From: Neon John <johngdNOSPAM@bellsouth.net> Subject: Re: Child safety while traveling Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 19:42:11 EST Newsgroups: rec.outdoors.rv-travel R Bishop wrote: > >I sort of wonder what types of rigs these people drive where their > >possessions are bouncing all over. Should the crackpot move, I suspect it > >was due to the wall coming loose from the frame. That hasn't happened here. > > Um, what are you going to do when the contents slosh? It runs down the drain? Remember, the pot is sitting in the sink. I add the question mark cuz I've never sloshed anything. I merely predict the effects of gravity :-) > Ever hear of blanket cooking? Get a pot of food started at the boil. Fix > several large sheets of aluminum foil in layers. Put the hot pot in the > middle and wrap the foil up around the pot, sealing it across the top. Then > wrap the whole thing in a blanket. Come back a few hourse later and check > to see if it's done. Great for bean dishes or stews. Boy, that's the recipe for food poisoning. Before dismissing my comment as alarmist you should realize that things have profoundly changed with foodstocks in the last 10 years or so. Genetically pure breeding lines, more susceptible to fast spread of disease; abuse of antibiotics as growth promoters; factory farms and other factors have radically changed how food, particularly meat, is safely cooked and served. The USDA has suspended its much hyped program of actually doing bacteriological testing in meat plants because an overwhelming majority of samples showed positive for salmonella (chicken) or e. coli (beef). The existing USDA "inspection" involves an inspector standing at the line looking for things that look odd or smell bad! (This puts the lie to the comment made last week that someone was thankful that the government is responsible for our generally safe food supply - food is safe in spite of the government.) In the 8 years I've been in the food service business, my procedures for the safe handling of food have changed significantly. For example, we used to make homemade milkshakes and ice cream containing raw eggs. No more! The production line poultry operations using genetically pure stock results in a high proportion of eggs having salmonella in them. The problem turns out to be that the chicks have no opportunity to get harmless "placeholder" bacteria from their mothers in the commercial chicken house and so salmonella sets up house. Some producers are now spraying the brood houses with solutions containing the harmless bacteria but this is considered leading edge and not widespread. Another major factor is the advent of "box meat". Grocery stores and restaurants used to receive fresh meat in large hunks ranging up to whole sides that had to be butchered on-site. No more. The 3 or 4 major processors that are left after merger-mania now package specific cuts in boxes. We buy boston butt pork roasts and beef briskets in 80 lb boxes that were packaged in some huge factory in the midwest. FDA allows meat that has been frozen to be called fresh if the freeze wasn't too deep. The result is "fresh" meat may have been frozen and thawed more than once, perhaps without good temperature control. I've more than once thawed cases of meat that stunk from spoilage from having been thawed and refrozen. I toss such product but others wash it in bleach, apply some ascorbic acid (I think that's what they use) to redden it back up and sell it. Relative to blanket cooking, It only takes minutes for the temperature of this mass to descend below the safe threshold of 160 degrees. Below that and bacteria have the opportunity to grow. The FDA limit is 4 hours in the "danger zone" (45-160). My standard is no more than an hour, including heating and cooling. The safe threshold of 160 degrees has food vigorously steaming. Most people don't serve food anywhere near that hot. That's fine for conventional cook and serve. But wrapping it up in a blanket for several hours would scare the heck out of me. John -- John De Armond johngdSPAMNOT@bellsouth.net http://neonjohn.4mg.com Neon John's Custom Neon Cleveland, TN "Bendin' Glass 'n Passin' Gas" From: Neon John <johngdNOSPAM@bellsouth.net> Subject: Re: Child safety while traveling Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 03:45:53 EST Newsgroups: rec.outdoors.rv-travel GBinNC wrote: > >Boy, that's the recipe for food poisoning... > ><snipped long discourse on food safety> > >... wrapping it up in a blanket > >for several hours would scare the heck out of me. > > John, as a physician -- oops, wrong thread! just kidding! sorry! I > lied again! -- I don't necessarily disagree with anything you said > above, including the snipped part. > > But I really am fascinated by the inconsistency between your (probably > justified) extreme concern for the safety of food products and the > obvious -- to some of us, anyway -- hazards presented by cooking them > while driving down the highway. > Difference in risk level. According to the numbers emitted by USDA and FDA as printed in our trade press, most raw chicken is now contaminated with salmonella, as is a large percentage of raw eggs. It is killed by proper cooking and storage so the issues are preventing cross-contamination during prep and in achieving the necessary sterilization temperatures during cooking. On the beef side, there are the virulent strains of E. Coli that have been bred by the abuse of antibiotics that apparently take up housekeeping on most processed beef. That the E. Coli is present in most meat isn't new; that it has turned deadly is. We treat all raw meat juice and eggs as hazardous materials - gloves for handling, chemical sterilization of utensils and work surfaces and segregation from other foodstuffs. We're a bit on the leading edge in this area but I'm not like a Jack in the Box restaurant - I could not survive an outbreak of food poisoning. If I can remember some old statistics correctly, one has about a one in 700 chance of having a wreck involving injury or death for any given car trip. Compare those rather long odds to the almost certainty of finding pathogens on raw meat. I think my response is at worst, proportional, at best, very understated. I run through a bit more than a ton of meat a month in the restaurant, all without a single case of food poisoning in our 6 years of operation so this is a topic near and dear to my heart. The problem is, YOU don't perceive this risk because you're used to how it used to be when one could nibble a hunk of raw hamburger or use raw eggs in recipes with safety, and because we restaurateurs are doing such a fine job. Our major problem is, as usual, with the government. Our health department is still promoting food service standards that have been outmoded for at least a decade. FDA96, the latest comprehensive food service food safety document from the feds has been out for about 6 years now and yet our local agency has no schedule of adoption. I've had to push appeals through the administrative labyrinth on more than one occasion to avoid being forced to do something dangerous. (such as placing a handwashing sink immediately adjacent to a steam table where wash water would splash on the food.) -- John De Armond johngdSPAMNOT@bellsouth.net http://neonjohn.4mg.com Neon John's Custom Neon Cleveland, TN "Bendin' Glass 'n Passin' Gas" |