Unions and Food Safety
First, a confession: I’m a pro-union guy. I believe unions were instrumental in securing many of the health and safety rights we take for granted. I believe unions continue to have relevance and remain necessary for a just and benevolent society.
The essence of that society is balance through strength. It is the logic that underpins all of our democratic institutions. For justice, we need government authority tempered by individual rights. For democracy, we need co-equal branches of government each to check the power of the others. For international diplomacy, we need military strength to prevent over reaching by expansionist nations.
How then can we, as a just society, ever accept a lack of balance when it comes to workers’ rights? History and our own experience shows that corporatism unchecked is a threat to us all (and not just the workers most directly affected).
A good example of this is playing out in a battle over organizing rights involving a Twin Cities Jimmy John’s franchisee that fired six employees after they publically protested the restaurants’ sick leave policy. See http://www.startribune.com/business/148530485.html.
Like many fast food restaurants, these Jimmy John’s shops don’t pay employees on days when they’re too sick to work. It doesn’t take a food scientist or an economist to figure out that such policies create a strong incentive for employees to continue working when they have infectious and highly contagious illnesses likely to result in contamination of work surfaces, utensils and food sold to the public.
This is not a hypothetical threat. Our firm, one of only a handful in the United States that specializes in food safety law, has represented hundreds of people harmed in foodborne illness outbreaks caused by infected food handlers. Many of those cases involved workers sickened by hepatitis A, Salmonella, norovirus or Shigella who continued working despite their illnesses.
The mode of transmission is as unpleasant as the illnesses are dangerous: fecal matter or aerosolized vomit in food. This pathogenic chain reaction is the direct result of employment policies and sanitation violations that are so often inextricably linked. Put another way, restaurants that are unwilling to pay their employees for sick time may have the same laissez-faire attitude toward restaurant hygiene.
Not all workers are saints and not all restaurant owners are villains. Personal responsibility applies to food safety as it does to every other human action. However, when we know by direct experience and common sense that certain policies ineluctably lead to foodborne illness, those policies must change.
A federal administrative law judge has ruled that a Twin Cities Jimmy John’s franchisee violated the union organizing rights of six employees by firing them last year after they publicly protested the restaurants’ sick leave policy.
The workers, who were all active in an attempt to unionize 10 local Jimmy John’s, must be reinstated to their jobs and given back pay, according to an order late Friday by the Washington, D.C.,-based judge, Arthur Amchan
It’s Time All Restaurants Ban Raw Sprouts
Enough is enough. The Jimmy John’s E. coli outbreak in Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Wisconsin and Kansas is at least the fourth sprouts-related outbreak of foodborne illness at that restaurant chain alone. A sprouts outbreak in Europe last year killed more than 50 people and the risk of bacterial contamination in sprouts is so severe that the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention advises they not be consumed by young children, older adults, pregnant women and others who have weakened immune systems. The following national press release went out from our offices this week calling for restaurants and other food service providers to stop serving raw sprouts.
MINNEAPOLIS, Feb 28, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Restaurants, commercial kitchens and other food service providers should cease serving raw sprouts of any kind unless an explicit food safety warning is provided on menus, national E. coli lawyer Fred Pritzker announced.
Pritzker, who represents victims of foodborne illness in practically every major U.S. outbreak, said that more than a decade of concentrated effort by regulators and sprout suppliers has failed to make raw sprouts safe to eat. The latest of far too many outbreaks has sickened customers of the sandwich chain Jimmy John’s in Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Wisconsin and Arkansas. Officials suspect pathogenic contamination in seeds sold to growers — a common source of poisoning in sprouts. Late last week, Michigan public health officials issued a statewide alert for citizens to avoid eating raw clover sprouts due to an outbreak of E. coli O26 associated with seven illnesses, including at least two victims who are confirmed to be part of the food poisoning at Jimmy John’s.
“These people suffered severe pain due to a collapse of food safety measures,” said Pritzker, one of four national figures chosen to debate the dangers of raw milk earlier this month at Harvard University. “If consumers are going to be put in harm’s way, justice demands they be forewarned.”
