Let's talk about food safety in this thread! :)

Discuss:

Have the recent microbiological food safety scares affected your diet or eating habits in one way or another?

Have you ever eaten something that made you really sick?

What steps do you take to ensure that your food is safe?

Where do you think the responsibility lies for food safety? The consumers, the corporations, the government, or some combination of those choices?

There have been food scares?? Where have I been?

I've only gotten food poisoning once, in Thailand. Ate some chicken sold by a street vendor that had been sitting in the hot sun all day. Not the smartest thing to do.

I have to admit, though, I don't think about food safety other than the basics: don't drink water if you don't know where it's from, don't let meat sit out on the counter, etc.

In the end, I think the responsibility for making sure food is safe should go to the companies that sell the food. It would be pretty stupid of them to go around selling potentially dangerous food and hoping the consumers will take the blame if they get sick. Not to mention it would lessen the chance of lawsuits. xD
It's the consumer's responsibility to be cautious about the food they eat, but I don't think it's their fault, especially if they weren't told the food was infected.

As for the government, I think they should only step in if the companies aren't doing their job. The government's responsibility should be to protect the people, and if companies refuse to take that responsibility, then I think it's time for the government to step in.

Around this time last year, dangerous E. coli were found in the cabbage or lettuce at this Taco Bell that gave people food poisoning and almost killed another person.

Food scares have pretty much helpd me stop eating from places like Taco Bell and ...well, just Taco Bell. Honestly, after I found out that not all sushi is properly prepared and can sometimes till contain parasites or sorts, I continued eating because the place I go is so reputable.
The only ways I bother are checking the brandwhen I can, or looking at the environment(restruaunts, peek into the kitchen, etc.)
It's pretty obviously the FDA's problem, but the company should take even more responsibility for their actions.

I don't usually think that much about food scares.
If mad cow disease doesn't kill me, it can only make me stronger!
XD
I already have enough problems with food, since I'm allergic to gluten. For those of you that don't know, this means that I can't eat any food that contains or was processed with wheat, flour, barley, malt, and rye. This includes soy sauce or anything with modified food starch. I have to be really careful, especially when eating out. If a crouton crumb even touches my salad, my digestive system will reject all the food, and release antibodies to attack the gluten.

@Iheart801:

Yes, there have been many food scares in the United States as of late. In fact, the biggest beef recall in history happened just a few weeks ago. Currently, there is an alert out on Salmonella on alfafa sprouts, and as Intoxicate mentioned, an E. coli outbreak linked to fresh green vegetables has occurred recently.

@Violet Lace:

Ouch! I get most of my food poisoning when I'm traveling, too. I once ate some bad fish in China, and got such bad food poisoning that I was half-delirious on my hotel bed for a day.

You're absolutely right that chicken left out in the sun all day can be a microbial hazard!

To me, the bulk of the responsibility of food safety should be on the corporation, because they make food in large quantities and distribute it all over the country and the world. If a consumer isn't careful and gets food poisoning, that's bad enough, but a corporation has the ability to take a localized food hazard and inadvertently spread it far and wide.

@Intoxicate:

I eat sushi, but not from cheap places. Parasites can be killed if the fish is frozen for 10 days or more, but not all places will do that...

I wish the FDA and the FSIS (Food Safety Inspection Service) had greater powers for regulating food safety. Of course, this is a hardship on companies, but I think the public safety concerns outweigh the bottom line.


@jelachu:

Wow, it's unfortunate that you're allergic to gluten! There's so much starch used as conditioners, thickeners, etc in processing food, let alone the starch that's the actual component of the food, I'm wondering if there's very much processed food you can eat at all!

To be honest, I don't really think about food at home, only when I'm overseas. And only about the water, as I'm usually too picky to try local cuisine, unfortunately. And it's better to pay more for bottled water than to be sick, as my dad found out the hard way. He bought some fruit in Thailand, and then he decided to wash it in a public fountain or faucet of some sort. Nothing happened at first, but a few hours later his body let him know that It Was Not Happy with what he did and he couldn't leave the hotel room or walk around without having to visit the restroom. It just hit him like a ton of bricks. XD

And like I've said before, I'm not as careful at home - especially since I'm really lazy to cook sometimes. For one week, I ate nothing but this hunk of ham. As expected, at the end of the week, I was really, really sick.

I didn't buy spinach when that scare was going on. I try to keep up. I don't eat beef so I'm okay in that department C8

My dad got salmonella when I was only a few days old. He told me that he'd never wish that on anyone.

