Australian Food Safety Blog

We recently blogged about the e coli outbreak in Europe which prompted someone to point out another blog post summarising the 10 worst food contamination outbreaks.

Click on the hyperlink to have a look – it’s pretty scary stuff which once again highlights the importance of good food safety management programs.

We all have a stake in this because we all eat and consume food from a wide variety of sources.

If you come across interesting statistics and data like this, please let us know, we’d love to blog about it.

On Thursday 9th June 2011, I attended a one day workshop at the New South Wales Food Authority (NSWFA) for all food safety auditors in NSW. While the event was beneficial for all attendees, it was disappointing to realise that less than half of the 22 approved auditors in NSW bothered to attend.

Whenever possible, I attend the meetings the different state regulators have for auditors and I am attending another one in September for Victorian auditors.

Joanne Bulle is a recent addition to The Gourmet Guardian team and she also travelled from Albury to Sydney for the one day meeting.

These meetings are an important forum for the regulator (in this case the NSWFA) to update auditors on resources, requirements, changes in legislation and also to provide an outlet to discuss any problems or concerns auditors may have and to seek clarification on them.

This meeting was no exception. There are two very important changes that have been made by the NSWFA.

The first is they have updated the audit checklist that all auditors are required to complete and the second is that they have revised the guidelines for businesses serving food to Vulnerable Persons Businesses (VP). The audit checklist was updated to match the guidelines.

If you are a VP business, I feel it is vital, if you have not already done so, to download and print these guidelines to ensure you are complying with them.

http://www.foodauthority.nsw.gov.au/_Documents/industry_pdf/guidelines_vp_2011.pdf Click Here To Download The Vulnerable Persons Business Guidelines

Your next audit will be made using these guidelines and you will be expected to comply with them. Continue reading ‘New Vulnerable Persons Guidelines Announced by NSWFA’

Gavin Buckett was interviewed on Sydney’s 2UE 954 Talk Back Radio yesterday. Click on the hyperlink to listen to the 5 minute interview that discusses the NSW Food Authority Name and Shame register and Chinese restaurants that seem to occupy most of the top of the list.

GOURMET GUARDIAN
2UE INTERVIEW David Oldfield

CLICK ON IMAGE TO LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW
(Full Transcript Below)

Click on the image to listen to the interview right now

Eating out is a bit of a common place thing of course in the 21^st century but also a long time before that.  The news is that the New South Wales Food & Safety Authority have named and shamed a whole series of restaurants and Chinese cuisine has predominantly hit the top of the list.  So is it a question that the cuisine you choose may determine your chances of getting sick or is it just that we’ve got more Chinese restaurants than anything else?  How does it work out?

Gavin thanks for joining me.

Thank you very much David.

Gavin Buckett is an Australian food safety specialist.  Gavin is it just simply a matter of there being more Chinese food restaurants than anything else?

I think that that may be a possibility.  I know looking back to my childhood that most of the multicultural food that we had sort of 20 or 30 years ago was Chinese and I also remember that every single suburb had a Chinese restaurant on most corners.

And of course the clubs, you’d go into the RSL or something and they would have a Chinese restaurant.

Yes, and I know that there’s a lot more cuisines, like Thai and the Vietnamese, around now but I think it would be important to take a look at the number of Chinese restaurants as opposed to the number of different cuisines as well.

It would be a good idea wouldn’t it if they actually did that rather than doing it on just raw numbers; apply it proportionately based on numbers of restaurants.  In fact the Chinese may come in better under the ties with some of the others.

Possibly, yes.

Certainly there are very, very large numbers of them.  Are there hygiene issues behind some of these cultural methods that pertain to food safety; I mean we always see stories about how certain cultures do things, for example they use one hand to go to the toilet and one hand to eat their food and you know there are issues of cross contamination because it seems that maybe things aren’t all that clean.  Are there elements of that in anything we might see in restaurants?

Look I’ve seen some terrible things in my time but it’s not specific to one nationality or one type of food business or anything like that.  So we find that there are some businesses with different cuisines that are very, very good and there are some that aren’t.  But I’ve not found in my experience, and we’ve been doing food safety now for almost 10 years, and we haven’t found that’s its specific to any one cuisine.

In fact I saw a movie the other day which was a comedy based in an American restaurant where an American chef actually went into the toilet and was standing there at the trough, you know as men do, and he had his cake spatula with him and was about to go back into the kitchen and lather up a cake.

Well I haven’t seen that but I have seen at one shopping center where a chef walked in, he was in full chef’s uniform with his apron and gloves on, he then went to the urinal and just opened to one side, finished doing what he was doing and then walked back out of the toilet without changing gloves, or washing his hands, and walked right back into his restaurant.

