The recent deaths and illnesses from pasteurized-milk ice cream emphasize, yet again, how much less we know about food safety than the people in charge would care to admit.
In the span of a few months, five ice cream companies have recalled potentially tainted products. Late last year, it was Snoqualmie Ice Cream and Pinks Ice Cream out of Washington state, followed by Full Tilt Ice Cream, also of Washington all based on the possibility of listeria monocytogenes in their ice cream and production facilities.
Then it was Blue Bell Creameries of Texas, the third-largest producer nationally, in which three people died from listeria monocytogenes in its ice cream (along with at least seven other illnesses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control).
Most recently, Jenis Ice Cream of Ohio decided to do a recall and shut down shops after a U.S. Department of Agriculture test found listeria monocytogenes in its ice cream.
The professionals who monitor food safety have contradicted their own warnings about ice cream. The Center for Science and the Public Interest, a nonprofit organization that tends to parrot the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in a 2009 report included ice cream as one of Americas ten most dangerous foods, citing nearly 75 outbreaks in the 20 years from 1990 to 2009. These scoops can occasionally carry a load of dangerous bacteria, it said. (It also included another dairy product in its top-ten list–cheese.)
But then, in a 2014 report, it labeled dairy as one of our safest food categories. (Pound-for-pound, seafood is the riskiest food, followed by poultry; fruit and dairy are the safest foods, CSPI concluded.)
The same kinds of contradictions crop up when the professionals consider food safety solutions. Here are a few of the solutions tossed around:
More mandated testing.
One seemingly obvious lesson seems that we should do more testing of dairy products for listeria monocytogenes than the occasional random testing that now occurs. Unfortunately, the presence of pathogens doesnt necessarily equate with the development of illnesses.
Part of the problem is that trying to find the pathogens in food that will cause disease isnt unlike trying to find the needle in the proverbial haystack. The New York Department of Agriculture and Markets has shut down raw milk dairies on at least a couple dozen occasions over the last decade for the presence of listeria monocytogenes, without a single illness developing (either in New York, or anywhere else in the country).
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration spent much of 2014 doing what it called a pilot testing program of more than 1,600 samples of raw milk cheese from dozens of producers in the U.S. as well as producers from nearly 20 other countries. It found listeria in the raw-milk cheese of only one American producer, so far as is known, and forced that producer to recall all the cheese; no illnesses were reported, even though much of the cheese had almost certainly been consumed before the recall. (The FDA also found listeria and salmonella in five imported cheese samples, and no illnesses were reported in those cases as well.)
Tighten the regulations.
The U.S. actually has the tightest regulations in the world when it comes to listeria monocytogenes in foodsa zero tolerance policy. Thus, the presence of a single cell of listeria is enough to shutter a food producer, even if no illnesses have occurred.
Because the presence of just a few cells of listeria monocytogenes doesnt usually lead to illness, most First World countries, including Canada and members of the European Union have adopted policies whereby they accept the presence of small amounts of listeria without shutting food producers.
Do quicker recalls when pathogens show up.
No matter how quickly a company orders a product recall, the reality is that most food is consumed shortly after it is purchased. All the ice cream recalls this year very likely came after much of the questionable ice cream had been eaten.
More aggressive anti-pathogen treatments of milk.
Some in the food safety community have promoted the idea of more intense pasteurization, heating the milk even further than the 165 degrees (F) regular pasteurization takes place at.
Yet researchers from Cornell University last year threw cold water on that idea in a paper considering the public health effects of raising the pasteurization temperature about 10 per cent, as a way to counter possible bioterrorism. Its conclusion? annual listeriosis deaths from consumption of this milk would increase from 18 to 670, a 38-fold increase
Punish companies that dont rid their facilities of listeria.
In practice, once listeria infects a food production facility, it is extremely difficult to eliminate. Blue Bell Creameries has been unable to re-open for weeks now because listeria keeps showing up in tests of its plant facilities.
Its safe to say the owners of Blue Bell want more than anything to rid their facilities of listeria monocytogenes, But listeria is extremely persistent, and eliminating every last cell is quite difficult, and sometimes apparently impossible, short of dynamiting the facility.
The solution isnt to ban ice cream, any more than it is to ban petting zoos or raw milk. The solution is to be seeking out ways to reduce risk, both in food production and consumption habits. It could be the petting zoo concept needs re-thinking, so animals are less stressed, and able to live more naturally. Ice cream producers likely need more education about ways to keep their plants in safe order.
But though risk can be reduced, its uncertainties will never be eliminated. And that I can say for certain.