Many restaurants have already removed raw sprouts from their offerings. For those who persist in selling them in ready-to-eat food, an explicit public warning should be mandatory, Pritzker said. The warning should alert consumers to the risk of life-threatening virulent bacteria, he said.
Toxic E. coli is the latest pathogen to contaminate sprouts in a multi-state outbreak, but Salmonella and Listeria also have a history of harboring in sprouts sold into the food supply. A sprout E. coli outbreak centered in Germany last year killed more than 50 people and sent more than 840 to the hospital with hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS).
In just the past three years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has publicly tracked six separate sprout outbreaks that have sickened more than 4,500 people. And by the government’s own admission, FDA guidelines for seed suppliers and sprout growers would not have detected the strain of toxic E. coli in the Jimmy John’s outbreak.
“The only way to make sprouts safe is to cook them,” Pritzker said. “Serving them raw to an unsuspecting public is irresponsible and should be banned.”
E. coli outbreak victims and their families can contact food safety attorney Fred Pritzker by calling his law firm at 1-888-377-8900 (toll free). PritzkerOlsen, P.A. is a nationally recognized food safety law firm that has collected millions for E. coli food poisoning victims. The firm represents E. coli victims throughout the United States and has offices at Plaza Seven, Suite 2950, 45 South Seventh Street, Minneapolis, MN 55402.
Family Cow Raw Milk Campylobacter Outbreak Looming Large as I Debate Raw Milk at Harvard Law School
I will be participating in a raw milk debate at Harvard Law School tonight sponsored by the Food Law Society. My partner, Dr. Heidi Kassenborg, and I will be debating Sally Fallon Morell, president, Weston A. Price Foundation, and her debate partner, David Gumpert, author of The Raw Milk Revolution.
The debate starts at 7:00 at Harvard Law School, Langdell South Room, Boston, Massachusetts, 1563 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA. There will be a livestream of the event and it will be archived on YouTube.
The debate comes during the largest outbreak of illness linked to raw milk in the last ten years. There are now 76 confirmed cases in an outbreak of Campylobacter jejuni infections linked to raw milk produced by Shankstead EcoFarm in Pennsylvania and sold under the Your Family Cow brand at The Family Cow dairy in Chambersburg, Franklin County, Pennsylvania. The most recent information from the Pennsylvania Department of Health is as follows:
76 total cases: 66 in PA (increase by 4 from yesterday), 5 in MD (increase by 1 from yesterday), 2 in NJ, and 3 in WV.
Onset dates range from January 17 to February 1, 2012.
PA County breakdown: Franklin 18, Adams 1, Wyoming 1, Chester 6 (increase by 1 from yesterday), Dauphin 2, Cumberland 6, York 7 (increase by 2 from yesterday), Lancaster 8, Delaware 6 (increase by 1 from yesterday), Bucks 6, Allegheny 1, Montgomery 3, and Northampton 1.
The Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Laboratories Administration confirmed the presence of Campylobacter jejuni in two unopened raw milk samples purchased from The Family Cow dairy.
Victims of this outbreak can contact me at 1-888-377-8900 (toll free) or by submitting the free consultation form.
If cookie dough adulterated with E. coli O157:H7 was so rare, how could consumers have been at fault for the E. coli outbreak linked to Nestles Cookie Dough?
A logical disconnection (Non sequitur, if you will) is an argument in which its conclusion does not follow from its premises.
In March 2009 there was an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak associated with Nestle Cookie Dough involving 77 confirmed E coli infections in 30 states, including 35 hospitalizations and 10 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome. I represented several of the survivors from that outbreak.
In a medical journal article published online on December 8, 2011,1 the authors concluded that raw flour used to make the cookie dough was the “prime suspect” in the outbreak although there was no conclusive evidence that the flour was, in fact, adulterated. The authors concluded:
This is the first reported STEC outbreak associated with consuming ready-to-bake commercial prepackaged cookie dough. Despite instructions to bake brand A cookie dough before eating, case patients consumed the product uncooked. Manufacturers should consider formulating ready-to-bake commercial prepackaged cookie dough to be as safe as a ready-to-eat product. More effective consumer education about the risks of eating unbaked cookie dough is needed. (emphasis added)
Within a few months of the outbreak (by July 1, 2009 according to press reports), FDA investigators were focusing on flour as the source of the E. coli O157:H7. However, officials and food safety pundits stressed how novel it was for an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak to be associated with either raw flour or cookie dough. Evidently it was so novel that most cookie dough producers were not treating their flour to kill off the deadly pathogen (and presumably were not testing for it either).
