Getting Your Goose Cooked – But Not In A Tasty Way.

Getting Your Goose Cooked – But Not In A Tasty Way.
Most food that’s spoiled gives itself away quickly in a home refrigerator. But many deadly bacteria can fester unnoticed in food processing and storage facilities without anyone noticing – until people show up at emergency rooms. The consequences can be deadly.
- By Isaac Rudik

Anyone who eats spoiled food by mistake must either have a terrible cold blocking their ability to smell or wolfs it down so fast they miss the weird colour and foul taste tainted food takes on: The natural colour of an edible hot dog is not green and it shouldn’t taste worse than cat food smells.

In fact, rotten food is so easy to spot and gives off such an overpowering stink when it happens at home that many people are amazed when a large-scale food recall is announced in front page warnings because salmonella or other bacteria has been found.

The reality is that while a tub of cottage cheese that’s turned ripe quickly gives itself away in a home refrigerator, most deadly bacteria can fester unnoticed in food processing and storage facilities without anyone noticing – until customers show up at emergency rooms suffering from uncontrollable projectile vomiting.

Deadly Consequence

Not only humans survive best in a temperature range from about 41°F to roughly 140°F. So do bacteria. Indeed, our normal body temperature of 98.6°F is perfect for breeding the little buggers along with other things that make us sick. As a result, health and safety regulations require that processed foods – before and after preparation – must be stored at 40°F or below and cooked to greater than 141°F; even foods kept warm in a buffet line or airplane galley must be stored at 141°F or higher.

The consequences of any mistakes can be deadly, as two recent examples show.

On a long flight from Chicago to Asia, several storage units keeping food warm lost power to the heating element. Because the bins were kept closed until mealtime, several hours passed before any of the flight attendants opened the damaged bins.

While the meal trays felt cooler than normal, flight attendants served the meals anyway. Within a half-hour of the dinner being completed, everyone who’d eaten fish became violently ill. The pilot was forced to make an unscheduled stop at the nearest airport – which, in the case of a flight out over the Pacific, was three hours away – so sick passengers could receive medical treatment. One passenger died and more than 40 were hospitalised in serious or critical condition.

Testing revealed that as soon as the temperature in the food storage unit dropped below 140°F”, bacteria began forming on the fish. With several hours to fester, the entrees were highly tainted by the time passengers who’d ordered fish ate dinner.

Likewise, a series of costly errors in both processing and storage of food Canada created a wide-spread problem not long ago.

In a case of “what could go wrong did go wrong,” a food processor stored uncooked meat in a cooler than was a few degrees too warm, allowing bacteria to take root. While the cooking temperature was proper, it wasn’t hot enough to kill off the germinating visitors in the food product.

Moreover, compounding the problem is that when the boxes of product were received by a distributor, its refrigerator was cooling right at the margin between safe and spoiled. So even more bacteria took hold, turn slices of luncheon meat into a bacteria nirvana. A multi-million dollar recall resulted but, fortunately, no one was made sick by the errors.

Keep Your Cool

It is possible to monitor temperatures reliably, easily and inexpensively – whether for food and dairy products, medicines and other critical items that must be stored within a narrow temperature range.

One of the best items for doing this is a two-in-one thermometer that combines infrared and K-thermocouple temperature measurements made by Reed Instruments. Among its other features, it includes:
• Built-in laser pointer to identify the target area;
• Digitally adjustable emissivity from 0.10 to 1.0;
• High and low alarms;
• It calculates and displays in both Fahrenheit and Celsius;
• It provides 20 data points of memory;
• There is an automatic data hold and shut off; and
• It will show when something is over its range and polarity indicators.

It’s relatively easy for food processors and distributors to get their goose cooked – and not in a tasty way – by letting temperatures slip by only a degree or two. But with testing and checking tools available at a relatively low cost, it’s possible to put multiple units around a facility so workers can keep tabs on food temps easily. And it’s a lot more effective than throwing out spoiled food or enduring the PR and financial costs of wide-scale recalls or spoilage.





Isaac Rudik is a compliance consultant with Compliance Solutions Canada Inc. (www.compliancesolutionscanada.com), Canada’s largest provider of health, safety and environmental compliance solutions to industrial, institutional and government facilities.

E-mail Isaac at irudik@csc-inc.ca or phone him at 905-761-5354.