I posted a TED link last week that spoke of how much each of our GUT micro biomes are different….not similar. That means that what makes one person sick does not sicken the next!
Perhaps we all go get our GUTS mapped or checked and take some responsibility for our immune systems. If we try and chase down every bug and pasteurized, neuter, crush, irradiate or sterilize them….we will be no better than the dead bugs we have just killed….because we are 98% bugs.
Let the FDA bug chasing comedic charade continue…it looks much like a bunch of pasteurized ice cream eating clowns running in circles at a three ring circus….it would be hilarious except people are dying. They are dying because our very own FDA refuses to acknowledge the NIH Human Genome project and begin to look at our world as it is in the 21st century. Being stuck in 1893 heralding “PARBOILING” as the sole remedy for bacteria challenges is truly back ward. If you think and regulate backward….you get backwards systems and backwards results.
Pasteurized ice-cream and pasteurized cheeses are both on the top ten risky foods list in America! Wow…so much for pasteurization being the end all be all.
It has appeared to me that their type of solution is to further try and sterilize everything, food and environment. And that is a huge failure from all points. The majority are not going to change their consumption habits. I believe that is a fact.
When we were kids, we had the old fashioned hand crank ice cream maker. It was used with pasteurized milk and the one at grandmas with raw milk. As you know, kids are NOT the cleanest creatures on earth. We often dipped our unwashed hands in the canister and even pulled the beaters out to lick before the ice cream was ready and put it back in to continue to churn. There were 5 siblings in my family and 14 in my dads, so there were a ton of cousins sticking fingers in that canister at one point or another. No one got sick, imagine that.
So, why is it that none of us got sick and the conditions were severely less than clean, not even close to sterile?
We would have cow chip fights, run in the house-grab something to eat and run back outside with the food to consume, and no, most of us didn’t bother to wash our hands. If mom didn’t see us, then we didn’t wash. There was no sickness.
We all did have the normal childhood diseases, chickenpox, measles rubella, mumps, and yes we were vaccinated with whatever was in vogue at the time. We even got the polio vaccination with the SV40 virus (Simian Virus-40). Aren’t we lucky? I had the flu for the first and only time at the age of 16 yrs. Never had a flu shot.
Please explain why we didn’t get these food poisonings when we were so unclean?
Moms breast milk is filled with at least 700 different bacteria. It is not sterile.
It does feel really good to be on the right side of science, of history and of life itself.
I agree, although if I may add, the greatest threat to our immunity is government sponsored scientific and medical tyranny, the product of which accurs long before we have had a chance to get good and fat and in all likelihood contributes to the obesity problem. Indeed our freedom to make constructive choices with respect to our overall health is impeded by draconian government policies that are a product of and in turn nurture human fear and greed. Rules and regulations governing food processing such as pasteurization and medical interventions such as mandated vaccination programs are but two mere examples.
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/downloads/parent-ver-sch-0-6yrs.pdf
It is with a very heavy heart that must tell you that our dog Moose after being on IV at Tufts Animal Hosp since Friday and showing signs of recovery on Saturday, was completely unresponsive Sunday Mothers Day when we visited. He could not lift his head up or move his legs and was just crying and bawling, continuing to have seizures every few hours. The doctor said there was no more we could do for him so he came home in a box and was buried in our personal back yard animal cemetery.
God I loved that dog, way too young to die at only 4 years old. In retrospect I now suspect that the vaccines he got a couple months ago probably caused it but there’s no way to prove it.
You can see his pic on our store facebook page and also a Moose baby pic, as well as our Australian mutt which is our remaining dog and another beauty. She is very sad and lonely lately as they seem to have an innate sense that something bad’s happened.
https://www.facebook.com/HealthyPetSupply
Thanks again and beware vaccines.
Ora
Your warning is on target. Every day we work hard to assure that our products are low risk…that is…low risk for even the weakest of immune systems. In a community based Cow Share system where the farmer knows everyone and knows the nuances of each immune system and even knows that little sister Susie Q is sick…the risk of illness can be mediated slightly by that knowledge. The farmer knows each consumer.
In a retail environment….the consumer chooses you and not vise versa. In this environment we have to really be on our game. Who knows why each consumer may choose raw milk. Today a new consumer called me because his doctor said that he needed to build his immunity after suffering from cancer. He also had arthritis and a recent heart attack,….although I totally agree with the doctors theory, it does place a very high threshold of ethical and moral obligation onto the farmer. It is nothing different than an oath of “due no harm” as we heal through nutrition. Food safety is my oath of “due no harm” as we do very good preventative and healing things. Striking that balance of biodiversity….but not too much…as people heal and mend back from the edge of medical collapse.
