The Goal Of The Industry
“Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.” — William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1
Part 3 — Product Testing At Natural Selection Foods & McEntire Produce
A lot of coverage in the first two parts of this report was on the subject of product testing, so we asked Pundit Investigator and Special Projects Editor Mira Slott to get “real world” application of product testing from the folks at the epicenter of the spinach/E. coli crisis, Natural Selection Foods, which now tests […]
Part 1 — Food Safety Vulnerabilities In Yuma And Salinas
What do we really know about E. coli and the growing end of the business? With everyone currently focused on green onions, it is worth noting that we do not fully understand the cause of the spinach/E. coli outbreak. There was a lot of attention paid to Salinas and possible problems with that growing area. […]
Buyer-led Food Safety Initiative Recap XVII
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 […]
Pundit’s Mailbag — Transitional Ground
We received a note regarding our coverage of food safety and the spinach/E. coli crisis: Why don’t you delve into the real spinach debacle! The field in question was organically grown on transitional ground! Organic growers use far more pesticides (sulfur, oils, etc.) per acre than conventional growers. These phonies are getting a food safety […]
Spinach Take Two — This time It’s Salmonella
It is obvious that nobody would even bother to write the story of a salmonella finding on a small sample of Texas-grown, Canadian packed Queen Victoria brand curly spinach at one retail store in Atlantic Canada if it wasn’t for the hyper-sensitivity to foodborne illness and spinach that we are living in right now. Nobody […]
Where is Yum!Brands’ David C. Novak?
We received a bunch of messages today from people telling us about catching the President of Taco Bell on television trying to reassure the public that eating at Taco Bell is safe. It almost certainly is safe. Even at the peak of the outbreak, considering the number of restaurants and the number of servings per […]
Pundit Rewind XLV
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 XXXV
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 […]
It’s Not Scallions, It’s Shredded Lettuce — They Think, Maybe
The Taco Bell situation remained in the news as the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention issued a statement: CDC is working with state and local health officials, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the restaurant chain to determine what food caused the outbreak. These investigations include an ongoing […]
