Food Safety and Processing Perspective

The boneless, skinless chicken breast meat price topped $2.00 per pound on May 13, 2013, in the United States. Dr. Paul Aho, consulting economist, Poultry Perspective, told the audience during the WATT Crop Forecast and Meat Supply and Price Outlook webinar that this somewhat unexpected jump in breast meat prices could hang around for a while...Read more

The magazine most noted for its product reviews, Consumer Reports, conducted a nationwide sampling of ground turkey at retail and cultured the samples, testing them for the presence of Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli, Enterococcus and Staphylococcus aureus. After isolating these organisms, they were tested for antibiotic resistance following the government’s National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System...Read more

When I heard that a writer had taken a job as a U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service line inspector at a Cargill beef slaughter facility for two months and then written a lengthy expose about his experiences, I was intrigued. I looked up the May 2013 issue of Harper’s Magazine online, and I hit the dreaded pay wall. Since I write a blog as part of my job, I figured the $19.97 one year subscription cost would qualify as a business expense, so I got out my credit card. As a public service, I would like to recommend that you save the $19.97 and not bother subscribing to Harper’s to read, The Way of All Flesh: Undercover in an industrial slaughterhouse, by Ted Conover...Read more

For the most part, U.S. broiler and turkey processors have done a good job of reducing the percentage of Salmonella-positive carcasses found in post chill checks. Processors have employed various chemical sprays, rinses and dips along with treatment of the water in the chillers to rinse off, damage or kill enough Salmonella cells to stay in front of the performance standards established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service. Poultry processors have shown significant reductions in Salmonella tests since the post-chill carcass performance standards were first established...Read more

"Antimicrobial resistance poses a catastrophic threat," said professor Dame Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer. "If we don’t act now, any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that can’t be treated by antibiotics. Routine operations like hip replacements or organ transplants could be deadly because of the risk of infection. That’s why governments and organizations across the world, including the World Health Organization and G8, need to take this seriously."..Read more