Editor’s note: Ben Chapman, associate professor and food safety extension specialist at North Carolina State University, has posted this tip sheet for dining outside the home during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. We thank him for his diligence and service.

I never met Dave Theno. I saw him speak a few times at IAFP (International Association for Food Protection), and other places; he had a fantastic story to tell. He had the experience of cleaning up after a tragic food safety mess. Stories like that are compelling — especially when the storyteller is earnest and candid — and Dave was.

There’s a lot to learn from folks like that. Dave was a food safety rock star. Everyone knew him. Sadly, Dave passed away on Monday.

The food safety world lost another star, albeit quietly.

My introduction to the real food and agriculture world was driving around Ontario — that’s in Canada — with Doug Powell and Amber Bailey.

In the summer of 2001, we went on a trip to Leamington, Ontario, to spend some time in vegetable greenhouses where Amber was collecting wash water and tomato samples for analysis and talking to the growers about hazards and risk reduction.

These trips were part of a program that Doug, Amber and Denton Hoffman, then general manager of the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers, had created.

On that trip, Denton told me that what kept him up at night was the thought of a customer in Pittsburgh or Cleveland getting sick from one of his industry’s 200+ members’ products. Such an incident could close the border to the hundreds of thousands of pounds of tomatoes and cucumbers that were being shipped all over the Eastern U.S.

I think the story is that Denton approached Doug sometime after following a Cyclospora outbreak linked to Guatemalan raspberries. Initially California strawberries were fingered for the illnesses. Denton saw how an outbreak, even if the industry wasn’t the source, could cost millions. So he wanted a robust, science-based and defendable food safety program to protect his members.

I took over Amber’s role as food safety coordinator and worked alongside Denton from 2001-2005. After declining health over the past few years and a stroke in 2015, Denton passed away last week.

I can’t find the words to describe how my experience with Denton shaped me. I have to steal Doug’s words: “This guy was a champion of on-farm food safety, long before it was fashionable.”

Yep.

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Chipotle, one of our favorite barfblog topics, is in the news again as CEO Steve Ells appeared on the “Today Show” to talk woes associated with recovery from 2015’s multiple outbreaks.

Ells says the slow recovery is because their service sucks now. I dunno.

I like to get my real and fake news on the Internet, and consume digital stuff, so I checked out the Newsy video of Ells walking through a Chipotle kitchen.

At 10 seconds the guy who wrote, “We deployed robust, industry leading new food safety procedures in our restaurants including new handling procedures for produce, citrus and meats as well as comprehensive sanitizing protocols” pokes at a piece of meat on the grill. I’m guessing to check for doneness, with his bare hands.

Steve, a good food safety culture starts at the top. Model safe practices for your staff, mix in a thermometer and some gloves.

Author information: Ben Chapman is an associate professor and food safety extension specialist at North Carolina State University. As a teenager, a Saturday afternoon viewing of the classic cable movie, “Outbreak” sparked his interest in pathogens and public health. With the goal of less foodborne illness, his group designs, implements, and evaluates food safety strategies, messages and media from farm-to-fork. Through reality-based research, Chapman investigates behaviors and creates interventions aimed at amateur and professional food handlers, managers and organizational decision-makers. Chapman co-hosts a biweekly podcast called Food Safety Talk and tries to further engage folks online through Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest. He is also a regular contributor to barfblog.com.

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As a Canadian in the U.S., I’ve fully embraced the holiday season that runs from Thanksgiving through December. I enjoy spending a day planning and shopping for an event-style meal and then another day actually preparing and cooking it.

I throw on some tunes (this year it will probably be Drake, for my Canadian roots, and the Avett Brothers, as a nod to North Carolina) and, with the help of the rest of the family, I’ll roast a turkey, make mashed potatoes, green beans, squash, beets and a couple of other harvest vegetables.

And we’ll make a lot of stuffing.

Depending on your preference and food persuasion, there are lots of different stuffing or dressing options.

A common question that pops up is whether it’s better to cook stuffing in the bird to preserve moisture (and get flavored by the turkey juices) or prepare it as a separate dish. The concern is that if someone puts the stuffing in the turkey cavity, it may become contaminated by the turkey juices and Salmonella and Campylobacter will migrate through the stuffing.

It’s easier to recommend not messing with the cross-contamination instead of managing the risk. But what does the science say?

I’m a food safety nerd and take a science-based approached to my meals. Armed with a digital, tip-sensitive thermometer, I’m happy to jam stuffing up inside of my poultry and use the probe to check the temperature. And I use 165 degrees F as a target for my bread-based stuffing.

There’s some history to that number. In 1958, Raymond Rogers and Millard Gunderson of the Campbell Soup Co. published some work evaluating the safety of roasting frozen, stuffed turkeys (a new product at the time).

