The Politics Of Produce And Public Health
Michael Pollan, author most recently of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is enormously influential, often interesting and a clever stylist, but prone to lay out exhaustive reams of facts, then draw unsupported conclusions from them. This style was perfectly in evidence in his piece in The New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. The article is called […]
Guest Pundit — Pairing The Global
Language With Technology
Yesterday we ran Guest Pundit –Traceability And The Need For A Common Language in which Gary Fleming of PMA explored how data standards could enhance the ability of the industry to trace products back to their source. Today we have an encore appearance from our Guest Pundit as Gary takes the industry one step further, […]
Seal Or No Seal: Marketing Agreement
May Confuse Consumers
The California Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement is out for signature. The nominees for the board have been made as we discussed here. The centerpiece of the marketing agreement is the fact that, as Western Growers has explained: Product which is certified by state authorized inspectors to be grown under the specific food safety […]
Freeze Points Out Sunkist’s
Need To Diversify
We heard that Sunkist had decided to stop selling strawberries at the end of last year on the same day California had a horrible freeze destroying most of its citrus crop. Our sympathies go out, of course, to all the growers who have been hurt by this disastrous freeze. Yet we couldn’t avoid the irony. […]
Pundit Rewind LXIII
The Pundit originally ran the Pundit Rewind on September 21, 2006. We continuously update it in order to keep everyone organized with respect to reference material on this subject; we have updated it with new items and run it again today. Spinach Crisis Summary With so much having been written in so short a time, […]
Botulism And Carrot Juice Summary LIII
We’ve been asked to make available in one place our coverage of the recall by Wm. Bolthouse Farms of certain 100% carrot juice products and the broader implications of this issue for food safety. This piece is updated regularly and will be re-run to include new coverage of this outbreak and issue. We initiated our […]
Buyer-led Food Safety Initiative
Recap XXXV
There is an ad-hoc group that started it all, the National Restaurant Association has its group working on a program and the Food Marketing Institute held a conference. All these buyer-led initiatives can get confusing, so to assist the trade in keeping track of them all, we are publishing this recap of coverage all in […]
Pundit’s Mailbag — NY Apple Fights
To Protect Healthy Reputation
I wanted to bring to your attention that New York recently enacted first-of-its-kind legislation that requires all cider produced in the state to obtain a 5 log reduction of harmful pathogens. To our knowledge New York is the only state that has this law. As a result of the E. coli outbreak linked to Odwalla […]
Guest Pundit — Traceability And The Need For A Common Language
A lot of the focus on traceback has been on requiring growers to maintain certain records. That may be useful, even important, but we wanted to explore how technology could be used to enhance the industry’s ability to effectively trace products back to their source. Gary Fleming, vice president, industry technology and standards at the […]
A Suggestion To Improve The Draft GAP
Here at the Pundit we’ve emphasized that all this attention to form in terms of how industry food safety standards will get developed should be secondary to substance: What are the food safety standards going to be? As we mentioned in Draft GAP Plan Shows Great Improvement … And Need For More Input , the […]