That said, I NEVER eat rare meat. And I wash my fruits and vegetables and fully cook everything.

I'm so unconcerned about food safety... unless its something I'm preparing for someone else, then I'm utterly stringent about every rule and consideration.
But if its just me? Heck yeah, give me that raw cookie dough. It fell on the floor? Five second rule! The rarer the steak, the better.
Oh, and I share food with my rats and opossum. If I've got ice cream or peanutbutter and they're begging me for a taste, I have no qualms against offering them a bite and then licking the spoon clean. x3

I've been massively food-poisoning sick a few times... in most recent memory, my mother cajoled me into eating a pickle that had to have been a year old. Her exact words "Oh, its soaking in brine, stop being such a baby" and then I spent an entire day with my head in a wastebin, vomiting up even water. But I've never gotten sick off of a massive food contamination, nor swapping possum-spit, though I did lose three rats to that pet-food contamination incident last year. :(
Very sad. It taught me to feed them lab-grade and fresh food rather than supplementing their diets with dog kibble, though.

I work in a fast food place, boyfriend works at a pizza place, friend works in a bistro and other one works in a Chinese place....for the most part I eat from a restaurant until I have a reason not too (excluding street vendors fairs/etc) and at my work and friends we always make our own food for everyone to share/know who made it so I'm never too worried.
I got some funky food in Japan thou that my stomach did not appreciate but I think it may have been an allergy more then an illness.

@Zen And Tonic- There really isn't a lot that I can eat unless I prepare it myself! Even things like Corn or Rice cereals have malt flavoring! Also, Pringles potato chips contain gluten. But there are a lot of gluten free alternatives at health food stores, there are even gluten free pastas and pretzels!

I hadn't heard about the alfalfa sprout alert; I eat them all the time! The food scares haven't stopped the way I eat, except that I wasn't allowed to eat my favorite lettuce (spinach) for a while last year.

I'm very concerned about certain types of food safety, though. One thing I want to be sure of is that a deli NEVER slices my meat or cheese on the same slicer that they've used for rare roast beef, unless I personally see it cleaned. I've worked in a deli, and that was one of the nastiest things I witnessed. That, and the way that particular place handled raw chicken, which was completely against regulations. I washed my hands ALL the time when I worked there.

I've never had food poisoning, and I always sample local cuisine when I travel. I eat rare beef, but never ground beef, because the processing process for ground beef causes higher likelihood of microbial hazards. My brother-in-law got salmonella once, after he left ate a pizza he'd left sitting in the car all night in the middle of spring. He had just moved from Alaska, where it would have been cold enough for that to be okay!

Here, nothing is really wrong with our food, it's our water you have to worry about. Our town doesn't seem to know how to clean out our water very well and people we becoming deadly ill.

As im a food health and safety graduate i take it very seriously, i have not as yet heard of any food scares.
And yes there have been foods that have made me seriously ill as ive had food poisoning 5 times, due to bad eggs (have been cooked properly)
I had a bad bought of salmonella.
As food is something people eat everyday i think it is important that food health and safty is taken into consideration.
try to prepare foods as instructed by the recipe book ensuring nothing goes wrong and cooking is done to the book.
When cleaning surfaces always make sure u use a disinfectant.
And when cooking or preparing meat always make sure u change the knife if u plan to chop or prepare something else, as this then lowers the risk of transferring bacteria. After preparing each item of food ALWAYS disinfect the surface.

I don't take things like that as seriously as I should...but if things look bad, I don't buy/eat them. I don't leave things out that shouldn't be left out and then eat them...and I cook all the food that needs cooked properly.

I think my chances are reduced a bit since I don't eat meat. I think that if the USDA/FDA is going to certify it, they actually should check and make sure it's ok. I read something about the USDA no longer checking the meat, and instead, slaughterhouses were required to check their own meat. That's completely unnacceptable to me. I mean, are the slaughterhouses inspectors really going to stop the line?

I also read that inspectors are held personally accountable for stopping the line. Meaning, if it's determined that there wasn't anything wrong with the meat when they stopped the line, they can be sued for the amount of production time they wasted.

I think during vegetable safety scares, the best thing to do is to cook them thoroughly. (Although, I'm not sure how good alfafa sprouts are cooked, lol)

@mesic:

I think you learnt first hand that brining doesn't necessarily kill off everything! XD In fact, staph bacteria is pretty salt-resistant, and many bacteria are resistant to acid. I really wouldn't recommend eating raw cookie dough and sharing food with your pets, but that's up to you. XD

@jelachu:

I figured there wouldn't be a lot of processed food you could eat. I'm glad that there are plenty of alternatives for yo, though!