Thank you Ora for recognizing this perilous position. That’s what we all do as pioneers as we fight to gain back our health while producing clean safe raw milk in this crazy germ theory world.
Ken
http://naturalsociety.com/lab-tests-mcdonalds-devastates-gut-health-in-10-days/?utm_source=Natural+Society&utm_campaign=447b41ce3c-Email+740%3A+5%2F14%2F2015+-+McDonald%E2%80%99s+Gut+Health&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f20e6f9c84-447b41ce3c-323119937
Maybe part of your education program should feature this and educate customers to the real risks in other things they consume.
Sorry for your loss. I don’t have dogs around anymore simply because of highway I live on. There was only one who had enough sense to stay away from there, but he’s been gone a long time. Kitties on the other hand, are another problem. They don’t always learn the important rule of not crossing the road.
In a nutshell, I can totally sympathize with you, and what you are going through. :'(
It is a brave new world in the pasteurized dairy world. This is the first time I have ever seen the state or FDA requiring mandatory testing and Test & Hold for pasteurized dairy products. Times have passed when “pasteurization was a trusted & sacred step” and the results were not challenged. The news about Blue Bell is not good. They are laying off hundreds and initiating a Test & Hold program for their products. This marks a critical incident in food safety history. Pasteurization is no longer trusted!!! It is now challenged. This is huge!! I can feel the tremors shaking through the CAFO dairy industry. The only problem is this: most CAFO dairyman do not feel the shaking and quaking. The only thing they feel is low milk prices….and do not know why??!! The market-disconnect is really terrible, and most dairymen do not seem to care or want to change this consumer-market distance.
Gut bacteria manufacture neurochemicals such as dopamine and serotonin, along with vitamins that are important for brain health
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/05/17/gut-bacteria-brain-health.aspx?e_cid=20150517Z1_SNL_art_1&utm_source=snl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20150517Z1&et_cid=DM76651&et_rid=956012382
“I can feel the tremors shaking through the CAFO dairy industry.”
Well you know, there’s a whole lot of tremoring and quaking going on worldwide, and California is living on borrowed time so be ready to recover.
“This is a sad day for all of us at Blue Bell, and for me personally reports the guy who will have one less entity to sue, aka Bill Marler and The Wayless
http://music.famousfix.com/tpx_2057553/judge-not/
Past your eyes sounds like a good song title wonder why no corporate milk has picked it as their theme song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwTve0vw1MQ
A husband and wife went to the doctor. [The husband is hard of hearing]
The doctor says to the wife, “You’ve got to do 3 things to keep your husband well.”
“1st you got to keep everything real clean and smooth. You got to iron everything.”
“2nd you got to fix him fresh meals every day from scratch. No left overs, no fast or frozen foods.”
“3rd you got to give him more loving and raw milk.”
They get home and the husband asks, “Well what did the doctor say?”
The wife looks at him and responds, “You’re going to die.”
Thx for the link. Great stuff…stuff we have been talking about for years. It is good to have docs now saying this….not just us farmers and raw milk people etc. How come the farmers said it years before the docs ??? Just sayin !!
After all the years of saying…get your head out of your ass….it now appears that it is your ass that needs to be in your head. The gut-brain connection is becoming mainstream thought. Owe the wonders of gut microbes. Medicine as we know it today will not be recognized in 50 years and be thought of as the “second dark age that killed and sickened millions, and stunted and mutated many generations”.
As long as there is an insurance company (for Blue Bell), there is someone for Marler and other lawyers to sue. That, after all, is where the money is.
I had just posted something at my forum about that very subject, which is probably why it was on my mind.
(.) (.)
I asked friends from all over academia to try and contact Dr. Nicole Martin….I even tried my best. Where does she get 18 deaths per year from pasteurized milk and listeria??
If this data is accurate,then there is a massive FDA and CDC coverup and pasteurization is damn dangerous or in the alternative,….Academics really suck at predictions and modeling death and or illness rates. Either way, it is truly an indictment of pasteurization.this study was funded by the dairy industry. Talk about turning the missiles back onto themselves ! How stupid could they be?
I want to know where the 18 bodies are? They certainly know current data and would not model present data? The models are supposed to be for future casting. It does not take a genius to see this ridiculous study for what it is…or is this the truth and there are 18 dead Americans buried every year all brought to us by guaranteed safe pasteurized milk.( …that we do not know about). Makes you truly wonder. Why would the dairy industry study, peer review and then publish something so incredibly self incriminating?