There appears to be a logical disconnection here. If cookie dough adulterated with E. coli O157:H7 was so rare that even producers did nothing to prevent it, how can it be suggested that consumers (who are known to eat raw cookie dough) are implicitly at fault because they failed to take precautions against the E. coli O157:H7 threat?
I can already hear the response: Everyone knows cookie dough contains raw eggs and everyone knows raw eggs carry Salmonella, so if consumers used common sense and refrained from eating cookie dough to avoid salmonellosis, they could have also avoided E. coli O157:H7 poisoning.
But you know what? Most consumers are not food safety experts. They may not know about the dangers associated with raw cookie dough and certainly could not know it was capable of harboring deadly E. coli O157:H7. They also don’t know that the infective dose of E. coli O157:H7 is so incredibly low (which means that you don’t even have to eat raw cookie dough to become poisoned by it).
I agree that consumers need to take reasonable precautions. But if producers – especially multi-national companies like Nestle – don’t consider a danger or prevent it from occurring, it’s illogical and unfair to blame consumers for not doing so.
Food is a product and therefore subject to product liability law and the requirements of safe product design. Those requirements establish a three-tier safe design process: design out the defect; if you cannot design out the defect, add guards that prevent contact with the danger; and if you cannot design out or guard against the danger, then (and only then) are you allowed to warn users to avoid the danger (and when you do issue warnings, they have to be explicit).
In this case, as in so many others involving unsafe food products, producers don’t design out the dangers; they simply bypass the principles of safe design and jump to innocuous and ill-conceived warnings that do not convey sufficient information to constitute an effective warning (Why? Because if the warnings were truly effective, people would not buy the product).
1. Karen Neil, et al., A Novel Vehicle for Transmission of Escherichia coli O157:H7 to Humans: Multistate Outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 Infections Associated With Consumption of Ready-to-Bake Commercial Prepackaged Cookie Dough—United States, 2009 , Clin Infect Dis. (2011) doi: 10.1093/cid/cir831. First published online: December 8, 2011.
Food Safety Lawyer Fred Pritzker to Bourdain: Love Your Show But Medium Rare Hamburger Is Dangerous
I live in Minnesota. That means that for four or five months of the year, my exercise regimen is relegated to the basement of our St. Paul home.
Since using an elliptical trainer or riding an exercise bicycle is mind-numbingly dull, I distract myself with television. One of my favorite work-out programs is Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” (and his new show, “The Layover”). I like Bourdain because he’s wry, mordant and cynical: the perfect companion for a visit to places I may never see on my own.
I also like the fact that he’s a dick. His persona is that of a self-absorbed and highly opinionated guy – traits you probably don’t want in your father or best friend but quite enjoyable as a travel guide (provided you have separate rooms and a lot of time apart).
Bourdain is also the quintessential (and disdainful) foodie. In a recent episode, “The Layover: New York,” Bourdain samples some of New York’s best burgers, including the $26 offering at Minetta Tavern (a blend of inexpressibly choice cuts of cow capable of exciting the salivary glands of any carnivore, me included).
Bourdain, of course, orders his burger medium rare and eats it with a verbal dollop of sanctimony about the virtues of less-cooked food. On some level, I think “good for him.” If he drinks too much or has no antipathy toward pathogenetic microorganisms, who am I to judge?
And yet…I wonder if Bourdain has ever cared about someone dying from foodborne illness or watched a child undergoing dialysis? I doubt it. The pleasure of food well-eaten pales in comparison to a young life lost to foodborne illness.
We tout the virtue of personal freedom and rebel against the sanctimonies of dictated behaviors. That tension will always exist and the line separating the extremes is, by necessity, ever shifting. But Bourdain is still a dick, albeit an entertaining one, and hamburger, even the priciest, is still a danger at less than 160°.
Fred Pritzker On Newsmakers
