Earlier this month, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) published a notice in the Federal Register announcing a two-year pilot project that would farm out the responsibility for studying environmental assessments of proposed biotech crops, such as Monsanto’s Round-Up Ready alfalfa, to those companies themselves, or USDA-approved third parties. Right now, those studies are conducted by APHIS.

The project, the department hopes, will “test new approaches to developing environmental analyses and documents” currently required under the National Environmental Policy Act, and reduce the length of time — and costs — associated with those reviews. “The pilot project will focus only on NEPA analyses and documents associated with petitions for non-regulated status for [genetically engineered] organisms.”

In order for genetically modified plants to gain approval from the USDA, petitioners — such as biotech companies Monsanto or DuPont, for example — must submit specific information to help APHIS determine whether the biotechnology in question is eligible for deregulation. The process, critics say, is slow and a large number of crops are tied up in the queue awaiting decisions by the agency.

It’s possible that this change can help streamline the process, said Karen Batra, communications director at the Washington, D.C.-based Biotechnology Industry Organization. Much of the problem lies with staff shortages and availability of resources at APHIS, she said.

Petitioners would have one of two options if they choose not to have APHIS conduct the research. The first option would be to let the petitioners actually conduct the research themselves, submitting it to the agency for final approval. The second option would be to farm the research out to an APHIS-approved third party, private firms that would conduct the research on behalf of the petitioner.

“It’s important to point out, this program will be voluntary,” Batra said. Such an arrangement would still make it possible for smaller companies without the resources to conduct such research on their own to leave the studies to the USDA.

“We would point out that the proposed pilot program doesn’t change the fact that APHIS retains accountability for the rigor of the review,” noted Lisa Dry, communications manager for biotech and regulatory affairs at Iowa’s Pioneer Hi-Bred, a DuPont company, “and the responsibility to thoroughly research and analyze all the data in the [environmental impact statement] or [environmental assessment] regardless of who prepares it.  We also believe that public participation in the review process is important — all existing opportunities for  public comment and review of EISs and EAs remain unchanged.”

But not everyone is as optimistic. Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, said from his office in Pennsylvania the project will only continue APHIS’s longstanding role as a rubberstamp for biotechnology companies.

“The underlying issue is — I don’t say this lightly — APHIS doesn’t really have the will to regulate genetically engineered crops,” said Freese. “They’re too tied to the industry; a lot of their people come from the biotech industry.”

Freese worries, too, that third-party research firms may find themselves shut out if they produce too many reports that “reflect adversely on the crop.”

A better alternative would be to follow the Environmental Protection Agency’s model, he said. When the EPA finds itself dealing with issues it doesn’t have experience with, the agency calls together scientific advisory panels to investigate. There’s nothing similar at APHIS.

“Our basic position is that we need to have USDA personnel performing these assessments,” he said.

You know that the ideal temperature for transporting spinach, a particularly fragile green, is 32° F. You also know this spinach has been sitting in a Honolulu warehouse for at least six hours since it was unloaded from the plane. While it is February, this being Hawaii, the temperature has been hovering around a pleasant 73° for much of the day. 

Because you’re one of only a few inspectors available — your numbers have been declining in Hawaii for a while now — you’re also in a hurry to get the inspection completed and move on to the next shipment. You can break up the pallet to take a look at what’s inside but that takes a great deal of time, and simply looking at the produce will only tell you so much.

“Anyone who depends largely upon visual inspection is a fool anyway,” says John Ryan who, over the phone, brings to mind Jeff Bridge’s character, Dude Lebowski, in the movie The Big Lebowski. “Eyeballs just don’t catch it.”

OK, your career in produce inspection may have lasted only a few paragraphs but Ryan has been dealing with this issue for about five years now. He’s the administrator for Hawaii’s Department of Agriculture Quality Assurance Division and he’s been experimenting with some notable developments in cold chain traceability. 

In Hawaii, the vast majority of produce and other foods consumed by islanders – about 85 percent – are shipped in from Asia and the U.S. mainland, according to Ryan. Nearly all the produce undergoes inspection by the state’s agriculture department, a measure used to protect local agriculture and wildlife from invasive species and possible diseases. 

Those inspections can really bog down the whole shipping process.

As agriculture has declined in the islands, so has the number of inspectors, Ryan explains. Hawaii doesn’t have enough inspectors to get to each shipment as quickly as most would like. Consequently, when a pallet of produce arrives at the airport in Honolulu, it’s not unheard of for it to sit in a hot warehouse or on the tarmac for up to eight hours. 

Of course, it’s not only tropical paradises that have these problems. Back on the mainland, where most produce travels by semi-trailer trucks, there are even more issues to contend with. In addition to all the loading and unloading, the temperatures inside a trailer itself can fluctuate from one spot to another by as much as 30 percent. Besides the very basic problem of quality control, there are some serious food safety issues with which to contend. 

Transporting produce isn’t a seamless venture. A pallet of spinach may be loaded and unloaded a half dozen times or more as it makes its way from the farm in California to a grocery store in Wisconsin, with many hours of layovers in between. In fact, a pamphlet from the U.S. Department of Agriculture identifies as many as eight, but they throw a cargo ship into the mix for good measure. 

Throughout the journey — which for most farm goods can average about 1,500 miles in the United States — the spinach may encounter a wide range of temperatures, from its ideal of 32° F to substantially higher figures. A particularly delicate green, spinach doesn’t tolerate too much of a rise in temperatures before it begins to decay, shaving days off its shelf life. But quality isn’t the only concern.

Remember the spinach recalls of 2006? Spinach grown in San Benito County, CA, was exposed in the fields to E. coli 01:57:H from feces left by animals. Packaged and distributed to states as widely separated as Wisconsin and Maryland, the spinach was responsible for an outbreak that killed five people, including a 2-year old boy, and sickened at least 205 other people in 26 states. While there have been numerous outbreaks related to leafy greens since, the outbreak of 2006 was, arguably, the incident that brought the matter to public attention.

Already exposed to E. coli, that spinach traveled as much as 3,000 miles, no doubt encountering temperature fluctuations on the way. The optimal temperature for E. coli is 98.6° (which partially explains why it grows so easily in our guts) but it can grow in temperatures as low as 44° and as high as 122°. 

How do you tackle a problem like that? By keeping an eye on those temperatures, of course. Unfortunately, even that isn’t as easy as it sounds, although significant remedies are already available that rely on technology rooted in the Second World War: radio frequency identification. 

Ryan came to work in Hawaii familiar with the use of radio frequency identification, better known as RFID. He’d been working with electronic tracking systems in places like Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand. When he arrived in his new home, he recognized the pitfalls of the system Hawaii had been using.

“I basically went ‘what the hell are these people doing?'” he said. “‘Don’t they know there are solutions already?'”

A notable solution came from one of Ryan’s colleagues — a guy named Tom Reese whose small, Silicon Valley company, Intelleflex, was developing new technologies based on RFID. 

If you’re a commuter, you’re probably already familiar RFID. When you drive across a toll bridge, for example, it’s used in those plastic monitoring devices that sit on your dashboard and track when you enter the toll area, deleting the charge automatically. That device is called a tag and it picks up radio frequencies broadcast by another device called a reader.

The uses for RFID are potentially endless. Subway systems around the world use it to handle fares. Retailers such as L.L. Bean are beginning to install systems that signal when a potential customer has picked up an item on display, which, in turn, activates a nearby television monitor to play infomercials about that particular, or similar, products. Casinos have used RFID technology to track poker chips, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has recommended their use to track cattle tested for bovine tuberculosis.

In the past few years, RFID has begun to be used to monitor the temperatures of produce as it travels from farm to store. With tags planted in a pallet of, say, cantaloupes, drivers can keep tabs on the temperature of produce as they drive it to its destination. While it’s a great way to monitor what’s going on back in the trailer, it’s a fairly limited application. The RFID used in this case – as well as most of the examples given earlier – is passive RFID. The reader sends out a signal, which activates the tag sending data back to the reader. The tags are expensive, they can only be read from a very short distance – about 40 feet – and, for the most part, they store only a limited amount of information. But that’s changing. Radically.

With the help of Intelleflex, Ryan was able to organize a pilot program to begin utilizing the company’s technology to more efficiently, and with much more detail, track produce through its journey from the farms where Hawaii’s produce is grown, to its final destination at retail stores throughout the islands. A pallet manufacturer in Taiwan donated plastic pallets for the experiment. They were important for two reasons: the pallets, unlike many wooden pallets, could be reused many, many times thereby decreasing costs, and they could also be designed to hold those vital tags in stationary positions throughout shipping. 

What Ryan got in return was a system that could track cold storage conditions almost from the instant the spinach, or any other produce, was picked in the fields in California to its arrival at a Sak N Save in Hilo. 

Intelleflex is headq
uartered in an office park just off Highway 101 in Santa Clara, not too far from Great America amusement park and right next door to the University of California Santa Clara Extension Office.

There’s really nothing remarkable about the offices themselves — there are thousands like them throughout Silicon Valley — but the work going on there could change the way Americans transport and safeguard their food. 

The privately held company is a favorite of some of the leading venture capital funds, including Arcapita Ventures, New Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Venutures, and the Woodside Fund. 

They’ve helped Intelleflex fund three RFID products that came out in the final quarter of 2010:   the HMR-9090 handheld reader, the FMR-6000 fixed reader, and the TMT-8500 temperature monitoring tag. 

Peter Mehring, Intelleflex’s chief executive officer, says investment is this RFID traceability technology provides a return on investment. Mehring, who formerly headed up Apple’s hardware group, says the RFID technologies work together to enable produce companies to locate their freshest product at all times.

Being its own computer chip developer helps Intelleflex keep its costs down, and allows it to offer very competitive prices. 

For example, other temperature-monitoring tags can cost up to $50 each. The TMT-8500 has a $25 base price and a two-year life. 

At this week’s RFID Journal LIVE! Conference in Orlando, Intelleflex’s new technologies for both fighting spoilage and traceability may be good enough for it to be named “Best of Show.”

In naming it as finalist for the award, RFID Journal said: “Intelleflex readers and tags are unique in delivering a range of 100+ meters and operating in RF-unfriendly environments, thereby enabling new business applications that were previously not practical or cost effective when active RFID was the only option on the market.”

While city residents lined up in the basement of City Hall to cast their own ballots in the mid-term elections Tuesday, two floors up the supervisors voted 8-3 in favor of the measure.

The new ordinance, which amends existing city code, is titled “Setting Nutritional Standards for Restaurant Food Sold Accompanied by Toys or other Youth Focused Incentive Items.” 

Contrary to widespread descriptions of the measure, it does not ban toys as promotional items for fast food meals, like those served in restaurants such as McDonald’s or Burger King. 

What it does is establish nutritional standards for calories, fat, salt, fruits and vegetables for meals that use toys or any “game, trading card, admission ticket or other consumer product, whether physical or digital” to promote meals for sale to kids.  For example, meals may include toys if the food and drink combined add up to less than 600 calories, and if less than 35 percent of the calories come from fat.

It took more than a few compromises to bring the legislation to a vote.  A clause requiring the inclusion of whole grains in kids’ meals was ultimately dropped and restaurants now have until December 2011 to comply with the new rules. 

Apparently that was enough to persuade holdouts on the board to cast “aye” votes.

While proponents of the measure were thrilled with the supervisors’ decision, critics were disappointed, to say the least. 

“The big surprise today was that the San Francisco supervisors have taken the ‘happy’ out of Happy Meals,” lamented Scott Rodrick after the vote. 

Rodrick’s family owns half of the 20 McDonald’s franchises in San Francisco.  He said he was worried that the ordinance–if it is not vetoed by the mayor–would simply drive business, and money, beyond the city’s borders to neighboring communities such as Daly City or Marin County, which have no such restrictions. 

“It’s not a good day for the consumers of San Francisco,” Rodrick told reporters. The city’s actions, he said, effectively remove the ability of parents to make their own decisions about what is appropriate for their children. 

Not everyone agreed.

“This is fantastic,” beamed Deborah Lapidus, senior organizer for Corporate Accountability International. The Boston-based organization works to expose what it regards as “corporate abuse at the expense of the public good.”

Lapidus disagreed with the idea that San Francisco’s move takes power away from parents.

She claims corporations like McDonald’s spend billions to reach children, and thus challenge parents’ abilities to control their kids’ diets.  She said the new legislation will be a huge boost to public health.

“Curbing predatory marketing will spare the lives of millions of children” she said, “by helping to reduce obesity, diabetes, and numerous other maladies.  Kids are contracting these diseases at earlier and earlier ages.”

Critics argue there is no way to know what the long-term implications of the legislation might be and, as Rodrick alleges, San Francisco’s actions may have no real meaningful impact. The legislation’s supporters, however, differed again. 

Supervisor Bevan Dufty was the crucial swing vote who decided in favor of the ordinance.  He told his fellow supervisors before the vote that the quick service industry–as restaurants such as McDonald’s prefer to be called–spends $1.2 billion each year to advertise to kids and that they were “paying attention” to what was happening in the ornate legislative chambers of San Francisco’s City Hall. 

“I do believe the industry is going to take note of this,” Dufty said, despite the prevailing belief among some outsiders that San Francisco is “wacked out there.”

Wacked or not, the legislation must still make it past the mayor’s desk. 

Deborah Lapidus remained hopeful, noting that since the two week extension of the vote, elections are now over.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, now California’s lieutenant governor-elect, will have all the time he needs to consider the measure.  Newsom, a restaurateur, had previously spoken out against the proposal. 

“I think Mayor Newsom is a champion for public health,” Lapidus said.

But eight votes is enough to override a veto, should it come to that.

McDonald’s franchisee Rodrick noted that 60 years ago, McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc would never have imagined his company offering items such as salads or apple dippers. 

“Our menu is a reflection of what our customers want,” Rodrick said. 

The city’s 11-member board of supervisors moved Tuesday to postpone a vote on the controversial measure until Nov. 2.   

There were concerns about the timeline for implementing the ordinance if it passed, said Lin-Shao Chin, legislative assistant to the ordinance’s primary sponsor, Supervisor Eric Mar.

Chin said Mar’s office has been in discussion with various groups, including the California Restaurant Association, McDonald’s, and Yum! Brands, owner of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. 

Implementation is a concern for the restaurants, agreed Daniel Conway, spokesman for the California Restaurant Association, which strongly opposes the measure. 

Speaking from Sacramento, Conway said Mar had come to appreciate, through discussions between the two sides, that complying with such a requirement wasn’t something the industry could do overnight.