Using a known amount of Salmonella pullorum, nine turkeys and some then-fancy ceramic thermocouples, they found that they could get an 8-log (or 99.999999 percent) reduction when the deepest part of the stuffing hit 160 degrees F. They recommended 165 degrees to be conservative — and because some thermometers aren’t always very accurate.

From the manuscript, comments that still apply today: “The initial temperature and the size of the turkey influence considerably the time required to reach a lethal temperature in the stuffing. The lower the initial temperature of the turkey, the longer the roasting period required. Present recommended roasting procedures designating hours cooking time or which stipulate a thigh or breast temperature to be attained alone does not appear to be adequate bacteriologically.”

So, inside the bird, outside the bird, meat or no meat: Use a thermometer.

Note: Chapman has also made an entire video devoted to minimizing risk from foodborne illness when cooking turkey. More food safety tips from him are available here.

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(This blog post by Dr. Ben Chapman was published June 2, 2014, on Barfblog and is republished here with his permission.)

The business fallout from Detroit-based Wolverine Packing Co.’s May 19 recall of 1.8 million pounds of ground beef that may be contaminated with potentially deadly E. coli bacteria won’t be known for some time.  Investigations, both internal and by government officials, are underway. So is at least one lawsuit. Wolverine, which had $1 billion in revenue last year, declined to discuss any business practices that may change, or how it may be affected financially, until it completes its own internal investigation. “Since the voluntary recall was launched, the company still is conducting an internal investigation into the recall and assisting the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service as it continues to look into the matter,” said Chuck Sanger, Wolverine’s outside spokesman via Hartland, Wis.-based food industry public relations firm Charleston Orwig Inc.

Shea’s article continues:

Bad press and lawsuits trigger worry by suppliers, who may turn elsewhere. “Trying to sell back to that industry that is purchasing can be an uphill battle,” said Ben Chapman, an assistant professor and food safety extension specialist at North Carolina State University.  “The loss of that 1.8 million pounds is one thing. It’s difficult to put a monetary value on (goodwill); it’s more than just the product.” Companies that have closed in the wake of a major recall couldn’t survive the combination of lawsuits and loss of trust, Chapman said. In Wolverine’s case, he expects customers to have questions no matter what investigations show. “If everything is up to what’s expected, the buyers may say, “What are you to doing to address what went wrong?’ ” he said. “It’s not a random act. Something happened. Either the system they have failed or the system they have wasn’t good enough.”

“The Internet is there to provide data for what you already believe.” That’s what Doug emailed me in a conversation we were having about the endless coverage of the supposed maim and chaos that reusable shopping bags have on public health.. The reusable-shopping-bags-are-killing-us discourse took a turn into the mainstream when the NY Post and San Francisco Chronicle covered a publishing-by-press-release paper by Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright.

They also put their paper on the Internet, on the Social Science Research Network, carrying the tag line of U of Penn Inst for Law & Econ Research Paper. But not in a peer reviewed journal that deals with food safety, microbiology or public health.

Klick and Wright claim that something stinky has been going on since San Francisco banned plastic shopping bags, and the replacements, reusable polypropylene and or canvas bags, are killing people.

From the paper,

We examine the pattern of emergency room admissions related to bacterial intestinal infections, especially those related to E. coli around the implementation of the San Francisco County ban in October 2007. We find that ER admissions increase by at least one fourth relative to other California counties. Subsequent bans in other California municipalities resulted in similar increases. An examination of deaths related to intestinal infections shows a comparable

Krick and White choose to report hospital room illnesses and deaths from pathogenic E. coli – and omit statistics on other pathogens – and it’s not clear why. In the Chronicle, San Francisco health officer Tomás Aragón calls the research sloppy. I’m with him.
Cited in the research note is a paper from Williams and colleagues (2011) who have published the only peer-reviewed study on the microbial safety of reusable bags. They sampled 58 bags taken from shoppers in Arizona and California, finding coliform in just over half.  And E. coli matters more than coliform (which is commonly found on plant material and is not a good indicator of pathogen presence on food). At least E. coli demonstrates that a pathogen might be there. The Williams study showed generic E. coli can float around in bags – they recovered it in 12% of what they sampled (n=58).

An unanswered question is, can E. coli or other bugs be (or is it likely) transferred to any ready-to-eat foods, or somehow to food contact surfaces in the home? Seems like that matters. Just because the bacteria might be there, doesn’t mean it can contaminate a ready-to-eat food. No one has presented data to support that. We’ve done some cross-contamination work in bags recently and although I’ll wait for the peer review, the data shows that transfer is pretty unlikely.

I don’t know what happened in Frisco (I hear the folks from there hate that) but my guess is it ain’t the bags. I also visited in San Francisco in 2007, which correlates (but doesn’t prove causation) with the onset of the start of the illnesses. Maybe it was something I left behind.