@JoieD:

There's a lot of bad stuff associated with raw chicken, such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, so you may have saved yourself from getting sick by cleaning your hands properly! :D

That said, cold doesn't kill bacteria, it only makes them dormant. So if the Salmonella was dormant in the pizza in the first place, it would have not been killed by Alaskan spring temperatures, but would have woken up in your brother's body instead...


@Nixie:

You too, huh? :D I'm a graduate student studying food safety.


@juniper_silver:

I was under the impression that the FSIS (under the USDA) is still conducting inspections, actually:

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Fact_Sheets..._101/index.asp

That said, it's still hard for every single piece of meat to be inspected given the sheer volume of meat that is processed every day. However, it's really in the company's best interests to make sure their meat is safe, because recalls seriously damage their profits and reputation. So I hope they would have the sense to be serious about it.

Let's see..Yes I have eatten something that made me sick..VERY SICK! One time I ate sushi! *yum!* but then after that I had a very very bad stomache ache..I had to go to those chinese docters and they gave me like these very bitter medicine..It was soo hard. I was actually afriad to eat sushi after that..I wanted to sue that place..but I didn't have the courage to..Plus the food at that restaurant NOW is actually very nice! :D

@Zen: I know about the cold thing, but that was my brother-in-law's sense of reasoning. He claims he did it all the time there.

@mesic: My mother makes pickles, and she's very careful to date them. Of course they go bad!

@Zen and juniper: It's not that the USDA doesn't inspect meat, it's that they are seriously under-manned. A lot of the recent meat scares have come from products coming from seaports, where not a high enough percentage of the meat was inspected.

There are food scares? *shrugs and continues munching her out of date puddings* I don't take precautions at all, if it's not growing I'll eat it, although after drinking half a pint of off milkshake (before I realised why it tasted funny) I have started to sniff my milk before drinking it.

I call it building my imune system. I won't get food poisoning. A fact my sister has pointed out several times before. if I don't have it by now, I'll never get it.

@JoieD:

That's the problem - as far as I know, there's too much meat being produced daily for proper inspection given that the FSIS is undermanned.

@Jayms_fallen_angel:

The immune system is wonderful, but food poisoning is caused by many different causes, so unless you have somehow acquired immunity to every single bacteria, virus and enterotoxin that causes gastrointestinal disease, you're likely to get food poisoning a some point in your life. ^^;

The food health scares haven't affected me too much personally (living in Alaska means not a lot of access to fruits and veggies) but still, my family makes sure we prepare our food properly and try to minimize cross contamination as much as possible. I think if more people knew how to prepare food properly and made a bigger effort to keep their cooking areas clean and prevent cross contamination incidents of food poisoning would drop even if only in the domestic sector (you can't control how food is cooked in other places).

I think it's entirely possable I have an imunity to food poisoning by now. As I already stated and yes, I am well aware of what causes food poisoning, thank you for that. I love people making out that I don't know anything about what I say. Because you know, that's not irritating at all... :roll:

Originally Posted by Jayms_fallen_angel

I think it's entirely possable I have an imunity to food poisoning by now. As I already stated and yes, I am well aware of what causes food poisoning, thank you for that. I love people making out that I don't know anything about what I say. Because you know, that's not irritating at all... :roll:

Whoa, there's no need to take it that personally - I wasn't out to prove your ignorance or anything. ^^;

But it's pretty much accepted in science that you cannot build up immunity to food poisoning as a whole, because it's not one disease - it's a catch-all term to describe many different diseases, each with a different cause.

Even different mutations of the same bacteria can defeat an immune system that has already been exposed to that particular bacteria. It's kind of like why people get the flu every year even though you'd think they'd built up the immunity by now. Influenza virus mutates so quickly that the vaccine that someone got years ago doesn't work any more, so they have to get a flu shot again. Same goes with bacteria like E. coli - I know I carry E. coli in my body (I checked), but if I'm exposed to a different strain, I might get sick anyway because my body hasn't acquired immunity to it.

So, if different strains of the same species can stymie the immune system, that goes double for different species!

I never pay attention to any of that. x___x I've never gotten sick from food, but if I did get deatlhy ill, I'd probably pay more attention to it.

I think a lot of things should be left to the people who sell it. They're the ones who are controlling how it's made. And the government should monitor it all.