But Tuesday’s motion to continue the proposed ordinance was political, as well, Conway said.

Come Nov. 2, San Franciscans will not only be voting for a new governor but will also be choosing new supervisors.  The city’s popular mayor, Gavin Newsom, will term out of office. 

Mar may be looking to postpone action on the ordinance until after two potentially negative votes and a promised veto by the mayor are no longer threats, said Conway. 

“I think [Mar] did some political calculating,” Conway said, “and is waiting.”

Santa Clara County, about 40 miles south of San Francisco, enacted a similar measure earlier this year.  Whereas Santa Clara’s restrictions apply only to restaurants in unincorporated parts of the county, San Francisco’s legislation would affect all restaurants serving the city of nearly 800,000 people.

The new law, Senate Bill 602, was approved by lawmakers in a 74-1 vote in late August and then hung in limbo as the bill’s supporters wondered whether the governor would sign the bill despite the fact the California Assembly hasn’t passed a budget. 

Two years ago in the midst of yet another budget impasse, Schwarzenegger refused to sign any policy bills until the state’s massive budget shortfall was addressed.  The governor, whose term ends in January, signed the bill Monday; the budget, which still has not been passed, is 90 days late. 

Sponsored by Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Pacoima, SB 602 goes into effect June 11, 2011 and requires all food handlers working in restaurants and other food service facilities to be certified in safe food handling practices within 30 days of hire. 

Food handlers hired prior to the new law’s effective date will need to obtain certification before then.  Employees working at temporary facilities are exempt from the requirement. Currently, restaurants need only one person on staff to be so certified and that typically falls to a manager or someone in a similar position. 

Restaurants and retail businesses are required to maintain records documenting that their employees are properly certified, and employees will have to keep their certification current as long as they work in food service. 

For the sake of those who can’t get to a certification class, which will be handled by local agencies, the new law also specifies that at least one online version of the class will be made available. 

Industry groups and media have praised the bill.  The California Restaurant Association, which claims 22,000 member businesses, supported the measure from the beginning.

“[Senate Bill] 602 is lawmaking at its best,” said CRA President and CEO Jot Condie in a release.  “All stakeholders were at the table, working together toward a shared goal of ensuring food safety. We wanted a common-sense approach to training restaurant employees to safely handle food and to avoid a patchwork of local regulations.  SB 602 achieves both of these goals.”

The bill was based upon models already enforced in three Southern California counties. 

Following a Hepatitis A outbreak in San Diego in the 1980s, local government made certification of all food handlers mandatory.  The idea, said Liz Pozzebon, assistant director for the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health, was to increase safety by increasing knowledge about food safety procedures.  The result was a notable decrease in incidents of foodborne illness in San Diego restaurants. 

Over the years, the department has continued to monitor food handlers’ knowledge.  In 2003, Pozzebon said, 1,200 food service workers were surveyed about major violations and to determine what they knew “before better emphasizing food-safety risk factors during inspections and on food handler training materials.”  Five years later, the survey was repeated and the department found a decrease of more than 60 percent in violations at retail establishments and a 50 percent increase in food handler knowledge, she said.

“The most successful businesses, food safety-wise, are those that have good procedures and training in force, reinforced by the presence of a food safety manager,” Pozzebon said. 

Similar programs in Florida, Oregon, and Washington have resulted in dramatic improvements, according to figures from Padilla’s office.  “A study by the Florida Department of Health found that the Florida state food handler program has lowered foodborne illness by an average of 7 percent a year since its inception – a total reduction of 79 percent in one decade.”

Some cities, such as Portland, Ore., where as many as 500 carts work the streets to feed hungry residents, have embraced the phenomenon and crafted special legislation to foster its development. Others, like Chicago and Sacramento, which has all but banned them entirely, clearly don’t know what to do with the mobile vendors and seem more intent on tightly controlling them or blocking them outright.

Then there’s San Francisco, which has taken a slightly different, if not complicated, approach.

In a city as famous for food as it is for its earthquakes and bridges, mobile food is picking up steam in the form of trucks and food carts, pushed by their operators to locations around town. The vendors – often trained culinary professionals in their own right but not always – frequently offer dishes new to experienced San Francisco palates. Many, however, operate without the proper permits and do business, for all intents and purposes, illegally.

Take Adobo Hobo, for example.

“We still aren’t fully permitted for San Francisco,” said Ed Chui. That hasn’t stopped him and his business partner, fellow San Lorenzo resident Jason Rotario, from operating their cart in the city, however.

The guys began working a little over a year ago, hauling their renegade cart to parks and street parties around town.  Serving Filipino staples, like chicken adobo over rice, and Filipino-Mexican fusion in a city with few Filipino restaurants, they struck a chord with foodies ever on the lookout for a new food experience.

Of course, there was another advantage, said Chui, 30. In a tanking economy, they were offering good food at affordable prices.  Much of that is possible because of the food cart’s low overhead.  With not having to worry about maintaining a brick-and-mortar presence, their costs are substantially lower. That’s also why mobile food carts – and trucks – are so appealing to would-be culinary entrepreneurs.  In a city where real estate values are through the roof, it can be nearly impossible for anyone without substantial financial backing to get their foot in the door.

That’s where Matt Cohen comes in.

“You gotta begin with the observation that this type of street food vending has been going on for a very long time,” said Cohen, 31.

In the past, food carts were an attractive option for immigrants, he said.  They could do the cooking in their homes, the carts were cheap, and they could take them to where ever there might be a hungry crowd, such as street fairs, parks, and bars.

 There are even long-term survivors such as Mexican-born Virginia Ramos – better known as “the tamale lady” – who’s been making and selling tamales in bars around the city since Cohen was 14 years old.  But as carts have taken off in popularity, so has the number of vendors operating without permits or health inspections.

Cohen, who runs Tabe Services, a sort of one-stop planning, branding, management, and marketing agency for food cart vendors, estimates the number of food carts now operating with at least some frequency in San Francisco at “100 and change.”

Food carts bring jobs and innovation into San Francisco, Cohen said, but it’s extremely difficult for would-be food cart vendors to get the permits they need.  “It’s a multifaceted issue,” he said.

Multifaceted only begins to describe it. The logistics of trying to get permitted are complex enough that other organizations have jumped in to assist aspiring cart vendors as well.

Although not nearly so involved as Cohen, La Cocina, a non-profit organization based in the Mission district – ground zero for much of the alternative culinary movement – recently helped Cohen organize a conference on making street food possible in San Francisco and other communities.  This was in addition to its core mission of providing kitchen space and training to women, usually immigrants, who hope to establish their own culinary businesses.

Because of efforts like that, as well as the encouragement and guidance of Cohen, businesses like Adobo Hobo actually meet the city’s health requirements, despite the fact they’re operating their cart without a permit.

The Adobo Hobo guys cook their food in a commercial kitchen that is inspected, Chui said. They’re insured, and they follow all the health regulations as well. More than anything, he said, it’s the costs entailed in jumping through the various hoops of city regulations that prevents them from actually going legit. (Actually, Chui and Rotario also cook for their own pop-up restaurant, renting an established restaurant kitchen a couple nights a week to serve their growing number of fans in a perfectly legal setting).

An unusual aspect of San Francisco’s street food cart oversight is that carts like Adobo Hobo are actually regulated by the San Francisco Police Department which, unless there’s a specific complaint, isn’t too inclined to chase after street food vendors.

For adventurous foodies, chasing after carts has become the culinary equivalent of groupies following their favorite band from concert to concert.  Carts offer variety and the excitement of discovering new cooks and flavors.  For many of the carts’ customers, concern about whether carts have passed health inspections is secondary to the quality of the food. That, Cohen believes, speaks to the confidence many customers have in the safety of the food offered.

“If food safety were an issue,” said Cohen, “it would threaten people’s interest in trying these things.” 

The Scene on the Street

It’s a damp, gray, muggy day on San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza but that hasn’t stopped a lunchtime crowd from gathering around the five food trucks parked in front of the city’s grand, domed City Hall.

Offering everything from curry and bao – steamed Chinese pork buns – to Korean- and Filipino-Mexican fusion dishes, the trucks are doing a brisk business.  Customers, clutching their midday meals in a variety of to-go boxes, either wander off to eat at their desks or take them beneath the nearby grove of trees where several dozen folding chairs have been set up so diners can listen to a jazz bassist while they enjoy their lunches. On the bare, gravel strip that runs down the center of the plaza, several people have set up a bocce ball court.

Events like this – three- or four-hour gatherings of street food vendors – are just the latest development in San Francisco’s lively food scene.  Only the night before, Off the Grid, Cohen’s brainchild and the organization behind this particular event, held a similar gathering in funky Haight-Ashbury, and later in the evening would set up shop again at historic Fort Mason in the city’s affluent Marina district.

Unlike many of the carts working the streets, the trucks selling food on the plaza that day had all been inspected and passed, according to Stephanie Cushing, principle environmental health inspector for the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

“That’s one of the things we required of Matt Cohen’s Off the Grid,” she said.  “Every participant must be permitted.”

Very recently, an Off the Grid participant was turned away after the truck failed inspection, said Cushing.  In addition to some other infractions, the truck operators weren’t thawing foods correctly.

“It’s working,” she said of the relationship between the health department and Cohen’s event. “I don’t think Matt had a problem with us.”

He certainly didn’t.  In order to participate in the increasingly popular food event, participants must meet city standards, including preparing their food in a commissary, having a business license, and other city-ordained regulations.  The vendors’ vehicles, Cohen pointed out, can be inspected and closed down if they’re found to be operated under unsafe conditions.

Still, for better or for worse, food safety didn’t seem to be the highest priority for many of those attending the Off the Grid event at Civic Center that day.  Jeanne Beacon, standing in line for the Chairman Bao truck, didn’t know whether the trucks parked there that day were inspected or not – they were, of course – but wasn’t too worried about it.

“If it’s been legitimized at an event [like Off the Grid], then it’s sort of been vouched for,” said the unemployed office manager and roller derby skater. She likens the experience to cooking for friends; one certainly doesn’t have to be licensed to do that, she noted.

After saying she wasn’t worried about the safety of buying food from street vendors, Oakland resident Katheryn Anderson paused for a split second and added, “Maybe I should be.”  That didn’t stop her from moving along in the line though. “I’ve heard only great recommendations,” she said.

Another Oakland resident, Chris Hallenbeck, said his confidence in the food’s safety comes from the fact that “some of these folks have culinary training.”

Often enough, that’s true. But many of the cooks who own and operate the trucks on the site that day didn’t start with culinary educations. Chui and Rotario, a real estate broker, began cooking after being encouraged by friends to follow in the footsteps of another notorious street food vendor, Curtis Kimball, aka “the crème brûlée guy”.

Julia Yoon, owner of Seoul on Wheels and the first in San Francisco to begin selling something other than tacos or hot dogs from a truck, started as a home cook. She offers Korean barbecue – and Korean barbecue-filled tacos – from her truck all over the Bay Area. Despite her lack of formal culinary training, however, she’s just as concerned with safety as she is quality.

“I thoroughly believe in regulation,” Yoon said.  “I certainly don’t want anyone to get sick from my food or anyone else’s food.”  Yoon is especially heartened by what she sees as the city’s efforts to be more accommodating to mobile food vendors like herself, but she credits Cohen with doing all the leg work.

“I don’t think it would ever have gone to this point if it were not for his efforts,” she said. “I applaud him. I certainly don’t have the time and resources to do what Matt is doing.”

While Cohen touts the growth of mobile food vending in San Francisco as an incubator for new ideas in a city that prides itself on its food culture, the health department isn’t quite as preoccupied with that ideal.  Many interviewed for this story commented on San Francisco’s light-handed touch in dealing with the issue, seeing it as almost tacit encouragement for the growth of street food.  For Cushing, however, it really comes down to safety.

Yes, it’s nice to be able to help people pursue their dreams, she said, “but we really have no feeling one way or the other.”

The Challenge of Mobile Oversight

From the city’s perspective, the rise in popularity of food trucks – and the resulting regulatory headaches – has been a challenge. Technology has added another dimension to the issue, as well. Nearly all the city’s food vendors use social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to let customers know their whereabouts as they move from one location to another. Curtis Kimball, alone, has nearly 14,000 people following the movements of his crème brulee cart on Twitter.

Unlike in other cities, however, the day-to-day oversight of mobile food carts and trucks in San Francisco falls to the police department, although health inspections fall under the purview of the health department.

That’s been problematic.  As far as the health department is concerned, it’s also meant that fees that should be going into their coffers – including fees that are already earmarked for public health – are collected by the police department, instead, said Cushing.

Those fees are then supposed to go to the health department, but that hasn’t been happening, she said.  Without the money to cover the costs, inspectors are able to perform only the minimum number of inspections unless a complaint has been specifically filed about a particular vendor.

Under new proposals by Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who is also a candidate for mayor in the upcoming November election, regulatory oversight would shift from the city’s police department to the department of public works. That’s a detail that’s left many street food observers scratching their heads but, as a source close to Dufty observed, it makes sense.

Streets and public lots, the very spaces where cart and truck owners ply their trade, fall under the oversight of the Department of Public Works. The Department of Public Health would have the initial sign off, the source said, but continued oversight would fall under public works. The legislation, which was submitted by Dufty last spring, is expected to come to a vote before the end of the year after consultations with a variety of city agencies, including police, fire, small business, and planning. The new legislation would also ensure that more of the fees paid by vendors actually go to the health department.

In fact, the overhaul of San Francisco’s street food vendor regulations could mean the entire process of obtaining permits and dealing with inspections, regulations, and fees should result in a more streamlined process altogether. The idea is to present vendors with a cohesive, sensible plan that won’t leave the people most affected by it trying to cobble together the permits and information they need despite the changes in the laws.

At least, that’s the hope.  

Announced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a year ago, the regulations address several aspects of egg production, particularly spots where chickens and egg production seem most vulnerable to infection by Salmonella enteritidis. While the new regs only immediately effect the largest of the nation’s egg producers, those producers also account for the overwhelming number of eggs produced.

According to United Egg Producers, an Atlanta-based industry group which lobbies on behalf of large-scale egg producers, “there are approximately 192 egg producing companies with flocks of 75,000 hens or more. These companies represent about 95% of all the layers in the United States.”

Small farmers, those with less than 3,000 hens or those who sell directly to consumers, aren’t affected by the new regulations. Farmers with less than 50,000 hens but more than 3,000 had to begin compliance on July 10, 2012, unless the eggs are treated in some way, or pasteurized.