Well maybe he’s one of those chef’s that you know cooks with one hand and goes to the toilet with the other.

Yes, and he certainly wasn’t of Chinese descent so, like I said its not something that’s specific to one cuisine or another but yes, the importance of food safety certainly is something that all food businesses need to implement.

Yeah and I suppose, responsibly speaking, when these various name and shame things occur like the New South Wales Food Safety Authority, it would be better if they gave us a proportional understanding given the numbers of restaurants when you’re going to cut it down to cuisine.  Because the report this morning did most certainly give the idea that if you were going to get sick there was more chance of it in a Chinese food restaurant; but the suspicion might be that there are simply more Chinese food restaurants so it proportionately gives the wrong impression

Yes, possibly.  Like I said I don’t know the number of different Chinese or Indian or Pakistani or any of those different restaurants that are around.  But I think from the name and shame website is that it indicates what penalties are being raised and that’s what the officers and inspectors are finding.  I don’t think its their job to turn around and say, look there are more Chinese restaurants than others; they’re just reporting what they find, so I think it would be discriminatory if they proportionately reported what had been found.

What I’m getting at is the way the story was related though, they way the story sort of went; the suggestion was you’ve got more chance of getting sick from eating Chinese food than something else because of the raw numbers that were used.  But in fact proportionately there may simply be more Chinese restaurants; so the report may have been unfair.  But I suppose the very interesting thing also about the name and shame file is I wonder if you look up these things, and anyone listening if you do this, if you go to the website and have a look at any one of those name and shame restaurants, would you ever go to any one of them?

Gavin can you understand why somebody looking at these restaurants that have been caught out in the past, would just never go there again?

Very much so.  I know that I was doing some training in Sydney and I didn’t know a lot about some of the cases that one of the guys in the class was talking about and I spoke to him at the break and he said that he looks at the name and shame website all the time.  So I went back to the hotel where I was staying and I pulled out [Renwick], that’s where I was staying, and there were 36 restaurants there in [Renwick]; that’s going back about 8 months now.  There were 36 restaurants there that were listed including the one that I had eaten out at the night before, and it certainly didn’t give me… A lot of confidence.

Yeah.  I hadn’t seen anything that would not make me eat there, but it certainly would be something that I believe the public has a right to know.

Yeah, absolutely.

A lot of the time you can’t see what goes on behind the walls.

More than a lot.  Gavin, I appreciate your time.

Can I just clarify one point?  Just before the break you mentioned that it might be safer to eat in your own home.

Well if you are cooking the food yourself; I’m certainly happier with everything that we make at home yeah, but I have a couple of restaurants that I love.  Yeah go on.

But according to the Food Safety Information Council there’s about 5.3 million people that get food poisoning every year in Australia and about ¼ of that is quantified back to people preparing food in their own homes.

Is this because they are using poor ingredients or is it because they’re eating stuff that’s long past when they should have used it because they’re leaving things in the fridge for too long; like seconds and sort of leftovers and what have you?

Well it could be leftovers and things that have been left in the fridge, it could be you know a domestic fridge if it’s overloaded it might not be running at the right temperature or drawers being opened frequently but…

It’s a good point actually Gavin, you sort of pack everything you can into your refrigerator but if you do that it doesn’t actually work very well.

Well that’s right, and with having a young family myself things like changing nappies, if people don’t go and wash their hands after changing nappies and then go and prepare sandwiches or prepare food or salad or something for their kids then it could easily be that they’re making their own kids sick as opposed to or something they’ve picked up at school or something like that.

Taste sensations you’re not looking for.  Thanks for your time Gavin.

All right.

That’s a good point there in closing about what happens in your own home too; especially when people leave stuff in the fridge for too long.  “How long has this been here?”

Let me tell you, if there’s any question about how long something’s been in the fridge, just don’t risk it.

Gavin Buckett was recently interviewed by the Daily Telegraph about the high incidence of Chinese food restaurants in the NSW Food Authority name and shame register.

Click on the hyperlink to read the full story!

NSW Food Authority Name And Shame Register

Words like, ‘food poisoning’, ‘foodborne illness’ and ‘kitchen accidents’ are very common when talking about food safety in general. What isn’t talked about as much is the science behind all of it.

Since the majority of food safety revolves around foodborne pathogens, scientific research is the foundation of all food safety rules with two main types of research: Laboratory experimentation and investigation.

Because most countries’ governments depend on disease and food surveillance data to regulate their country’s types of foodborne pathogens, different types of testing are required for epidemiology, food microbiology and food technology. All of this falls under laboratory experimentation and provides the types of harmful microorganisms found in food that causes disease along with the level of risk involved.

