Do About That, and One Thing the Secretary Should Stop Doing.
The Secretary is asking Americans to build their health around fresh, whole, minimally processed food, and this summer a great many of them looked at the lettuce and quietly decided against it. Nobody gets talked back into the produce aisle. You make the produce safe, and then you show your work.
Publisher’s Platform: Twenty-One Outbreaks Is a Normal Year. Ten Thousand Nine Hundred Thirty Sick From One of Them Is Not.
What none of this is, at any point, is a consumer behavior problem. The field for next summer gets planted in a few months. Nobody chooses what is living in the water when it does, and washing will not help then either.
Publisher’s Platform: There Is No Premarket Approval for Food, Says the Senior Food Adviser at HHS. Ten Days Earlier His Own Secretary Called the Exception to It a Loophole That Industry Hijacked.
A recall is not proof the system worked. It is a notice, sent after the fact, usually by the company that failed, telling you that something already went wrong and you may have eaten it. Calling this a good year for recalls is not a defense of the FDA. It is an insult to the people counted in it.
Publisher’s Platform: The President Has Nominated Dr. Heidi Overton to Run FDA. She Would Inherit the Largest Cyclospora Outbreak Ever Recorded, and Here Is the To-Do List I Would Put on Her Desk.
I have watched commissioners arrive since 1993, each with an agenda, and I have outlasted every one of them. That is not a boast. It is the problem, and it is the reason I am writing this the day the name came out rather than the day something goes wrong.
Publisher’s Platform: California Lettuce Was Never Implicated. California Growers Plowed Under a Third of the Crop Anyway. Here Is What the Trade Associations, Washington and the Rest of Us Can Actually Do About It.
Fix the finding and one farm takes the loss instead of ninety percent of the lettuce. Do that and you put me out of the fresh fruit and vegetable business, and I would go gladly.
Publisher’s Platform: Frank Yiannas Wants an Independent Board to Investigate Foodborne Outbreaks. Set the Airplanes Aside.
I have known Frank since his Disney days, through his ten years at Walmart and through his time at FDA, and I guest lecture in his food safety culture class at Michigan State every year. I want his board built. I want to argue with one part of how he sells it.
Publisher’s Platform: On the Day CDC Confirmed 13,895 Cyclospora Cases, the Acting FDA Commissioner Told Americans to Feel Confident About Lettuce. We Need Leadership, Not Cheerleaders.
Leadership starts with doing something useful instead of saying useless things.
Publisher’s Platform: I Have Been Told I Am Too Hard on Industry and on the Government. Here Are Fifteen Things They Could Do About Cyclospora.
I have watched administrations of both parties handle outbreaks badly. What is different this time is not the mistakes. What is different is that three weeks into the largest Cyclospora outbreak this country has ever recorded, nobody at the top has said the number out loud.
Publisher’s Platform: Recall readiness is assumed, never measured
The people who price the risk can change that.
Publisher’s Platform: The T-Shirts Arrived. All of Them Say: Test Infant Formula for Botulism.
A t-shirt in a plastic bottle will not produce one either. But it is small, it is strange, it does not throw away easily, and it says the entire argument in one line. Sometime in September a staffer is going to unroll one and read it out loud. That is the whole idea.
Signs of the Times
Tucked among the boutiques, bars and novelty shops were storefront signs that had nothing to do with tourism and everything to do with the national conversation surrounding food safety.
Publisher’s Platform: The Traceability Rule Was Supposed to Be Law in January. This Cyclospora Outbreak Started in May.
I have spent more than thirty years watching companies mistake a negative product sample for innocence. Product testing finds contamination when you are lucky. Cyclospora makes you unlucky more often than most.
Publisher’s Platform: The Largest Foodborne Outbreaks of the Last Fifty Years. Now Count the Sick with Cyclospora in Michigan.
Fifty years of outbreaks and the pattern does not move. We find out how big it was afterward, from a journal article, years later, when it is too late for the rule to matter and too late for the family.
Cyclospora: Seasonal nuisance or preventable problem?
The parasite's long incubation period makes it challenging for investigators to identify exposures.