S. enteriditis typically causes illness after people have eaten raw or lightly cooked eggs contaminated with the bacteria. Raw eggs are commonly used in Caesar salad dressing as well as homemade ice cream, egg nog, and mayonnaise, and many people enjoy eating eggs with barely cooked yolks. Unfortunately for fans of their eggs cooked sunny side up, the yolk is also where the bacteria are most prevalent. Nationwide, more than 118,000 egg-related cases of Salmonella are confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which estimates that nearly 3 million eggs sold each year are contaminated with Salmonella bacteria.

As of last week, the nation’s largest producers are required to adhere to the following guidelines established by the FDA:

• “Buy chicks and young hens only from suppliers who monitor for Salmonella bacteria

• “Establish rodent, pest control, and biosecurity measures to prevent spread of bacteria throughout the farm by people and equipment

• “Conduct testing in the poultry house for Salmonella enteritidis. If the tests find the bacterium, a representative sample of the eggs must be tested over an eight-week time period (four tests at two-week intervals); if any of the four egg tests is positive, the producer must further process the eggs to destroy the bacteria, or divert the eggs to a non-food use

• “Clean and disinfect poultry houses that have tested positive for Salmonella enteritidis

• “Refrigerate eggs at 45 degrees F during storage and transportation no later than 36 hours after the eggs are laid (this requirement also applies to egg producers whose eggs receive a treatment, such as pasteurization).”

The egg industry says it is committed to working with the FDA on the new regulations but seemed to downplay the need for them.

“Egg farmers have practiced the requirements of the new regulations for many years now and have achieved significant success in food safety for our customers,” said Gene Gregory, president of United Egg Producers, in a release.

The country’s egg producers were already putting new safety measures in place “while they waited for the final Federal rule,” the United Egg Producers release continued. The release also mentioned a number of suggestions industry leaders had offered to help improve safety but noted “some suggestions that the industry still considers important were not accepted.”

The release did not outline or describe those suggestions.
Salmonella enteriditis has proven to be a particularly vexing issue for the U.S. egg industry. About 1 in 20,000 eggs are believed to be contaminated with the bacterium. While the industry enjoyed important success in the early 1970s in reducing other forms of Salmonella infections directly related to fecal contamination, S. enteriditis popped up in the 1980s leading some scientists to believe it might have evolved during the previous decade.

Tracking down the sources of S. enteriditis contamination is no small feat. The United States is the world’s second largest egg producer after China. Some 276 millions hens in the U.S. lay more than 6 billion eggs per month.

Unlike other forms of Salmonella, S. enteritidis does its work from inside the egg. The pathogen, the second most common cause of Salmonella-related illnesses in the U.S., infects the hen’s uterus but scientists aren’t especially clear on how that happens.  A study published by scientists in the Chinese World Journal of Gastroenterology in 2007 found evidence the pathogen actually spurs physiological changes in membranes in the birds’ guts, allowing the bacteria to gain a foothold and multiply.

Once a week, Jeanine Iyala loads her two kids into the car and makes the roughly 60-mile round trip from Pleasanton to San Francisco to visit her step-mother at Davies Medical Center. Traveling any distance with a 2-year-old and a 9-month-old is hardly convenient but for Iyala, it’s a bittersweet experience, as well.

Iyala’s step-mother, Linda Rivera, is undergoing physical therapy following her year-long struggle with E. coli O157:H7, a foodborne pathogen that kills up to 100 people in the United States each year.  It very nearly killed Linda, three times. She’s pulled through, thanks as much to her doctors as to the sheer force of her family and her own will to survive, but she’s not out of danger yet. Even if she were to experience no more health complications–and many victims of E. coli continue to feel the effects years afterward–her battle with the disease has left her seriously weakened. She only began to walk again about 6 weeks ago.

For the past 15 months, Linda has been hospitalized continuously, save for a few very brief breaks. She has missed the graduations of three of her sons, she has missed sports tournaments, the birth of Iyala’s youngest child; she has missed–perhaps most keenly–the experience of simply being at home with her family.

“At first I was angry,” said Iyala, comparing the experience of coming to terms with Linda’s illness to Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s classic five stages of grief.  “You know, she’s been robbed and we have been robbed of family times.”

Ask Linda’s friends and family about the impact of her illness and each will eventually bring up the subject of loss:  the loss of participating in milestone events, the loss of time with those she loves, the loss of a woman each had come to admire and rely upon.

Linda is very hands-on with her kids, said Iyala, and she was looking forward to similar relationships with her grandchildren, rolling around with them, being right there in the thick of it.

“I know she thinks that’s the type of grandma she wants to be, and it hurts her not to be able to do that.”

Soccer Mom

“I used to be a soccer mom,” said Linda, laying her in bed at Davies. “I miss that.”

Linda was the epitome of the soccer mom.  With three boys involved in sports, to say nothing of friends’ kids, as well as her own involvement in pretty much every aspect of her children’s school careers, Linda spent much of what spare time she had either raising money for various activities at school, or driving kids–everybody’s kids–from one place to another.  

Robyn Treska, Linda’s friend of 23 years, recalled the time Linda was involved in a serious car accident.  She had promised to pick up Treska’s son to take him to a local bowling alley.  From the scene of the accident–a fairly grim incident that left Linda seriously injured–Linda called her, apologizing that she wouldn’t be able to give him a ride.

Even her job–as an aide teaching autistic students in her twin boys’ school–kept Linda near the kids.

“I would always stay in her room during lunch,” said 17-year-old Tony Simpson, one of Linda’s twin sons (his brother, Ricky, was out that day).  This past year, he said, was the first time he had ever gone to school without having her nearby.

Despite a mischievous grin and his fair, blond complexion, an air of gravity hangs over Tony as he talks about his mother. He estimated he’s been interviewed at least 10 times about the illness that nearly took her, but that doesn’t seem to have lessened the impact of discussing the matter.  It is, he noted, the first time he’s been able to talk to a reporter without tearing up during the interview.

“She’s the person I talked to most about everything,” he said. “I could ask her anything, really.”

Seated next to him in the small sitting room just off Linda’s hospital room is Emilee Blankenship, Ricky’s girlfriend of three years. That she’s there, 400 miles away from her own family back in Henderson, NV, seems perfectly normal to her. Linda, Emilee said, had welcomed her into the Rivera family right away.  Like Tony, Blankenship took many of her problems to Linda.

“Once you get support from her,” Blankenship said, “she can cheer you up in a second.”

She’s changed

It’s not as if Linda can no longer do these things. Nearly everyone marvels at the fact that Linda still asks “How are you?” when she sees them, not out of custom but in concern.  Despite her own suffering, she’s fully aware of the pain felt by those around her.

“She’s still that way,” said Treska from her home in Henderson. “She still worries about the way [her husband] Richard feels and the way the boys feel.”

But Treska sees changes in her friend, as well.

“I’ve lost the person I talk to the most,” she said. Treska’s voice breaks. “We can still talk. She can’t hold a conversation like she used to.”

Linda’s speech has been affected by the illness, as has her memory. She has difficulty with numbers; her memory is a little worse for wear.

“I don’t think she’ll ever drive again,” Treska said. “No, she won’t, because of the problem with her eyes.”

Linda’s son, Tony, understands. “I feel as I’ve lost half my life,” he said. His mother doesn’t seem like the same person anymore.

For the first time, Linda, an outgoing, active woman, relies on others for everything.  It’s difficult for Treska to see her friend this way. For a long time in the earlier stages of her illness, Linda couldn’t even speak, said Treska, and it left her feeling even more helpless.  The woman to whom everyone else looked for support was afraid to be alone.

“She’s dependent now,” said Treska. “Hopefully, she can get some of that back. Right now, she’s very, very scared.”

A source of strength

In the midst of all this, holding it all together, is Linda’s husband of 13 years, Richard Rivera. A short, stocky guy with a thick mustache, he beams warmth but even beneath that you can see the cogs spinning, keeping track of everything that has to be dealt with, sizing up new elements, appointments that have to be kept, schedules that must be adhered to.

Linda’s physical therapy schedule? He knows it. The kids’ flight schedules for a trip to Hawaii–planned years before–to celebrate their graduation from high school? He can reel it off. Somehow, he manages other commitments, as well, maintaining a delicate balance in the midst of a thousand demands on his attention. Somehow, he manages to remain upbeat.

The Riveras’ friends and relatives watch him in amazement.

“I’ve seen the toll it’s taken on him emotionally,” said his daughter, Jeanine Iyala. “He’s the most devoted man I’ve ever met.  It’s really renewed my faith in commitment to one another.  He does not leave her side.  I have to beg him to leave and to go.”

Unsure of just how committed Linda’s doctors might be to her recovery, he educated himself about his wife’s condition as much as he could, said Iyala.

“My god, he’s a wonderful man,” said Robyn Treska, “but it’s got to be hard to sit in that hospital day in and day out.  [Linda] just gets more anxious now.  She never used to get anxious before.  She just doesn’t feel in control anymore.”

If Richard is frightened, he doesn’t show it, she said, if he’s hurting, it never comes out.  “He needs a medal.”

Richard insists his strength comes from Linda. His wife, he said, is his inspiration.  “When times get dark, I’m not the one in that bed, she is.”

There have been a lot of dark times, too many.  But he takes whatever victories he’s offered.  When Linda first used her walker to walk on her own, “you’d think the 49ers had
won the Super bowl,” Iyala said.

“Richard’s my best friend,” said Linda, “my lover, my best friend. He’s the one who’s worked the hardest, keeping the household together.”

Three times throughout the past year, he watched Linda escape death.  His choice, he decided, was to sit and blame God or to find meaning in what his family has been forced to endure. They don’t take the little things for granted anymore, he said.

“As long as you keep up the fight,” he told Linda, “I’ll stay here with you.”

See Part I of the series, “Linda Rivera:  An E. coli Patient’s Will to Live“

It’s one of those glorious, fogless summer days in San Francisco when the winds whisk the skies clear and everyone is outside basking in sunlight.  From Linda Rivera’s hospital room at Davies Medical Center, you can see the city’s skyline–including the pyramidal TransAmerica Tower–and, if you look down through the thick barrier of evergreens that line the perimeter of the hospital’s property, you can see Duboce Park, where local residents sunbathe and let their dogs run free as trains from the N-Judah line roll by before entering the tunnel that will spit them out on the other side of Buena Vista Park.

A 10-minute walk south of the hospital, the sidewalks of the Castro district are filled with people shopping and enjoying the beautiful weather while just to the north, in Haight Ashbury, tourists plod the sidewalks attempting to recapture the Summer of Love with souvenir T-shirts and Tibetan jewelry. Linda, who actually lives in Las Vegas and has been at Davies since April, hasn’t seen any of it. She only began walking again, with assistance from her physical therapist, just over a month ago.

At 58, Linda is probably the most famous–if one cares to describe it that way–of the victims of the outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 that shut down Nestle’s cookie dough production for nearly two months during the summer of 2009. Rivera, like many people, enjoyed eating the dough raw. Like hundreds of others, she and three members of her family became ill after eating dough from the contaminated batch. Across the country, about 80 people were made seriously ill. Unlike most of the others, or her family members, Linda very nearly died at least three times as a result.

If you saw the photos of Linda in the story that ran in the Washington Post back in September last year or on television, you might not recognize her today. The illness had ravaged her, leaving her pale and wan.  Now, with the color returned to her face and her energy levels slowly returning to something approaching normal–although still notably less than 50 percent–she still looks tired, frail even, but she’s pleased to see a visitor even after a full day of physical therapy has left her exhausted.

On the day a reporter came to visit, she smiled warmly and extended a tiny, curled hand in greeting. She was in bed, fully dressed except for her shoes; physical therapy had left her so tired she didn’t have the energy to change into bed clothes and simply crawled right in. Physical therapy is pretty much her life right now. That, and the hospital room she currently calls home.

“There were many times I thought life was over and I was going to pass on,” she said. “There was no hope.”

Actually, hope is the one thing that has been returned to the Rivera family since that day at the end of April 2009 when Linda and other members of her family casually munched on spoons full from a tub of raw Nestle’s cookie dough. But it would be hard won. Within a week, she would be in hospital, struggling just to survive.

“I didn’t know the seriousness of her illness,” said Richard Rivera, Linda’s husband of 13 years. “E. coli. You don’t realize what E. coli is. I used to think of it as a tummy ache.”

Of course, E. coli is more than just a tummy ache. While there are significantly more outbreaks of Salmonella than E. coli each year, E. coli is easily the nastier of the two. Up to 100 people die from the pathogen each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most people recover from it within a week or so but in a few cases, about 5 to 10 percent, victims develop a potentially life-threatening complication known as hemolytic uremic syndrome which can cause a the kidneys to shut down. Most recover after a few weeks but can continue to suffer from additional complications for years afterward but some, notes the CDC, “suffer permanent damage or die.”

Even as Linda’s condition worsened, no one could have foreseen what she and her family would be forced to endure over the following year. A few days after eating the raw dough, Linda began to feel the symptoms of what she thought might be a cold or flu. Soon, she was vomiting and passing blood in her stool.

“God, Robyn, I’ve been really sick,” she told her friend of 23 years, Robyn Treska, over the phone. “I can’t get off the bathroom floor.”

Linda’s condition would not improve. The first time Richard took her to the emergency room, she was vomiting every 45 minutes to an hour, he said, but the ER doctors couldn’t pinpoint the problem and diagnosed her with irritable bowel syndrome.

“That night, it just started getting worse and worse,” said Richard. “And, somehow, during the night, I had fallen asleep–and this was the morning of the sixth of May–she had crawled downstairs and wrapped herself around the toilet in a fetal position.”

“How long have you been down here?,” he asked her.  “A couple of hours,” Linda replied.

The Riveras returned to the hospital where Linda was admitted with colitis, an inflammation of the large intestine, and given antibiotics for nearly two days. The E. coli had moved a quarter of the way into her colon; her doctor said he would need to operate in order to remove it. Would she survive without the operation?

“I’m not sure you would make it through the night,” her doctor replied.

Linda survived the surgery and was put into a doctor-induced coma for 10 days, although at one point it looked as if they would lose her. The next 24 to 48 hours are going to be very critical, said the doctor.  “The chance of her coming out of this is probably 5 to 10 percent,” he told Richard.

For ten days, the family watched Linda, not knowing whether she would come out of the coma. They played one of her favorite tunes, “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys, and when she began mouthing the words and tapping her feet to the rhythm, they knew she was still there. Physically, she was so swollen, Richard said he thought she might begin weeping fluid through her skin.