After this data is discovered and on hand, food safety specialists take on the essential role of investigator to assist the public in awareness and help food businesses keep their industrial kitchens free from foodborne illnesses.

This investigation is extremely important, to say the least, for any well-run food establishment, especially considering there are over 200 known bacterial pathogens that exist in a spore or vegetative cell, viruses, parasites and toxins. That’s a scary number of foodborne pathogens which is why trained professionals are needed to handle this spectrum of the food business!

If not, restaurants may end up doing their own inspections, much like this man:

We’re previously blogged about how important it is to wash your hands. Of course some people need a little motivation – we’re not sure if this will work, but it sure is an innovative approach to improve hand washing!

I couldn’t pass up the chance to share this photo with you – to put our Food Safety Standards in perspective.

The next time you get upset because of the bureaucracy, red tape and government regulations – just remember, they exist for a reason…!

While hand washing is very effective at preventing the spread of infection by wiping out bacteria as well as cross-contamination of foods, it is less than adequate for getting rid of many viruses such as hepatitis A and protozoa. One out of every five cases of food-borne illnesses is caused by an infected worker’s hands coming into contact with food, so;

Clean gloves are a better choice than unclean hands.

However, it has not been proven that the use of disposable vinyl, latex or non-latex gloves is a safer method of handling food compared to effective hand washing techniques. Wearing gloves can lead to a false sense of security and safety and can more than likely cause food contamination if hands are not washed and air dried prior to putting them on; so this can result in cross contamination from raw to high risk food in the same way as it does with hands.

Defects in a significant number of gloves, such as pinholes or punctures, enable bacteria from the hands to pass through the gloves and may result in contamination of high-risk foods with large numbers of pathogens. Latex gloves can also produce allergic reactions in some people.

The hand environment created by wearing gloves provides the ideal conditions for the growth of bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus.

Cleaning hands before putting on gloves and frequent disposal of gloves minimises the risk for food contamination.

It is good practice to wash hands thoroughly after gloves have been removed as pathogens may have multiplied significantly while the gloves were being worn. Some workers tend to wear the same pair of gloves for extended periods and it is that complacency that could account for the failure of gloves to prevent bacterial contamination.

Therefore the use of gloves could be counterproductive because workers might tend to wash their hands less frequently.

Food handlers with gloves are more aware they are handling high-risk foods and therefore are less likely to scratch their head and pick their nose or all those other bad hygiene practices that can lead to the spread of bacteria.

It therefore appears that a multi-tiered approach will offer the best protection.

Food service workers need to be educated about hand washing, using proper gloves and preventing ill employees from preparing food. They also need to be provided proper training in proper hygiene with a system put in place for monitoring compliance.

Hand Washing + Food Business = Healthy Customers

Graphjam.com has done it yet again, eloquently displaying anecdotal statistical data what we all know to be true:

Handwashing Statistics

When asking employees or owners in the food business what their #1 safety hazard in the kitchen is, they’ll always answer, ‘Hands’.

Considering the fact humans have between 2 and 10 million bacteria between the fingertip and elbow and this number doubles after using the toilet. It’s not surprising and in agreement with any health science degree class this is at the top of the list for potential safety hazards in the kitchen.

The most common diseases spread by food business employees with unwashed hands include:

• Nosocomial Infections: Most commonly, E. coli, MRSA and pseudomonas
• Airborne Illnesses: Respiratory illnesses such as common colds and flues spread by sneezing and coughing
• Noroviruses: Gastrointestinal infections transmitted through the fecal-oral route, i.e. vomiting, nausea, diarrhea
• Hepatitis A: A viral infection affecting the liver spread most commonly by food handlers when touching food containers

These foodborne diseases can create havoc in food businesses if the proper steps aren’t taken, leading to destroyed reputations of great dining facilities and experiences.

Washing hands is something everyone has control over and is the easiest and most effective prevention measure to stop bacteria from spreading.

It’s also completely cost effective for ALL food business owners!

Understanding the dangers that lay in our hands makes it an undeniable fact that washing hands benefits the people who make the food as well as the people who eat it!

I was just speaking with Dr Marc Dussault, an Exponential Growth Strategist, about inviting people like you to attend the Food Services Australia Trade Show coming up in June (23-24-25)… That’s when Marc asked me a question that through me for a loop. He asked me…

“Do you know how high above the net a top tennis player has to hit the ball to get the ball deep into the back court if he or she is standing on the base line?”

Think about it before you click on the READ MORE button

Continue reading ‘What does Tennis have to do with the upcoming Food Services Australia Show?’