Mandatory Restaurant Grade Posting
A few weeks ago I was invited to speak to a group of Illinois sanitation inspectors whose job it is to inspect and grade restaurants. My presentation was about how lawyers prove food safety cases. During the talk I asked the sixty or so attendees what they thought about mandatory restaurant grade posting. Surprisingly, at least to me, most were against it. Their comments are summarized as follows:
- Inspections are just “snapshots in time;” what happens on just one day may or may not be indicative of restaurant cleanliness throughout the course of a year
- With so much riding on a sanitation score, the relationship between inspector and restaurant will become contentious and lead to much more administrative action
- Posting restaurant scores is punitive; it’s better to encourage (one inspector from a small town said their practice is to publicize good scores)
- Many low risk violations may lower a score even though there is no real threat to the public.
My reaction to the inspector’s comments is that those concerns can be address in a uniform and fair grading system. And the system can be fine-tuned over time. Overall, the public’s right to know trumps any perceived unfairness to restaurants. Transparency is rarely a bad thing.
Pritzker Report: What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us
Attorney Fred Pritzker, founder and president of national food safety law firm Pritzker Olsen Attorneys, has cast a critical eye on the results of a report produced by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Emerging Infections Program. While the report’s central message is that we as a society aren’t getting any better at controlling food poisoning, Pritzker found data that suggests the problem runs deeper. Here is his report:
by Attorney Fred Pritzker
The Federal government’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) recently released preliminary data about the frequency of certain foodborne illnesses in 10 monitoring states for the year 2008. This is the equivalent of the government’s report card for food safety. The scores, as they say, leave much room for improvement.
The “take away” point from this data is that “progress toward the national health objectives [for foodborne pathogens] has plateaued, suggesting that fundamental problems with bacterial and parasitic contamination are not being resolved.”
Stripped of its “journal speak,” the data shows that after making progress for a few years, efforts to safeguard our food have gone nowhere. From 2007 to 2008, test samples of ground beef yielding E. coli O157:H7 nearly doubled from 0.24% to 0.47%. This is significant because a small amount of E. coli can contaminate thousands of pounds of ground beef. And when this happens, the result is serious injury and death—eating a hamburger becomes a high-risk activity.
“The lack of recent progress toward the national health objective targets and the occurrence of large multistate outbreaks points to gaps in the current food safety system and the need to continue to develop and evaluate food safety practices as food moves from the farm to the table,” stated Attorney Fred Pritzker.
American Foods Group Recall
Prompted by the reports of cases of E. coli O157:H7, American Foods Group recalled about 48 tons of ground beef products. The American Foods ground beef recall involves ground beef products that were distributed for further processing and repackaging and will not bear the recalling firm’s establishment number on the package. This means that consumers have no way of looking at a package of ground beef and knowing if it is part of the recall. Read our press release regarding Fred Pritzker’s call for food safety disclosure laws on our website, www.pritzkerlaw.com.
E. coli Lawyer contacted the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) regarding its investigation into the illnesses that may be associated with American Foods Group, LLC ground beef products. According to Kimberly Parker, IDPH Communications Manager, IDPH both the sickened people and ground beef products found in the home tested positive for E. coli O157:H7.
E. coli Prevention: Cooking with Cameras
Three home-schooled girls found a new way to determine if hamburgers are cooked well enough to kill any E. coli bacteria—“burgercam” (from the Philadelphia Inquirer):
Above a stove, the girls mounted a camera that took a picture every 30 seconds. They measured how much each burger shrank during cooking, and recorded the size when it reached the proper temperature. Aided by computer software designed to measure geometric shapes, they calculated the percentage of shrinkage for various brands of frozen patties. And then they tested the finding by injecting raw burgers with E. coli.
“It pretty much worked every time,” Collipp says.
Say “cheese,” burgers.