While the coma might have been helpful in stabilizing Linda’s condition, it also brought up a harder issue to deal with. What if she didn’t come out? Linda and Richard had told one another they didn’t want to be on life support if that was the only thing keeping them alive, “but we never talked about it giving us a second chance at life,” said Richard.

In a scene Richard still recounts with solemnity, he put the matter to his family to vote upon. It would have to be unanimous, he told their children. If even one person voted against keeping her on life support, then she would be removed from the machinery keeping her alive.

“That was scary,” said Richard. “Thankfully, everyone said ‘yes’.”

It’s hard to say who is more grateful for the outcome of that vote. In her hospital bed, Linda talks about the matter with a profound sense of gratitude. She couldn’t blame her family for having made the other choice but having been through it, she’s come to believe that many coma patients are, indeed, still there, trapped inside injured bodies.

Over the next year, however, there would be more close calls. A priest would be called three times to offer last rites. Linda would spend all but nine days in hospital before becoming well enough to make the trip to San Francisco for physical rehabilitation.

Linda spends several hours each day in physical therapy, an ar
duous experience that leaves her exhausted, both physically and emotionally. But she’s making progress. In early June, with the aid of a walker, Linda took her first steps in nearly a year.

Most important, she’s hopeful. Physically, she will probably never be as strong and as active as she once was, and both she and Richard talk about her probable reliance upon a wheelchair to get around once this is over. The disease has affected more than just her mobility. Her eye sight, her cognition, her physical strength, have all taken serious hits. But neither she nor her family or friends have given up.

“Lots of times I’m angry,” she said. “I’m thankful most of the time, for the chance to do things again.”

Everyone is grateful to have made it through an experience none of them could have imagined.

“She kept fighting,” said Richard, “and kept coming back and kept coming back.”

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) on Tuesday served Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald’s USA with an intent-to-sue in 30 days if the company doesn’t “immediately stop using toys to market Happy Meals to young children.” McDonald’s, which began offering Happy Meals in 1979, is currently offering a collection of Shrek-themed watches as part of its Happy Meal promotions. Shrek is a cartoon character developed by DreamWorks animation.

“DreamWorks is the supplier of the drug and McDonald’s is the pusher and distributor in this country,” said CSPI attorney Steve Gardner.

While the organization has considered going after promotion partners like DreamWorks in the past, the popular animation studio is not a target of this particular action.

McDonald’s give-aways don’t just end in the Happy Meal box, however. Online, kids can find puzzles, wallpaper, games, and music videos geared directly toward children, tied in with Happy Meal promos. Above links to the various online games and activities, a statement in a very light, small typeface warns children: “Hey kids, this is advertising”. The links to promotions are all offered in far bolder, brighter, larger typefaces.

“We couldn’t disagree more with the misrepresentation of our food and marketing practices made by the Center for Science in the Public Interest,” the company said in a statement released shortly after CSPI’s announcement.  “Since 2006, we have been a part of the Council for Better Business Bureau’s voluntary initiative to address the importance of children’s well-being. In the U.S., McDonald’s primarily advertises the four-piece Chicken McNuggets Happy Meal which includes Apple Dippers, low-fat caramel dip and one percent low-fat white milk.”

As part of its participation in the Council for Better Business Bureau’s voluntary initiative, McDonald’s “pledged to advertise only Happy Meals that meet McDonald’s nutrition standards for children,” CSPI claims, but the company undermines that pledge with an “insidious use” of toys to promote the meals. That, coupled with the fact that the meals are “nutritionally inappropriate” for children makes the promotions little better than a “bait and switch,” said Gardner.

McDonald’s does use the healthier Apple Dippers in its advertising, the CSPI attorney acknowledged but once the customer actually gets to McDonald’s, the apple side is almost always replaced–by default–with nutritionally inferior fries, unless the customer specifically asks for it. It’s rarely, if ever, offered at the counter, he said.

Anyway, Apple Dippers are only relatively healthier, Gardner added, and send kids a mixed message: apples are only good if they’re paired up with sugary caramel. Ultimately, he said, “They’re forming really bad eating habits. Their healthiest meal still isn’t good for you.”

This isn’t the first official action targeting McDonald’s use of toys to promote its products to children. Earlier this year, the Board of Supervisors of Santa Clara County, CA, voted to ban the promotion tool in restaurants in the county’s unincorporated communities.

McDonald’s has 30 days to respond to CSPI’s notice and did respond Tuesday with a brief email to Michael Jacobson, secretary of the board for the organization.

“Dr. Jacobson,” the succinct message read. “I received your email.” The note was signed by William Whitman, a spokesperson for McDonald’s.

McDonald’s did not respond to additional questions from Food Safety News; Dreamworks did not respond at all.

Pictured:  Shrek 3D Happy Meal Watches from happymeal.com (cropped). 

Update: This story was republished to ensure attribution accuracy.

Still, despite the fact that ice probably appears somewhere on your grocery list for the upcoming weekend, chances are pretty good you don’t give the stuff much thought and that has some people worried.

“Ice is ice is ice,” said Jane McEwan, executive director of International Packaged Ice Association, or that seems to be the public’s general perception, at any rate. McEwan, however, has particularly strong feelings about ice and she wishes consumers shared her concerns. Ice, she said, repeating the organization’s mantra, “is food”.

“It’s a food product that just has not garnered a lot of interest,” McEwan observed with some concern.  “You hear about the spinach and the peanut butter,” she said, but ice, well, it’s just frozen water, right?

True, it is just frozen water–if it’s made correctly–but it’s highly unlikely your attitudes about water itself are as cavalier. When it comes to water, admit it, you feel better about it if you know it’s been treated properly and is regularly tested. You’re unlikely to drink water you suspect is contaminated. You’re certainly not going to drink it if it smells funny or is filled with floaty things. You may even buy bottled water if you’re not particularly thrilled with the water from your tap.

So, where’s the concern about ice?

Founded in 1917, International Packaged Ice Association attempts to worry for you but they do wish you would read the labels on the ice you buy at the store. Comprised of companies who make, sell, or transport ice, members of the IPIA are expected to meet certain standards before they’re allowed to post the organization’s logo on their packages. They must renew their membership on a yearly basis and, finally, they must adhere to various guidelines concerning everything from employee hygiene and plant sanitation to record keeping and recall guidelines, standards verified by the National Sanitation Foundation. They also work at consumer education.

Given the public’s penchant for dumping ice into a cooler along with all their picnic foods–both raw and cooked–and then calling it a day, it’s a wonder more people don’t become sick but McEwan has several safety tips for would-be ice consumers:
 
• Look at the label. According to the FDA, the packaging on a bag of ice should tell you “the name and place of business of the manufacturer, packer, or distributor of the ice.  The labels must also list the net quantity of contents of the product.”

• Make sure the ice was closed properly. Drawstring bags compromise both the safety and quality of the ice, said McEwan. Look for bags that are sealed shut.

• Look for dirt. Yep, dirt. It can get in there, particularly if the bag is sealed with a drawstring or the ice is manufactured in a small Mom-and-Pop operation with little oversight.

In fact, the IPIA expresses quite a few concerns about ice manufactured by non-IPIA businesses: Fifty to 60 percent “of all packaged ice sold in the U.S. and Canada is produced on-premises at supermarkets, gas stations, liquor stores, campgrounds and other retail and wholesale outlets,” according to its Website. “These packaged ice producers (non IPIA plants) which are in thousands of locations nationwide producing millions of bags of ice annually neither meet any standards nor are they adequately inspected.”

Surprisingly, even though the FDA maintains strict standards for bottled water, it doesn’t apply the same regulations to ice. If ice is food, as the IPIA says, it follows that treating ice just as you would ground beef is probably not a bad idea, either:

• Store your ice in a clean container. Scrub out your ice chest with hot soapy water and let it air dry before you use it.

• Keep your ice cold. As silly as it sounds, the FDA recommends keeping foods chilled at 40 degrees or less to prevent the growth of pathogens. Follow the same advice for your ice.

• Avoid cross-contamination. Don’t use ice that has been exposed to the water that is pooling in your ice chest, and don’t use ice in your drinks if it has been poured loose into the ice chest to keep other foods chilled.

• Just as you would in your refrigerator, keep raw foods separate from cooked foods and, better yet, keep raw meat in a separate container, all together.

The new guidelines take some pretty dramatic steps, however:  the allowable level of contamination for Salmonella in young chickens, or broilers, currently stands at 20 percent or no more than 12 samples out of 51.  After the 60-day comment period when the new standard goes into effect, it will be 7.5 percent or no more than 5 positive sample tests out of 51.  Even more notable, the new guidelines address the problem of Campylobacter contamination in poultry, a first.

The National Chicken Council’s Richard Lobb says his industry is already exceeding those standards. The Council advocates and lobbies for the industry’s interests in Washington, DC.

Poultry producers Foster Farms and Perdue declined to comment on the guidelines and smaller, organic poultry producers in California did not return calls.

“The question is, how much more can we do?,” asked Lobb in a telephone interview. “Twenty years ago you’d say one-third of chickens had Salmonella, and now it’s consistently under 10 percent. The contamination level is considered fairly low.”

Current industry practices are pretty much in accord with the new guidelines already, according to a release issued by the National Chicken Council, but “it should be noted that the suggestion that human illness is directly linked to the microbiological profile of raw chicken is not very well supported by the data,” the release stated, “since the prevalence of human disease from Salmonella has been going up in recent years while the presence of Salmonella on raw chickens has been going down.”

That’s a bit of a sticking point between the large-scale producers the National Chicken Council represents and the FSIS. Over the past several years, while the rates of Salmonella infection have increased, the figures for infection as a result of eating contaminated poultry have dropped.

“If one line is going down and the other trending upwards, where is the correlation?” Lobb asked. “The major outbreaks have been in produce such as peanuts and peppers but, in fact, Salmonella is found in any warm blooded animal and any place where food is in contact with animals has such a potential.”

The FSIS doesn’t disagree that poultry contamination figures have dropped.

“But in order to get a positive public health outcome, we can’t rely on one strategy,” said Neil Gaffney, FSIS press officer. “We must have a multi-pronged and multi-agency approach, which we are undertaking through the President’s Food Safety Working Group and with our sister agencies,” the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Others, too, think more work is needed.

“It’s a huge step forward,” agreed Consumer Union’s Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives for the consumer advocacy group in Yonkers, NY.  The lower averages cited by the poultry industry, however, can “disguise problems with outliers,” she said.

In 2009, Consumers Union conducted a now infamous study revealing a wide range of contamination levels among the country’s largest poultry producers with companies like Perdue and Foster Farms exhibiting dramatic extremes of contamination for Salmonella. While Foster Farms and Tyson were found to be the most contaminated–less than 20 percent of birds for either company were free of Salmonella–56 percent of Perdue’s birds were clean.  Organic chickens, on the other hand, had no Salmonella at all.

“It’s a useful number,” said Halloran of the National Chicken Council’s figures, “but it doesn’t tell you everything that’s going on.”

Actually, Lobb has similar issues with the numbers of illnesses FSIS claims will be averted by the new standards. After the guidelines have been in place for two years, Salmonella- and Campylobacter-related illnesses will drop by 26,000 and 39,000 thousand cases respectively, according to estimates from the FSIS.

Those numbers “threw people for a loop,” Lobb said. Given that even the estimates are based on estimates of the numbers of people made sick each year, Lobb is dubious of FSIS’s claim and even the USDA doesn’t have real data to back up the claims, he said.

Despite that, the FSIS is sticking with the numbers, based on figures from the CDC. The agency estimates that Campylobacter-contaminated broilers cause 400,000 illnesses per year, while Salmonella-contaminated broilers cause 220,000 illnesses over the same period. Given the higher numbers for Campylobacter, FSIS expects to see an even more dramatic turnaround in those figures, and expects to see “a shift of about 25 percent of establishments that currently do not meet the standard to meet the standard” thereby preventing 39,000 illnesses, said FSIS’s Neil Gaffney. A similar shift of 7 to 8 percent of establishments to the new, tighter standards would result in 26,000 fewer illnesses due to Salmonella, he added.

Regardless of the disagreements over figures, real differences of opinion are most apparent when each begins talking about the feasibility of eliminating the presence of the pathogens from the birds altogether. Whereas groups like Consumers Union insist producers and the USDA should concentrate on eliminating the presence of pathogens completely, Lobb said he doesn’t believe they can ever be eradicated entirely.

“There is some concern that the low-hanging fruit has been picked,” said Lobb calling the presence of bugs like Salmonella and Campylobacter “a natural phenomenon.”

The new compliance standards are, however, entirely manageable. Ninety percent or more of California’s poultry producers “are meeting or exceeding the guidelines,” said Bill Mattos, president of the California Poultry Federation, which includes nearly all the state’s commercial poultry producers, both large and small.

Despite that, Mattos is concerned that consumers may interpret the new guidelines to mean that poultry is completely free of pathogens. Both the California Poultry Federation and the National Chicken Council regard Salmonella and Campylobacter as naturally occurring organisms and their presence in the guts of poultry as nothing new.  Cooks have to be diligent, said Mattos from his office in Modesto, CA.

“Cooking destroys these organisms,” according to a press release from the National Chicken Council. “Safe handling and cooking instructions are printed on every package of raw poultry and meat sold in the United States.”

Not everyone agrees with that assessment, however.

“We do not think the primary responsibility for safety lies with the consumer,” counters Consumer Union’s Halloran.  “It’s neither right nor necessary the chicken should be so contaminated.”

It’s delicious in enchiladas, it complements black beans beautifully, and it’s a wonderful addition to salads. Unfortunately for queso fresco–that quintessential Mexican fresh cheese–it also seems to have a knack for attracting pathogens such as Listeria.

If you go through the records for recalls over the past few years, you’ll find that each recall linked to a commercial queso fresco producer has typically resulted from contamination after the cheese was produced.  That isn’t to say abuses don’t happen.  Just as in any industry, the great peanut recall of 2009 is a clear example, there are unscrupulous producers but they’re rare enough to be remarkable. Of particular note is Peregrina Cheese Corporation.

The New York City maker of queso fresco as well as flan and other Hispanic food products seemed to have so many problems with hygiene they were forced to recall product six times in as many years. Things came to a head last year when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sought to put them out of business. Peregrina’s owners, Isabella and Javier Peregrina, were cited repeatedly by the FDA for “filthy conditions”.

