Irradiation Will Prevent Future Outbreaks
Monday’s Wall Street Journal editorial page spoke out in favor of irradiation: Says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research at the University of Minnesota: “If even 50% of meat and poultry consumed in the United States were irradiated, the potential impact on foodborne disease would be a reduction in 900,000 cases, […]
WGA's Food Safety Plan Gets Attacked
As the spinach/E. coli crisis grew, with astonishing alacrity the Western Growers Association came to the conclusion that only mandatory regulation would both solve the food safety problem and appease industry critics. So, on October 30, 2006, Western Growers Association issued this statement: The effect of these actions, when completed, will be to impose enhanced […]
Part 2 — The Science Of Waterborne Bacteria
In addition to exploring the differences in environmental conditions and growing practices between Salinas and Yuma, we still wanted to know more about Yuma and particularly water issues there, so Mira Slott, Pundit Investigator and Special Projects Editor, spoke with Charles Sanchez of the Yuma Ag Extension Service: Charles Sanchez, University of Arizona, Yuma Ag […]
Reducing Labor With Technology
Here at the Pundit, we’ve dealt several times with the issue of immigration reform, including here and here. The Pundit also made some specific suggestions on what could actually pass in Straight Talk On Immigration. One wild card in this issue is what the industry could actually do in terms of mechanizing harvesting if labor […]
Another E. Coli Outbreak — This One In Washington State
Taco Bell in the Northeast; Taco John’s in the Midwest. Anyone know any taco places in the Chelan-Douglas Health District in Washington State? The plot thickens…
Taco John’s Drops Its Produce Vendor Too
We haven’t written about a separate E. coli outbreak that has been going on in the Midwest at Taco John’s. Despite the oddity of two taco chains having outbreaks at the same time, the testing indicates they are different outbreak strains. The company provided a chronology and an explanation of its decision to drop its […]
Taco Bell’s PR Fiasco
It seems increasingly likely that PR executives or advisers to Taco Bell profoundly misunderstood the nature of foodborne illness outbreaks and that, in their quest to win back customers for Taco Bell, they both threw their produce vendors to the wind and put Taco Bell in a more difficult position. The Wall Street Journal ran […]
Pundit Rewind XLVI
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 XXXVI
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 XVIII
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 has a conference planned. 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 […]