. so forget suing a doctor in Canada. on the other hand [ as the lawyers are wont to say ] a class-action suit brought against a milk processor, for harms occasioned from the consumption of commercial “homo milk” would be taken very seriously by the Establishment. Politics makes for strange bedfellows = Bill Marler can be our friend!!
“IN ONE OF THE LARGEST DAIRY PRODUCT RECALLS in U.S. history, Blue Bell took all of its ice cream off of store shelves following a potentially deadly Listeria monocytogenes outbreak. The investigation has been probing for sources of the bacteria since pasteurization does destroy the deadly pathogen, meaning it was reintroduced during manufacturing.” May 10, 2015, page 329.
. UN-learned as I am in the law, my first take on it, is ; that the Plaintiffs have picked the wrong target
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hagens-berman-sobol-shapiro-llp-announces-pendency-of-class-action-lawsuit-in-fresh-milk-antitrust-litigation-300086122.html
This is huge.
We even have a Girl Scout troup coming to camp! Chief Catered food, a movie in the pasture, a raw milk chugging contest, a dunk the farmer contest ( yes…I am being dunked ). Hay rides, gunny sack races, a hay maze, Bon fires at night, speaches on a wide range of subjects including food safety practices seen only at opdc and RAWMI Listed operations, cow milking demonstrations…..gonna be fun!
This has become so much more than a visit to the farm and has taken on a life of its own. There will be live feed on our Face Book page. Customers really thrive on the farmer-connection and touching the soil and knowing the source of their food. Star gazing is also something pretty darn special as well.
As a special tribute….on Sunday morning, we will break ground on our new milk barn with a special celebration commemorating this very special…. long planned and long awaited project! The foundation is already completed!
Mark, it sounds like a wonderful tradition that has taken hold. Almost like a modern-day version of sleep-away camp….sleep-away farm. Have fun!
2009 took out a lot of farms, of all different sizes, not just the mega dairies that too many love to hate. I still haven’t recovered from it, and I’m sure there are many more in the same position. I’ve stated before, the reason a lot of big dairies can survive is because they can spread the costs over a broader
amount of milking cows, plus there are some who raise crops, and other livestock as well. Corn (if I remember correctly) was hovering around $8.00/bushel, and hay prices weren’t exactly cheap in my area. I can’t remember what soybeans were, and for producers who have to buy all their feed, this was devastating.
I found a milk check from January 1994, and compared it to one of the lowest I received in 2009 (was between May to July). 1994’s pay price was around $4.00 *higher*, and almost 15 years later!!! The herd back then was high component (predominately Jerseys) just like my mixed crossbred herd is now. I don’t think I would have wanted to open my milk check had I been milking Holsteins. The cost of living is more now than it was then, so how on earth can somebody complain about “artificially inflate, the price of milk…”? Doesn’t anybody know what the repercussions could have been if everyone continued to bleed milk? The market was flooded. Hypothetically speaking, processors could have easily started rejecting milk, and co-ops, or other marketing services could have rejected milk as well (my co-op was pushing for farms to consider the CWT, and sent forms in with the milk checks). What would have happened to producers then? Somebody could have picked winners and losers. I know it is a lot of “could haves”, but it isn’t rocket science to imagine the possible scenario, had things continued in the path they were headed. I’m not even factoring in the MILC payments (Milk Income Loss Contract–A gov’t. subsidy, and NOT an automatic payment. A person had to sign up for it), because not everyone wanted that gov’t. money.
I bought a few loads of hay from a guy during the ’08/’09 winter, and he had just sold his cows that past fall. He got a decent price for them, and I said he had gotten out of dairy at a good time. He also asked me if I had signed up for MILC payments, and I said, “Dairy welfare? I don’t think so, I don’t believe in that”. His comment was, “That was designed to keep you in business”. I still disagreed with him. I had heard of those who said MILC kept prices low for everyone (farmers), rather than help those who want to stay in the business, because it kept a lot of milk in the market, so a greater supply meant lower prices. Yes, some will fail, that’s the nature of the beast (not just with dairy either), and one more notch for the gov’t.’s cheap food policy.
Just to clarify, CWT is NOT a government bailout, and is NOT a government subsidy. It is farmer funded, and not voluntary, at least it wasn’t with my co-op. I had a percentage deducted from my check every month, whether I agreed with CWT’s mission or not.
California also gets a MUCH lower price per cwt. Since I no longer get a milk check, I don’t have the latest on whether or not they now have a federal order, like most states do. I know it was in the works, but by them not being in a federal order, this subjects them to lower milk prices. At least that is my understanding of it. I don’t live in California, so it doesn’t affect me, and I really don’t have much reason to keep up with the news on this subject.
http://www.hoards.com/T15mar25-California-FMMO