Standing water on the floors of the factory, food transport equipment coated with dried crust from previous batches, and a dead rat on the premises were just a few of the many pieces of evidence cited by the FDA and the New York State Department of Health.  Feds filed for an injunction to prevent Peregrina from making or distributing any foods at all but with the help of a New York federal judge, the Peregrinas were able to enter a consent decree that allowed them to remain in business but with 16 pages worth of restrictions and commitments. They’re still in business.

A Culinary Staple

At Lucero’s Produce in Mission Market–a half-block long shopping arcade in San Francisco’s Mission District with red tiled floors and open bins of produce – a white, enameled display case holds several short rows of queso fresco, panela, crema fresca, and Honduran and Salvadorian sour creams, packed in plastic bags and lined up in short rows. At one of several tables in the middle of the arcade’s walkway, young, dark haired women chat and laugh over café con leche from the Peruvian café next door.

There’s a similar display of cheeses at the Lucky Pork Store a few blocks down Mission Street and in several other grocery and produce stores throughout the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. Outside Hispanic kitchens, many consider those fresh cheeses dangerous and unsanitary. Is that reputation deserved?

Those fresh cheeses are to Latin American cooks what cheddar and Swiss are to many non-Hispanic Americans. They’re integral to many deeply loved dishes and foods. While seemingly bland in comparison to aged cheeses, queso fresco is a crumbly, almost pure white, soft cheese with a complex salty flavor built on a subtle base of milky sweetness. Queso fresco, and its many relatives, offers a wonderful flavor and textural contrast to the spicy and rich flavors so often associated with Hispanic cuisines.

It’s no wonder Latino immigrants were so eager to reproduce it in their own kitchens in the United States as they began settling here. Unfortunately, that’s probably where many of the cheese’s image problems began, as well.

Bathtub Cheeses

“Bathtub cheeses” is what Catherine Donnelly calls them. Like many immigrant groups deprived of the culinary staples they love, they sought to produce those foods themselves, in their own homes, often enough in their bathtubs. Suffice to say, mistakes were made.

Donnelly is associate director of the Northeast Center for Food Entrepreneurship and the co-director of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese, based at University of Vermont in Burlington. In addition to teaching food safety and public policy at UVM, she researches and writes extensively on Listeria monocytogenes, the bacteria most commonly associated with outbreaks related to fresh cheeses.

“I think the industry as a whole gets a bad rap,” said Donnelly on the phone from her Vermont office.  

Fresh cheeses such as queso fresco are particularly vulnerable to contamination, she said. They’re high in moisture, there’s no starter culture, and they have a very high PH. In other words, if made in the wrong conditions, they’re perfect breeding grounds for pathogens.

In large commercial operations, however, those conditions are highly monitored, said Donnelly. Three Californian cheese makers–Cacique, Don Francisco, and El Mexicano for example–run safe operations with “unbelievable standards of hygiene”. The average consumer should feel very comfortable and confident in buying their products, she said.

“The real risk of those cheeses comes from the illegally made, illegally distributed varieties,” said Donnelly.

The Abuela Project

In 1997, officials in Washington state were facing an epidemic of food poisoning. The state’s health department was alarmed by more than 90 cases of Salmonella Typhimurium DT 104 in Yakima County. The majority of people sickened were Hispanic and the median age of the victims was 4 years. Incidents of Salmonella Typhimurium infection had been high for a couple of years, especially compared to the rest of the state. In 1995, the county saw more than 15 cases while the state average was less than five.
The problem? Homemade queso fresco.

Investigators soon tied the outbreak to homemade queso fresco made with unpasteurized milk. It was sold under the radar from person to person. Knowing they were going to have a difficult time convincing Yakima’s growing Mexican community to give up a food that not only provided an inexpensive form of protein but a strong emotional connection with their roots, officials came up with a novel way to improve the situation.

Taking a cue from Colorado, Washington State University and the Yakima County Cooperative Extension Office began an outreach effort to the county’s Mexican grandmothers. The rocks upon which many families depended, the grandmothers–abuelas in Spanish–were the perfect conduits to teach improved cheese-making techniques to the community. They called their plan the Abuela Project.

Using a recipe for making queso fresco from pasteurized milk, based on a home recipe developed by the mother of one of the project’s organizers, the plan was simple. Teach the abuelas a safer method for making the cheese with the understanding that they would each teach 15 others the same techniques. Incentives for the grandmothers included free cheese-making equipment but the real key to the project’s success, according to a contemporary account of the effort, was the recipe. It produced a cheese that tasted close enough to the original that everyone who tried it switched over to the new technique.

In 1998, Salmonella cases in Yakima County plummeted to about half a dozen, none of which were related to unpasteurized milk or queso fresco. By 2001, more than 500 people had participated in the Abuela Project.  The outreach is still happening, said Gena Reich. Most recently, booklets and information have been sent to people in Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas.

“People were happy to make that change,” she said.

Reich is the eastern region manager for the food safety division of the Washington Department of Agriculture and served as the agency’s representative to the Abuela Project. She also, as it happens, has overseen two recent outbreaks of Listeria monocytogenes in her district, both related to queso fresco.

Outbreaks in Washington

February was a lousy month for the owners of Quesaria B
endito. The Yakima cheese maker was forced to recall three types of cheese after five people, including two pregnant women, were sickened with Listeria after eating their product. Two months later, another eastern Washington cheese maker, Del Bueno, recalled all its queso fresco after a customer became ill, also with Listeria.

No one died from either outbreak, although the babies of both women were born prematurely as a result.

“I want to say both of these companies have bent over backwards to do everything we suggested,” said Reich. Both Del Bueno and Quesaria Bendito use pasteurized milk for their products and both, as far as Reich is concerned, follow high standards of hygiene in their production. In each case, they were done in by seemingly small things that only serve to underscore just how careful a company must be to insure the safety of their products.

A recent expansion of Quesaria Bendito’s facilities resulted in a change in how workers’ boots were stored “and it was just walked in” said Reich.  In Grandview, 40 miles southeast of Yakima, Del Bueno’s owners had purchased a used refrigerator where investigators found the contamination that had caused their problems. The contaminant was nowhere else in the facility.

“it’s not at all about shoddy manufacturing,” Reich said. Until now, both companies enjoyed “perfect records” and both followed good handling practices. But the products they produce, as Catherine Donnelly in Vermont noted, are particularly vulnerable to contamination.

“It’s just so easy,” agrees Reich. “It just takes so little contamination to cause a problem.”

While Peregrina Cheese Corp. provided the worst-case scenario when it comes to problems with fresh cheeses, the home cheese makers in Yakima 13 years ago offer a clear illustration of what can happen when lack of knowledge about microbiology is crossed with casual production methods. Of course, it doesn’t end there.

Customer care for the product once it gets home is another issue, said Catherine Donnelly. The cheeses are pure as long as they stay sealed in their original wrapping. Once they’re out, however, they’re vulnerable to whatever conditions in which the customer might place them. If they’re left out in the open too long, or stashed in a less than sanitary refrigerator, they’re open to contamination.

But neither the home kitchens of family cooks or scandalous conditions of Peregrina Cheese Corp. before the law was forced to step in are typical of practices used by commercial fresh cheese makers in the U.S. Commercially produced cheeses from long-established producers are safe.

“It requires real stringency in the manufacturing environment,” Donnelly said. “The reality of the processing conditions couldn’t be more different.” 


Beyond that, however, I find myself looking for tradition in holiday meals, as well.  In this case, I’ve taken it a little farther afield. Up until fairly recently, it was common for people–eager to shake off the blahs of a heavy winter diet–to consume spring tonics comprised of everything from fresh spring greens to molasses. Bitter greens, such as dandelion leaves, are traditional ingredients in that spring ritual. These were supposed to purify the blood and reinvigorate the system. Whether you care to invest revivifying powers into herbs or not, fresh spring herbs–such as dandelion greens–are delicious and they’re a wonderful way to enjoy some of the first greens of the season. Combine them with eggs–the traditional symbol of rebirth–and you have a wonderful frittata, perfect for Easter brunch or a light holiday meal. 



Those spicy Mediterranean flavors come to fruition nicely with a Moroccan orange salad, a bright, fresh contrast to the frittata, flavored with pancetta and cheese. Serve the two dishes with a good loaf of crusty bread, and you’re set with the first of the season’s lighter fare.



The frittata, the French omelet’s rustic Italian cousin, really is a different dish altogether. Omelets should be creamy whereas frittatas are firm, almost like pancakes. Omelets are folded over themselves to hold different fillings whereas with a frittata, the flavorings are added to the egg batter itself before it hits the frying pan. Frittatas can be served hot or at room temperature and some even like them cold. Omelets, when they’re cold, well, they taste like cold omelets. Care should be taken to avoid overcooking the frittata, though, as they dry out quickly.



Dandelion Greens Frittata
 
•    5 eggs
•    1 bunch dandelion greens
•    2 strips pancetta
•    ¼ cup white or yellow onion, minced
•    2 tablespoons Pecorino Romano or Parmigiano cheese, grated
•    2 tablespoons olive oil
•    Salt and pepper to taste

•    
Special equipment you’ll need: a 9-inch, or thereabouts, heavy-weight skillet with an oven-proof handle. Iron skillets are great for this.


Slice the pancetta across into thin strips and then begin frying them over low heat in half the olive oil. After about 2 minutes, add the minced onion and continue frying until the bacon is just crisp. Remove and drain on paper towels. Wipe the grease from the pan; you’ll be using it for the next step.

Strip the leafy parts from the dandelion greens and discard the stems. Rinse the greens, squeeze off the excess water and then wilt them in a hot skillet over medium heat. It shouldn’t take more than a minute or two at most for the dandelion leaves to wilt down. Remove the wilted green to a cutting board.

Chop the greens, and then spread out over the cutting board to cool for a few minutes. While they’re doing that…

Turn on your broiler.

In a medium mixing bowl, beat together the eggs and then add the pancetta and onion mix, the cheese, and salt and pepper. When the chopped greens are cool enough to handle, toss those in, too, and give the whole mixture a few more good stirs.

Heat the remaining olive oil in the 9-inch skillet over medium heat. Tilt the skillet from side to side so that the oil covers as much of the bottom and sides as possible. Pour in the egg mixture.

Turn down the heat a bit so that it’s just below medium. Let the egg mixture cook until it’s just set and pulling away from the sides of the pan. The top of the frittata should still be a little runny.

Now, take the skillet by its handle and slide it into the broiler long enough for the surface of the frittata to set and just begin to brown. This will take a minute, maybe two at most. 

Serve hot or at room temperature, sliced into wedges.

Serves  4.

Orange Salad with Olives

•    4 oranges such as blood, Cara Cara, or navel, peeled, and cut into rounds or segments
•    ½ red onion, sliced into thin rounds
•    1 cup black oil-cured olives, or Kalamata, rinsed
•    1 teaspoon ground cumin
•    1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
•    1 teaspoon honey or sugar
•    ¼ teaspoon cayenne (or less, to taste)
•    ½ teaspoon crushed black pepper
•    10-12 mint leaves, sliced into threads
•    1 bunch coriander (cilantro), leaves picked and stemmed
•    ¼ cup olive oil
•    Juice and zest of 1 lemon

•    
Special equipment you’ll need: A lemon zester or microplane, and a wire whisk.


Place the orange slices in a large mixing bowl along with the onion slices and olives.

In a separate bowl, combine the lemon juice, spices, honey, and lemon zest, stir together, and then whisk in the olive oil, emulsifying the juice and the oil together.

Pour the dressing over the orange and olive mixture, toss, and then add the cilantro and mint, tossing again.

Let the salad rest in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes to allow the flavors to blend together. Give it another quick toss before you place it on the table.



Serves 4. 


When it comes to eggs, or any food, really, time is critical and it’s important to consider all the time the eggs have spent outside the refrigerator during their annual 15 minutes of fame. That includes the time you spent decorating them and the time they spent hidden around the yard or house at room temperature, said Elisa Maloberti from her office in Washington, D.C. 



Maloberti is the director of egg product marketing for the National Egg Board, and this is the time of year when her organization begins getting plenty of calls from consumers and reporters wondering how to make the ancient tradition of painting and hiding eggs a little less hazardous. 



Ideally, eggs won’t be outside the refrigerator more than two hours total, she said. That includes both the time it takes to decorate them and the time they’re hidden. If Easter and warm weather happen to coincide in your community–reaching temperatures of 80 degrees or more–knock down that time to a very tight 30 minutes. Those are the guidelines issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Maloberti said. 



There are other factors to keep in mind, as well.  Where will you be hiding the eggs?  If you’re hiding them outside, avoid doing so on a just-fertilized lawn; keep pets away from the festivities, too.  One of the marvels of eggs is their natural packaging.  Not only does it keep everything tucked away neatly inside, but the presence of thousands of pores also allows the egg to breathe.  The downside to that, of course, is that they can absorb chemicals from the lawn such as fertilizers and herbicides. Let’s not forget the ick-factor of potential exposure to, um, pet wastes, too.  



Even before you hide the eggs, though, you’ve still got a potential minefield of decorating dangers. Right off the bat, be sure you’re using food-safe dyes. They’re easily found in the baking section of just about every grocery store in the country and, every year, companies such as Paas roll out their Easter-specific egg decorating kits.
 


Another alternative is to make your own natural dyes. “These natural dyes will give you a softer shade pallet,” said Maloberti.

Dried onion skins will produce a gold colored dye, just as spinach will give you pale green. Even beets, she added, will still come out paler than the juice straight from the vegetable. Blueberries, purple cabbage, or coffee or tea are all good options.  A simple chef’s trick will increase the intensity of those colors somewhat, however. Begin by simmering those ingredients in just two cups of water. When you’ve extracted as much color as you want, remove the vegetables and reduce the colored water by boiling it down to half its original volume.

“If you’re using non food-safe decorations use [those eggs] for just display,” said Maloberti.  Non food-safe dyes, paints, and glue, for example, all fall under this category. Besides being potentially toxic, they really don’t taste good. Oh, and one more point.



“Hard-cooked eggs are actually more perishable than raw,” said Maloberti, “and should be consumed within one week. Store them in their shells. We don’t recommend storing unpeeled, cooked eggs.”



That, of course, would be why she and her colleagues refer to the days right after Easter as “egg salad week.”


