Food Safety Concerns Clash
With Organic Values
Everybody is in favor of food safety — right up till it bumps into something else they value. This article, Farms May Cut Habitat Renewal Over E. coli Fears, in the San Francisco Chronicle has gotten many organic growers, who value programs that are geared toward encouraging biological diversity, questioning what will actually be required […]
Freeze Report
Obviously the freeze is bad news for many in the produce industry and we’ll be analyzing it as the situation clarifies. The key with freezes is that you can lose some crop and as long as you still have a significant amount to sell, the crop losses can be ameliorated with higher prices. This assumes […]
Draft GAP Plan Shows Great Improvement…
And Need For More Input
United, PMA and WGA — with the help of many in the industry — have been hard at work drafting the revised version of the Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) document for spinach and leafy greens. The current version of the GAP document in force in the industry can be found here. The current version, published […]
Fresh Express Gives $2 Million:
But Its Food Safety System
May Be A Bigger Gift
Back in October PMA announced that it was committing $1 million over the next 14 months for a food safety program to help the industry. Now Fresh Express, a subsidiary of Chiquita Brands International, is raising the ante with a $2 million dollar commitment to fund research into E. Coli 0157:H7 in produce. This is […]
Pundit Rewind LVIII
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, […]
Flimsy Reporting On Organics’
Health Benefits
The Wall Street Journal is one of the Pundit’s favorite newspapers. However, we are partial to the Editorial and Op-Ed pages, which have different editors than the news pages. As far as the regular newspaper goes, those editors should be ashamed of themselves. In the January 16, 2007 issue, The Wall Street Journal published an […]
FDA Points Finger At Dairy Farms
In Taco John’s Outbreak
The FDA issued a statement regarding the E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak at Taco John’s Restaurants: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today announced that it has moved closer to identifying the source of illness for the Taco John E. coli outbreak. FDA and the state of California, working in conjunction with state health officials in […]
Draft GAP Plan Shows Great Improvement…
And Need For More Input
United, PMA and WGA — with the help of many in the industry — have been hard at work drafting the revised version of the Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) document for spinach and leafy greens. The current version of the GAP document in force in the industry can be found here. The current version, published […]
Botulism And Carrot Juice
Summary XLVIII
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 XXX
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 […]