The ban on leavened foods such as yeast breads (or any grain product that isn’t fully cooked within 18 minutes of contact with water, so as to avoid rising) means a lot of favorite desserts are suddenly out of the running for inclusion in the Seder menu, the traditional feast commemorating the Jews’ exodus from Egypt.  Many Jews include rice, corn, peanuts, and beans on that list just to be safe–they’re also used in breads.  Fleeing from the pharaoh’s army, the Hebrews didn’t have time to let their bread rise before they left; they certainly didn’t have time to bake a cake. 



Consequently, Jewish cooks have been pretty inventive in their use of matzo, the flat, crisp–and bland–unleavened bread eaten during the Passover celebration. Ground, it’s used as a thickener, or as a coating for fried foods. Whole, it’s used in everything from a form of French toast called matzo brei to a snack cracker. Here, it’s dessert.



This is not a simple dessert but it’s celebratory and does bring together some nice symbolic aspects of the Passover celebration.  Matzo is, literally, the foundation while strawberries represent the first fruits of spring.  Dark chocolate adds a slightly bitter note to the flavor over all.  The matzo, which forms the structure of the timbales, will need to be baked twice.



Chocolate strawberry timbales 



4 pieces of unsalted matzo (one piece is back-up)
2 cups orange juice
3 cups strawberries, hulled and quartered
½ cup sugar
¼ teaspoon cardamom
½ teaspoon vanilla
Zest from half an orange
8 ounces dark chocolate (80 percent cocoa if you like your chocolate bitter)
2 tablespoons pareve margarine or shortening
Powdered sugar


Special tools you’ll need: four 6-ounce custard cups or timbales, a double boiler, a pastry brush, parchment paper, and a 4-inch pastry cutter.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

• Combine prepared strawberries with sugar, cardamom, vanilla, and orange zest. Give the mixture a few thorough stirs and set aside.

• Place the matzo in a baking dish just large enough to hold them stacked on top of one another, and then pour the orange juice over them. Make sure each piece of matzo is doused in juice. Let them soak long enough to become malleable but not soggy, anywhere from five to 10 minutes. If you let the matzo get soggy, you’ll curse yourself for having attempted this recipe.

• While the matzo is soaking, grease the custard cups with the margarine or shortening.

• Carefully remove the matzo from the orange juice (a wide spatula is helpful here), and cut two of the pieces into quarters.

• Using the pastry cutter, cut four circles from the third piece of matzo, and lay them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

• Press two of each of the matzo quarters into the greased custard cups, overlapping them as needed. Trim the overhang so that the edges of the matzo align as neatly as possible with the edges of the cup.

• Place the custard cups and the matzo circles in the oven. Note: the custard cups will need to bake for about 30 minutes for the first go-around. The circles, however, will bake very quickly, and should be removed after about 10 to 12 minutes, when they’re crisp. You may also need to loosely cover the cups with aluminum foil after about 15 minutes to keep the edges from burning.

• Remove the custard cups and let them cool for half an hour. When they are cool, ease the matzo cups gently from the containers. They’re still soft at this point and you’ll probably need a knife to separate the matzo from the sides of the cups. When you’ve done that, tip the cups over and jiggle them gently until the matzo separates from the bottom and comes out.

• Place the matzo cups, bottoms up, back on the baking sheet and return them to the oven for another 15 minutes, or until they’re crisp. Remove from the oven and let cool, completely, again.

• In the double boiler (or, barring that, in a stainless steel bowl placed over a sauce pan of boiling water) melt the chocolate.

• Brush the melted chocolate over the outsides of the matzo cups, and on both the top and underside of the circles. Coat them thoroughly. Place them on waxed paper or a plastic wrapped plate and then put them into the freezer for about 15 minutes or until the chocolate is hardened. You’ll have chocolate leftover in the double boiler. Don’t eat it; you’ll need it.

• When the chocolate on the matzo cups has hardened and can be handled without smearing all over your fingers, fill each of the cups with the macerated strawberries, draining off as much of the juice as possible.

• Place a matzo circle over the open end of each cup and then, using the leftover melted chocolate, glue them into place, sealing the strawberries inside. If you have gaps between the circles and the cups that can’t be completely sealed with the chocolate, don’t worry.

• Return the cups to the freezer for another 10 to 15 minutes, allowing the chocolate glue to harden. If you had gaps in the seal between the cups and the circles, gently tip the timbales over so that the excess moisture drains out.

• Plate each timbale flat side down, garnish with leftovers from the strawberry/sugar mixture, and then sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Serves 4

Photo by Eric Burkett


With the most recent recall of more than five million pounds of ground beef by Huntington Meat Packing Inc. over the past couple of months, to say nothing of the numerous other recalls of ground beef over the past decade, hamburger doesn’t so much say “fun” as it does “back off”. 



Much of the problem lies in how ground beef is produced in the United States. As Eric Schlosser pointed out in his seminal book “Fast Food Nation” back in 2001, “A single fast food hamburger now contains meat from dozens or even hundreds of different cattle.” Even more recent revelations about the use of ammonia to kill pathogens in fatty scrap meat added to the ground beef used everywhere from McDonald’s to public school lunches only confirms the image of ground beef as a health hazard, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are plenty of steps the home cook can take to make sure the ground beef they use is safe.



Looking for guidance, I called Josh Epple, co-owner with his brother Isaac Epple, of Drewes Bros. Meats, a venerable butcher shop in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood. Although the butcher shop was first opened more than 120 years ago, the first guys who worked there back in the 1880s might not recognize their professional counterpart today: Epple’s shaved head, chin piercing, ear plugs, and sleeve tattoo aren’t exactly the recognized symbols of butchers anyplace, but Epple knows his stuff. He’s also adamant about the safest source for ground beef: a neighborhood butcher shop, of course. 



”It’s always a challenge to buy pre-ground beef,” said Epple, even for commercial outfits. The problem, of course, is that you just don’t know what you’re getting when you purchase a pound–or 100–of the stuff. When Epple grinds meat for his shop, he knows what he’s put into it and he’s accountable to his customers. That, of course, is the beauty of a neighborhood butcher shop. 



With a butcher, you not only have the opportunity to build a relationship with someone who knows his suppliers, you can ask him or her about its origins, age, and just about anything else that may concern you. Of course, none of this solves the problem for those who don’t have access to a nice, neighborhood butcher shop. If a supermarket is all you have access to, it’s worth asking the folks in your grocery store’s meat section whether they’ll grind meat to order. But if they don’t? 



”Grind your own,” said Epple. 



Grinding your own isn’t as weird as it might sound and besides giving you the assurance of knowing which piece of meat your ground beef comes from, it also has the side benefit of allowing you to determine for yourself just how lean or fatty you want the meat to be. Want to add a little more flavor? Home grinders – somehow, I don’t see the phrase catching on as easily as “home brewer” did – can also add other varieties of meat, such as pork or veal, to the batch. 



A little more labor intensive? Yes, but not problematically so. Grinding your own has another distinct advantage. Ground meat in general deteriorates much more quickly than whole muscle cuts, Epple pointed out. Grinding your own allows you to grind as much as you need and no more. 



If the thought of shelling out for a grinder intimidates you, it’s worth reconsidering. Grinders come in a wide variety of models, from hand powered to electric. If you own a KitchenAid stand mixer, you can purchase a grinder attachment for about $65. Other, free standing electric powered grinders cost anywhere from $130 to more than $300, and hand-cranked models can range from a decidedly low-end $15 to a more reassuring but certainly more expensive $215. Most of the hand-powered models, though, come in between $60 and $100.



Mincing is another useful technique. Mincing, which means to cut something–meat, vegetables, whatever–into pieces smaller than simply chopping, is handy for a variety of reasons. If you don’t need a large quantity of ground meat, mincing is easy to do. It also produces a more textured final product, ideal for meat sauces such as that Italian classic, Bolognese.

For mincing, a good knife and a thick, sturdy cutting board are essential, but it doesn’t mean rushing out to your nearest overpriced kitchen boutique and buying an outrageously expensive knife. A Chinese cleaver – a good model will set you back about $15 – is ideal (Cleavers are useful for more than just mincing and I use mine more than any of my other blades) A good quality chef’s knife works just as well.

Knowing the source of the ground meat you use, or simply taking over the task of grinding it yourself, will give you a level of control over the safety of the food in your kitchen you won’t have otherwise. It might even make hamburgers fun again.

Even the Irish themselves didn’t begin really celebrating–really celebrating–St. Patrick’s Day until about 15 years ago. Beginning with a one-day observance that has since grown into a nationwide festival replete with parades, art exhibits, and–in at least one case–a nuns vs. priests beachside volleyball game, the annual saint’s day has evolved into a national showcase of all things Irish, casting considerable doubt upon the sanctity of our own observances here in the United States. That includes our annual obsession with corned beef and cabbage.

That’s not to say corned beef and cabbage isn’t Irish, but it’s safer to say it’s hardly Ireland’s national dish. Colcannon, an ancient dish of boiled cabbage, potatoes, wild garlic, and leeks mixed with milk and butter can probably lay better claim to that title. Nor does it undercut the dish’s popularity. Corned beef and cabbage has enjoyed status as a celebratory dish for many of Ireland’s major holidays for centuries, but its association with St. Patrick’s Day seems purely an American one.

Corned beef and cabbage is a simple dish with only one real secret for success: simmer–don’t boil–the meat and you’ll come out golden. Or green, as the case may be. Since few of us actually corn the meat ourselves anymore (“corn” refers to the salt used to preserve the meat, an English rather than Irish reference, at that) chances are pretty good you’re going to find your corned beef packaged in a plastic bag, complete with a little spice packet, ready and waiting to go.

That little spice packet contains ingredients that are traditionally included in the corning process. Chances are, the brisket you’ve purchased hasn’t been corned in the traditional manner–it’s probably just heavily salted–so those spices are there to supply the flavor that’s been left out as a result. You could also supply your own flavorings: allspice, mace, mustard seeds, bay leaves, whole black pepper corns, and garlic are all good choices.

Corned Beef and Cabbage 


3-4 pound beef brisket, rinsed
1-2 medium onions, quartered
Spices
1 large green cabbage
Water

1.  Place the brisket, onions, and spices in a pot a little larger than the ingredients, and cover–just cover–with cold water.

2.  Bring the water to a boil and then immediately reduce to a gentle simmer. Cover the pot, and then leave to continue simmering for about three hours, or until the brisket is fork-tender

3.  Core and cut the cabbage into quarters or eighths, and then tuck the cabbage chunks in amongst the beef and onions. Continue to simmer for 15 minutes (or longer, if you like your cabbage very tender).

What do you drink with corned beef and cabbage?

Think before you order, because the political slopes are slippery, indeed. Some might reach for a mug of Budweiser dyed green, while others might prefer a classic Black and Tan–that eye-catching mix of ale and stout–but its association with Ireland is tenuous at best and many Irish would prefer there be no association at all.

“The Black and Tans, of course, were a paramilitary force used by the British to terrorize Ireland during the War of Independence in 1920 and 1921,” noted the newspaper Irish Echo in a story about the drink a few years ago. “Recruited for their violence from the prisons of England, they were allowed to shoot any civilian they deemed suspicious.”

Who wants to celebrate that? Instead, consider Irish ale–a real one, such as Smithwick’s Ale or O’Hara’s Red Ale–or look for a perfectly nice American version such as Samuel Adams Irish Red Ale or Dick’s Irish Style Ale. Down a pint of ale with your corned beef and we’ll just pretend that request for a green-dyed Bud never happened.



Federal District Judge Jeffrey White accepted arguments Friday morning in San Francisco from both sides in the case which has pitted organic sugar beet seed producers against farmers throughout the country who have been planting their fields with genetically modified Roundup Ready sugar beets developed by Monsanto. The suit was filed in January, 2008. 



Plaintiffs, including Center for Food Safety, Sierra Club, and Organic Seed Alliance, are seeking a preliminary injunction from the court which would block planting of the Roundup Ready beets this spring. Whatever the outcome of this particular decision, both parties will be back in court in June to argue their cases for and against a permanent injunction on the planting and processing of GM sugar beets.



”We expect a decision soon that addresses our arguments and concerns,” said George Kimbrell, staff attorney for Center for Food Safety. “We know the court is well aware of the current planting season and he’ll be considering that in his decision.”

Defendants issued a collective, albeit brief, statement following the hearing through the Web site of the Sugar Industry Biotech Council: “On March 5, 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White conducted a hearing on the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction.  The judge took the matter under advisement and will issue his decision at a future time.”



Calls placed to the offices of both national and regional sugar beet associations for comments were directed to back to the SIBC Web site.

Roundup Ready sugar beets comprised about 95 percent of last year’s harvest, a remarkable number given that they were introduced into the market only two years ago.  Sugar from sugar beets comprises more than 50 percent of the United States’ sugar output.  The planting season for many of the country’s sugar beet farmers begins in April. The beets, like several other GM crops currently in use or under investigation in the U.S., were designed to withstand use of Monsanto’s herbicide, Roundup.



Plaintiffs argue the seeds should not have been deregulated by the United States Department of Agriculture without having first filed an environmental impact statement.



In a closely related matter, the U.S. Supreme Court in January agreed to hear another case involving GM crops. That decision involves the planting of Roundup Ready alfalfa, which opponents argue poses a threat to organic and conventional crops. Monsanto has twice filed appeals of decisions by U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in 2008 and 2009. Now their case, titled Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, No. 09-475, will be heard by the nation’s highest court. 



Defendants in the case will argue that conventional and organic alfalfa, open-pollinated by bees, is vulnerable to cross-pollination with Roundup Ready alfalfa. 



”Such biological contamination threatens the livelihood of organic farmers and dairies,” said the Center for Food Safety, “since the U.S. organic standard prohibits genetic engineering, and alfalfa exporters, since most overseas governments also reject GE-contaminated crops.”



Already, Justice Stephen Breyer has recused himself from the case because his brother, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco, issued the initial ruling against Monsanto.  Another Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, was employed for two years by Monsanto as a staff lawyer beginning in 1977 but has not withdrawn from hearing the case. 

3 tablespoons butter or olive oil

3 cups stock (chicken or seafood), hot

2 cups long-grain rice



You’ll need a very large, heavy bottomed pot or skillet, preferably with a tight-fitting lid.
 

• Heat the fat in the pot you’ve selected and then sauté the sausage and ham until just browned. Remove the meat and let drain on a paper towel.
• In the same skillet, using the fat from the sausage, fry the chicken pieces until nicely browned.
• When they’re done, let the pieces drain on paper towels, as well. Once they’ve cooled enough to handle, peel the meat from the bones and dice it into bite-sized pieces.
• Drain off all but about 3 tablespoons of the fat and sauté the onions over medium heat until translucent. Add the celery, green pepper, and garlic, cooking until they’re just tender. Reduce the heat to low.
• Add the rice to the vegetable mixture and stir it, letting it cook for about for three or four minutes, or until translucent.
• Add all the spices, herbs, and lemon zest, stirring it until everything is well incorporated.
• Add the meat and the stock – give it a few more good stirs – and then cover the pot, letting the entire concoction simmer over low heat until the rice is done.
• Gently fold in the shrimp, cover the pot again, and let stand for another 10 to 15 minutes or until the seafood is cooked.



Makes 6 to 8 servings.

The company is going to be competing in that seemingly growing field of processing agents to make meat safer, adding options to a list that already includes ammonia, chlorine, carbon monoxide, and maybe even irradiation down the road.

A division of Eli Lilly, Indiana-based Elanco made the announcement in a Jan. 18 press release that has appeared verbatim in much of the country’s agricultural press.

“We realize there is no single ‘silver-bullet’ solution,” said K. Douglas Miller, director for the new company, in that release, but EFS believes it can put a dent into the problem with pre- and post-slaughter formulas.

Two of those products are hitting the marketplace already thanks in part to a partnership with Baton Rouge, La.-based Albemarle Corp.

“A global supplier of specialty chemicals,” Albemarle produces chemicals for products ranging from flame-retardants and organometallics to Ibuprofen and potassium chemicals for use in numerous products, including glass and agrichemicals. More notably, Albemarle produces a wide range of bromine-based products, which is where they and EFS come together.

Bovibrom and Avibrom are bromine-based washes designed as “post-harvest” cleaners, intended to be used as rinses for whole animal carcasses after they’ve been processed.

Used in highly diluted forms, the solutions can be used as sprays or even in baths to kill off Salmonella and E. coli.

Part of the appeal of Bovibrom is that, unlike other chemicals such as chlorine, bromine doesn’t discolor the meat and is far less corrosive to equipment. 

Used properly, according to a release issued this week by Elanco Food Solutions, BoviBrom “forms a near-neutral (6.8) pH solution in water that is safe for workers, plant equipment, and the environment.”

Nonetheless, several bromide derivatives have been identified as health hazards and phased out from use in the United States, and many more have been implicated as possible carcinogens.

A third product, Finalyse, is a pre-wash, to be used just before animals are slaughtered. It’s different from Bovibrom in that it’s a bacteriophage, which uses viruses already found in human and animal guts to attack and diminish bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella.

Finalyse, according to EFS, can dramatically reduce the presence of E. coli on the hide, thereby helping to reduce the amount of the pathogen in trim after slaughter.

If Albemarle’s entry into food safety seems a little unusual, it’s not new. Albemarle is continually searching for new uses for bromide, even though other agricultural uses of the element, as fumigants for example, have been banned.

Close ties preceded its relationship with Elanco Food Solutions with another company, Ivy Natural Solutions that developed Finalyse.

Elanco bought out Ivy in 2007.


According to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Denver, Kay attached the labels, which he had made in a copy shop, on bottles in King Soopers, Rite Aid, Safeway, Target, and Walgreens around the Denver area. The bottles were even numbered like limited edition prints, with 67 of a planned 100 being distributed. Kay’s efforts weren’t in secret, however. Masquerading as a representative of the artist, Kay pitched his idea to Pepsico as he was working on the project, even keeping them updated on his progress. 



Over the next couple of days, he and a Gatorade employee exchanged emails about the project which were later turned over to federal investigators. 



”I represent the artist doing the ‘unfaithful’ pop art labels in the Greater Denver area,” he wrote in one email. “He’s been buying the 1-quart Tropical Mango, replacing the label with his art label and then re-merchandising them in stores here for less than a week. In this short time several people have contacted me and the story has even made the local news. We’re creating quite a buzz!”



Several people had contacted him to purchase bottles, he said in the email, but he wasn’t interested in selling to individual collectors. Kay was more interested in sparking conversation about the “stupid” scandal surrounding Woods, who recently admitted to having an affair, leading to a split with his wife and the loss of lucrative endorsements by several companies, including Gatorade. The company insists their decision was not related to the scandal. 



Suggesting Gatorade could “participate unofficially (while denying this connection)” by offering financial support in the way of travel costs and per diem, Kay added “This is the cheapest marketing campaign you could ever participate in. It is good for Gatorade and good for art.”



Kay, who filed for unemployment benefits in December, was arrested Wednesday. Federal law enforcement officials had spoken with him just a couple days before and the artist was very cooperative, telling special agent Daniel Burke he knew his efforts were illegal but “I didn’t think this was that big of a deal.”



Kay told Burke he hadn’t opened any of the bottles or tampered with their contents, a fact later confirmed by Gatorade.



Kay has been charged with introducing misbranded food into interstate commerce, altering labels on food being held for sale after shipment in interstate commerce, and intent to cause injury to a business with misleading labeling on a consumer product which affects interstate commerce. Together, the charges could mean up to five years in prison and up to $450,000 in fines. 



”From the onset, our primary concern has been the safety of our customers,” said Gatorade spokeswoman Karen May, from the company’s office in Chicago.

The schedule for ongoing litigation between Monsanto, Forbes Magazine’s Company of the Year and the maker of Roundup Ready sugar beet, and a list of opponents that includes the Center for Food Safety, the Organic Seed Alliance, High Mowing Organic Seeds, and the Sierra Club makes its less likely.

The parties, who have until Feb. 4 to hold a settlement conference on their own, are scheduled for a hearing on June 11th, well after most Roundup Ready sugar beets will be in the ground in the western and upper Midwestern states that grow them.

The collection of plaintiffs are hoping that discovery information the court expects to receive in March will convince Judge Jeffery White to halt planting of the next crop of GM sugar beets, expected to begin in April.

It was Judge White, appointed to the federal bench by former President George W. Bush, who last September ordered USDA to complete an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the safety of Roundup Ready sugar beets.

That decision was seen as a “procedural win” for the plaintiff groups.  The Sugar Industry Biotech Council found no issue with the safety of the Roundup Ready sugar beets, which are now favored by 95 percent of the acreage dedicated to sugar beets.

USDA deregulated Roundup Ready sugar beets in 2006, and the plaintiff groups filed their lawsuit in January 2008.  The case was filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.  Since the EIS decision, both sides have been shoring up their evidence and gathering evidence.

Judge White’s order for USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is being reviewed by the agency, according to Suzanne Bond, the service’s assistant director of public affairs.

Beets are among the most labor-intensive of crops and Roundup Ready sugar beets dramatically reduce the need for weeding and fuel, as well as water, said Luther Markwart, executive vice president of the American Sugar Beet Growers Association.

Introduced into the market in 2008, farmers apparently agreed and Roundup Ready sugar beets saw the fastest adoption rate by farmers of any genetically modified crop. Sugar beets account for more than half of the United States’ sugar production, and since the GM beets were deregulated nearly four years ago, nearly 95 percent of sugar beets produced in the US are genetically modified.
 


For organic seed growers like Frank Morton of Philomath, Ore., however, it’s only made matters more complicated. Philomath is situated in Oregon’s Willamette Valley where nearly all the country’s sugar beet seeds–both conventional and organic–are produced.

“I was concerned that contamination events would begin to occur that would make my seed worthless,” Morton told Capital Press, an agricultural newspaper, last December. Morton approached the Center for Food Safety in December, 2007 and they filed suit against the USDA the following month. 



Sugar beets, along with chard and table beets, are members of the Beta vulgaris family, and the three groups easily cross pollinate, a fact acknowledged by both Morton and Monsanto. In addition to the potential that genetically modified beets could cross pollinate with organic crops thereby destroying the organics’ value, there is considerable worry about other dangers from genetically modified food crops. 



“For both organic and conventional consumers, they should be concerned because there are insufficient claims that say those products are safe,” said Zelig Kevin Golden, staff attorney for CFS in San Francisco. Monsanto bases those claims on very short term studies, he said, and those studies were conducted over periods of time too short to really determine whether the sugar beets are truly safe Monsanto officials consider the plaintiffs’ concerns overwrought.



”Activists are making some pretty dramatic claims, but that’s why there are stewardship agreements,” said Garrett Kasper, public affairs manager for Monsanto in St. Louis. “There’s a lot of stewardship and training. Growing is by very well trained seed partners.”

Activists’ concerns go well beyond contamination of organic fields, however. 



“There are new studies coming out primarily in Europe that demonstrate genetically engineered corn varieties are toxic to organic functions,” said CFS’s attorney Golden. Genetically engineered soybeans have been shown to be toxic, he said.



”I wouldn’t say they’ll kill, no one actually knows that,” said Golden. “We’re being experimented upon because no one actually knows that.”

Latkes, the fried potato pancakes traditionally served during the Jewish festival of Hanukkah are a touchy subject. Everyone has their favorite recipe; everyone has their favorite way of making them. Make them too thick, with the tender centers and crisp edges, and you offend those who like their latkes thin and lacy. Make them too thin and – well, you get it. 



Of course, the point of Hanukkah isn’t actually the latkes despite the evidence to the contrary. The point is the oil in which they’re fried. In Israel, jelly doughnuts are the holiday treat, underscoring again it’s the oil that sits at the center of the observance. So, what’s with this infatuation with oil?



Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the temple in Jerusalem following the victory of the Jewish revolt against the Seleucid Empire in 166 B.C. (the Seleucid Empire was a remnant of the larger empire of the Alexander the Great). The Seleucid army had trashed the temple and when Jewish fighters under the command of Judah Maccabee moved to rededicate it, they found there was only enough consecrated oil to light the temple’s menorah for a single day.

Undeterred, they lit the lamp anyway but the small amount of oil continued to burn for eight days, long enough to press more olive oil to keep the lamp lit all the time, as commanded by religious law. The oil used for frying high-fat treats, then, is actually a reminder of this ancient event and a good excuse to blow off one’s diet for a little while. That, too, is the reason behind placing a lighted menorah – or candelabrum – in the window, a reminder to everyone of the miracle of the oil. This is also a good reason for non-Jews to cadge an invitation to a Hanukkah party. 



Traditionally, latkes are served with sour cream and/or apple sauce. Hanukkah begins Friday at sundown. Start cooking.



Rosemary Applesauce



4 cups apple, cored and chopped into about 1-inch die (Don’t bother to peel them unless you absolutely can’t stand apple peel)

3 tablespoons lemon juice

1 tablespoon honey

1 teaspoon rosemary, fresh, finely chopped

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup water



Combine all the ingredients in a medium sauce pan, bring water to a boil, and then reduce heat to medium.



Let fruit simmer, covered, for about 15 minutes or until tender. 



Using a food processor or immersion blender, puree the apples until they’re as smooth or as chunky as you like. Serve warm or chilled.



 
Potato Apple Latkes



2 medium to large Russet potatoes, peeled

1 medium yellow onion

2 apples (Choose a firm variety, such as Fuji or Braeburn) 

2 eggs, beaten

½ cup matzo meal

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 teaspoons salt, plus more salt for sprinkling over the latkes as they cook

Peanut or vegetable oil for shallow frying



Using a food processor or hand grater, grate the potato, onion, and apple together, letting the grated bits rest in a colander or strainer to drain off excess moisture. Then take hands full of the mixture, squeezing them as hard as you can to force out even more water. Transfer the dried mixture to a large mixing bowl.



Add the egg, matzo meal, and salt to the concoction and stir until thoroughly blended. 



Heat a heavy skillet – cast iron is great for this – and then add about a quarter cup of oil. While the oil heats up, add the baking powder to the potato mixture, and work it in quickly but thoroughly. The baking powder lightens the latkes’ texture a bit. It’s a nice addition. 



Drop a small morsel of the potato mixture into the oil; if it begins to sizzle, the oil is ready. Reduce heat to medium and begin adding spoons full of the mixture to the skillet, flattening them out until they’re as thin as you want them. Fry for three or four minutes on one side until golden and then turn them over, frying them for another three or four minutes.



Drain the latkes on paper towels, or keep them in a warm oven until you have as many as you want. Serve hot with sour cream and apple sauce.

The decision to embrace vegetarianism or veganism often means facing a table full of not-always-noncarnivore-friendly traditions. It doesn’t have to be that way and others have very neatly overcome that obstacle.  Nearly 40 years ago, vegetarian cookbook author Anna Thomas observed “I think part of the trick was to observe as many traditions as possible: the few that were missing were hardly missed.”


Taking a cue from an Italian-American tradition, raviolis at Thanksgiving, and a popular food trend from a few years back, I came up with this recipe for squash and sweet potato-filled ravioli in walnut sauce. I particularly like that it borrows from a food tradition born in this country with obvious roots overseas.  Squash, of course, is as American as one could hope for an ingredient being native to the Americas and eaten as long ago as 5000 BC.  The sweet potato, too, is indigenous to the Americas and was cultivated as long as 2,000 years ago. The strong notes of sage in the walnut sauce bring out a traditional Thanksgiving flavor (sage stuffing, anyone?).


The dough is made from all-purpose flour and an emulsification of olive oil and water. Traditionally, the dough for ravioli includes eggs, but the most important aspect of the eggs is the fat and the water they contain. I use a good table variety of extra virgin olive oil; there’s no need to use a more expensive kind. As for making the raviolis themselves, follow the directions that come with your pasta machine (I use an Atlas pasta machine I bought at a yard sale for $10) or roll the dough out with a rolling pin.
 


Squash and sweet potato ravioli with walnut sauce

Dough

4 cups white all-purpose flour

2/3 cup olive oil

1 1/3 cup water

2 tsp salt


Emulsify oil and water together and then pour as much as is needed into flour and salt in a large mixing bowl (you may not need all the liquid), stirring until a dough begins to form. Remove from bowl and begin kneading dough for ten minutes, until it is smooth and elastic. Wrap in plastic and set aside for 30 minutes to an hour. 


Makes enough dough for about 60 raviolis.


Filling

1 cup baked sweet potato

1 cup baked butternut squash

Zest of half an orange

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tsp olive oil

Grated nutmeg

1/16 tsp cayenne

Salt and pepper to taste


Using a hand-held mixer or food processor, combine all the ingredients, mixing until they’re completely combined and smooth.

Sauce

1 cup toasted walnuts, plus another 1/2 cup or so to set aside

1 cup good olive oil

2 heads shallots, minced

½ cup vegetable stock

Juice of half a lemon

6 leaves of sage, chopped

1 garlic clove, minced

Salt and pepper to taste


Heat olive oil in a sauce pan over medium heat and add shallots, sage, and garlic when the oil begins to release its scent. Lower the heat, simmer for about five minutes, and then set aside to cool.



Place walnuts in a blender or food processor with the vegetable stock, and add the oil and vegetable mixture gradually, pulsing the blades until you have a smooth sauce. Add lemon juice to taste. Throw in the walnuts you set aside and pulse just enough to chop them into small pieces.



Filling and cutting the ravioli



Roll out one length of dough and cut it into a strip about 4 inches wide. Brush the dough lightly with water, and place teaspoons of the filling every 2 inches, about 1 inch from one edge of the dough. Fold the dough over, being sure to gently press out any of the air pockets that form. Use a fluted pastry wheel or knife to cut the dough into 2-inch squares. Press the edges down to make sure everything is sealed tightly. Set the individual raviolis aside on a cloth towel or parchment paper, being sure that they aren’t touching another (they’ll stick if they do, and then tear easily). 



When the sauce is ready, it’s time to cook the pasta. Add them gently to a large pot of boiling, salted water. If you’re cooking them shortly after making them, they should only take three or four minutes. Taste one before emptying the pot; if they’re not done, cook them for another minute or until they’re tender with just a bit of a bite. 


Spoon sauces over ravioli, garnish with sage leaves or chopped parsley, and serve.


Do we have to have [insert oft-repeated dish here] again? In the interest of helping you navigate some of those final hurdles, here are a few suggestions:

Stock.  You’ll need plenty of it for cooking on Thanksgiving, and you may find yourself running out. Canned stock is frequently strong enough that you can dilute it (one cup of stock to one cup of water) without diminishing the flavor of whatever you’re using it in. A better alternative is to make it yourself. When you buy your turkey, also buy some turkey parts such as necks and wings, and use those for stock. Add 2 chopped onions, 2 chopped carrots, 2 chopped ribs of celery, and a couple of bay leaves and enough water to cover by about an inch. Bring to a boil and then simmer for about 30 minutes.

Cranberry sauce.  Do you really want to use the stuff from the can? Granted, it comes out in that neat tube shape, but homemade is easy to make and far more flavorful. All you need is one bag of cranberries, 1 cup of sugar or honey, 2 cups of orange juice, zest of one orange, 1 onion minced, and salt and pepper to taste. Combine everything in a sauce pot and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and let simmer for about 15 or 20 minutes. You can serve it chunky or run it through the food processor for a smooth sauce.

Brine.  If you like to brine your turkey beforehand, try replacing some of the water with orange juice. For 2 gallons of brine, use 6 quarts of water and 2 quarts of orange juice, along with 1 cup of kosher salt and 1 cup of sugar.

Libby’s, the people who supply the majority of Americans with their canned pumpkin, announced last week they wouldn’t have enough to go around because of a particularly wet harvest season this year. If you find yourself without canned pumpkin puree for your pies, preparing fresh pumpkin is easy. You’ll need sugar pumpkins (don’t buy the larger ones used for Halloween). The typical sugar pumpkin weighs between one-and-a-half and three pounds and five pounds of pumpkin produces about four-and-a-half cups of pumpkin puree.

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
• Scrub the pumpkin thoroughly on the outside and then slice it into halves, removing all the seeds and fibers.
• Arrange halves face down on a baking sheet, and let roast for 45 minutes to an hour, or until the flesh of the squash is tender.
• Scrape the meat of the pumpkin into a food processor or blender, and process until it’s a smooth puree. Actually, a fork or a potato masher does a good job, too. 
• Follow your favorite pumpkin pie recipe from this point on.

Tradition, of course, is a hallmark of Thanksgiving but sometimes even the prospect of facing yet another 20-pound bird is just too much to bear. Last year we served lamb; it was wonderful, but this year we’re having turkey again.  Whether it’s because we’re tired of turkey, or we’re only planning dinner for two, there’s absolutely no reason to be bound to the same menu year after year.


For many Americans, Thanksgiving means other dishes entirely and there’s absolutely no reason we shouldn’t feel free to borrow from them, regardless of our ethnic heritage. For many Mexican-Americans, tamales are an important part of the holiday. As a dish going back some 5,000 years and rooted firmly in the Americas, there’s little room for debate as to how traditional they may or may not be. They can be sweet or savory, stuffed with meat or vegetarian (although purists will scoff at the idea of tamales made with anything but lard). 


Italian-Americans look forward to ravioli, often served right alongside the bird. Another advantage to these stuffed pastas: they can easily be made vegan or vegetarian, or you can make your life even easier and buy them already made. If you choose to make the ravioli or tamales yourself, however, you can pull your friends and family in to help; you’ll definitely want help if you make the tamales. Isn’t preparing the meal together part of the appeal?


Instead of traditional stuffing, some Chinese-Americans draw on an equally rich dish: glutinous rice with turkey giblets, mushrooms, water chestnuts, and lop cheung, or dried sausages made from duck liver or pork.  


If you’re cooking for just a few people, perhaps just two, and want to stick with tradition, turkey breasts are easy to prepare and still provide generous servings. Of course, there’s no reason you have to stick with turkey: a roast chicken is a perfectly lovely alternative, as is duck. 


Of course, some simply can’t let go of tradition, although their take on what’s traditional might seem a bit askew.

“Cranberry sauce,” said Sarah Kelley, a screenwriter in Sierra Madre, Calif. “And yams with sherry and melted marshmallow. And peas. And mashed potatoes. And white meat. I could seriously drink a milkshake of all these things, pureed, and be happy.”

Americans endure around 76 million cases of food poisoning each year, according to estimates from the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest. Of those, 325,000 are hospitalized and 5,000 die from food related illnesses. 


The perils are everywhere: thawing the turkey can be dangerous if you don’t do it correctly, stuffing is life threatening, and the dangers of cross contamination lurk behind – or beneath – everything on your kitchen counters. It’s almost enough to make you call out for pizza but a simple regimen of caution and common sense will see you, and your guests, through the occasion with nary an illness or injury. Here’s a list of pointers to help things along:


Thawing the turkey. Unless you’ve purchased the bird fresh (and refrigerated it properly) you’ll need to thaw it first, and 20 pounds of frozen turkey doesn’t thaw quickly. The United States Department of Agriculture recommends allowing 24 hours of thaw time per 5 pounds of turkey. Begin by stashing it in the refrigerator on the Sunday before the feast to start the whole process. This is the safest way to defrost the turkey. As the bird thaws, water will accumulate and you’ll need to make sure it doesn’t come into contact with – and contaminate – anything else. Place the turkey in a large pan with high sides and store it on the bottom shelf of your refrigerator. You don’t want water splashing or leaking out onto the food beneath. If the bird thaws faster than you anticipated, you can store it safely up to two days in the refrigerator before cooking.


If you were late picking up the bird at the store, there’s still hope. You can always thaw it out by immersing it, still wrapped, in cold water. Allow 30 minutes per pound and plan on changing the water every half hour or your bird will be sitting in a stagnant bacterial soup. Once it’s thawed, plan on cooking it right away; cold water thawing doesn’t provide the consistent temperatures of refrigerator thawing that keep bacteria growth under control. 


Are you even more pressed for time than that? You can thaw the guest of honor in the microwave, too, but you’ll need to consult the directions that came with the oven to do it correctly. Do plan to begin cooking the bird immediately afterward, again to avoid bacterial growth.

Of course, safety doesn’t end with thawing the turkey. Once you get going in the kitchen, you’ve still got cross contamination to worry about. Cross contamination occurs when contaminated foods come into contact with other foods, thereby ensuring an equitable distribution of pathogens for everyone. Prepare your turkey separately from the other dishes. As you prep the bird, you may find yourself grabbing other items and tools without even thinking about it, possibly spreading contamination as you go. Prepare the turkey and then clean up thoroughly before going on to the other items on your menu.


To stuff or not to stuff. Almost everyone loves stuffing, or dressing depending upon where you’re from, but stuffing the bird can prevent it from cooking thoroughly. Your best bet? Cook the stuffing in a separate pan and use the cavity of the bird to hold a few aromatics that will lend extra flavor. Fill it with chopped onion and herbs, for example, but don’t pack them in. Loose packing will allow heat to circulate evenly inside the bird, ensuring everything cooks properly. If you opt for stuffing the turkey after all, plan on an additional 15 to 30 minutes roasting time, but you run the risk of drying out even more of the meat. 


Eat – and wash – your veggies. Clean all your produce before using it: leafy greens are not an uncommon source of food poisoning, and squashes should be scrubbed before you slice into them. Your knife’s blade can pick up pathogens on the skin and force them into the flesh of the squash when you slice into it (that goes double for any fruit and vegetables you plan to eat raw or just lightly cooked). 


Wash your cutting board, or switch it out, as you go from one dish to the next. Wash your knife, too. Contamination on just one vegetable can spread as quickly to other items as it does from meat to the rest of the meal. At the most basic level, wash your hands frequently, particularly when you move on to the next dish on the menu.

Frequently ordinary but always fresh ingredients combine to create memorable, soul-satisfying dishes.  As it happens, her style of cooking does more than simply taste wonderful, it brings a measure of security to her dinner table.



While many of us worry about the safety of the food we buy, Thomas doesn’t worry quite as much: “Maybe I’m in denial like everybody else,” she suggested. Maybe, but her approach to cooking and eating goes a long way toward mitigating her anxiety. 



Thomas, who has just published her fourth cookbook, “Love Soup”, is the author of the classic “The Vegetarian Epicure”.  First published in 1972, “The Vegetarian Epicure” took vegetarian cooking out of the realms of brown rice and tofu – and ideology – and moved it squarely into the realm of sensuality and pleasure. Over the years, she’s written more cookbooks, raised two sons (one is vegetarian and the other is vegan), and written and produced a number of films, including the Oscar-nominated “El Norte”. Food continues to be a tremendous source of satisfaction for her though, and she entertains frequently.  While she’s concerned about food safety she feels she’s in a pretty good position to protect herself and those for whom she cooks from many of the problems. 



“If you don’t eat meat, you’re way ahead of the game,” she said from her home in Ojai, California.
 “If you only eat some meat, and you make sure you know where it comes from, you’re also giving yourself a big advantage.”

Cooking one’s own food, using as minimally processed ingredients as possible, is another key step in keeping her kitchen safe.  That’s a far cry from food factories where numerous ingredients, often heavily processed themselves and from multiple sources, are combined to make products that are then shipped thousands of miles away.
 


”If you’re eating food that’s been mixing with other foods, in places where speed and profit margin are more important than safety,” she said, “you just expose yourself to real risk.”


An even greater advantage is how little processed food ends up in her kitchen to begin with. Although she granted a green light to canned Ortega brand chilies at least as far back as 1996 when she published her third book, “The New Vegetarian Epicure”, her pantry is largely empty of ready-to-eat foods and other highly processed stuff, she said.  For Thomas, it’s a matter of control.



Scouring her local farmers’ market and getting deliveries from a local CSA (local farms that deliver produce and other foods to subscribers who pay in advance for the season ahead), Thomas prepares her dishes from ingredients she’s selected herself.  She knows what goes into that batch of soup.  There’s virtually no question about the dessert or the salad dressing.


”I’m not saying nothing can happen,” she said, but it’s all about odds and, like crossing the street, you can improve your odds by looking both ways.  Ultimately, however, it’s about common sense.

“Fortunately, in this case,” she said, “common sense and keeping your food fairly safe happens to coincide with really eating well.”

Like any well-prepared cook, she keeps a pantry full of staples that free her up to make last minute choices at the farmers’ market, but even those items – save for some select cans of vegetable stock, those Ortega chilies, and luxuries like balsamic vinegar – are mere ingredients and not the soul of the food she’s preparing. Bringing home her own produce, washing it herself – even when it has supposedly been washed already – are just part of the routine.
 


”I think just as a question of improving your odds, the more you bring it back home and make it a little more basic, the more you’re in a position to control how those things are done. And you’re not trying to rush the process.



“The more of the process you control,” she said, “then the more of the process you control.”

Closures of Kellogg’s Eggo waffle plant in Atlanta have resulted in a nationwide shortage of the frozen breakfast food, leaving some parents scrambling for breakfast ideas for their kids. This week’s announcement the company is rationing its Eggo waffles is just the latest in a string of stumbles for one of the world’s largest food companies.


Back in September, Battle Creek, MI-based Kellogg announced a recall of 4,500 cases of its Eggo Cinnamon Toast Waffles and Eggo Toaster Swirlz after tests performed by the Georgia Department of Agriculture found Listeria monocytogenes in samples of the company’s buttermilk waffles.

Kellogg closed the plant for a thorough cleaning but was forced to close it again after heavy rain falls in northern Georgia flooded the plant. 



Last week, Kellogg announced it would begin rationing the waffles in an effort to get its product to areas where it is in greatest demand.  In an email, company spokesperson Kris Charles attributed the shortage to “a confluence of events” including the floods of September and mechanical problems at another plant in Rossville, Tenn.

There has been no mention of the Listeria-related recall back in September. 



Despite solid third quarter sales in October, Kellogg has had a number of stumbles this year. The company, which reported $13 billion in sales in 2008, was the target of criticism for its lack of vigilance in its use of ingredients from the Salmonella-laced Peanut Corporation of America.

Kellogg had to recall 30 brands and products as part of the largest food recall in American history.  In October, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera threatened legal action against Kellogg for labeling its sugary Cocoa Krispies cereal with the claim “Now helps support your child’s immunity”.  Kellogg quickly relented and agreed to withdraw the claim, although they insisted the timing, with the rise of the threat of the H1N1 pandemic, was “purely coincidental”. 


Kellogg is also being sued by Annex Holdings, the former owners of Wholesome & Hearty Food Co., which makes the popular vegetarian Gardenburger meat-alternative.  Kellogg purchased the company in November 2007, but seven months later withdrew Gardenburger products from the market, citing “facility improvements” to its Clearfield, Utah, plant as the reason but the company also withheld the $10 million escrow owed to the former owners. 



According to an Annex statement released Oct. 28, Kellogg has “never disclosed exactly what was wrong with the withdrawn Gardenburger products nor has it identified the specific construction conditions that led to the withdrawal.”



Annex accused Kellogg of trying to “‘pass the buck’ for its plant sanitation issues” while claiming, under its own tenure, Gardenburger “had an unblemished history of quality and safety, including passing numerous third-party and governmental sanitation audits, lending credence to the notion that consumer safety is of greater concern to smaller companies such as WHF than to the larger Kellogg conglomerate.