Common Dreams reports
[April 17] the Food and Drug Administration issued a report[PDF] based on inspections of Rose Acre Farms from March 26-April 11, and a review of facility records from September 2017. On [April 13], Rose Acre Farms announced a recall of 206 million shell eggs after federal investigators found that illnesses in multiple states were linked to a strain of Salmonella that was found at the company's facility in North Carolina. The FDA report shows an "ongoing rodent infestation" at the facility and "insanitary conditions and poor employee practices" that allow for the spread of pathogens. The FDA had also previously found "alarmingly high rodent populations" and salmonella contamination at another facility owned by the company in 2011.
In response, Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter issued [a statement which included}:
"This most recent Salmonella outbreak resulting in a massive recall is another example of how the ultra-consolidated factory farm system can have major consequences for food safety. That one facility can so quickly supply so many stores with tainted food shows that we need more regulation, not less, of our food supply. And repeated violations over the years show that the company continues to act recklessly where food safety protocols are concerned."
Note that the recall is for "shell eggs".
It appears that processed foods in which eggs from this source have been used are not covered.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:10PM (6 children)
Shouldn't cooking kill off the salmonella?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:37PM (1 child)
You're right, but this isn't about salmonella (it was probably the thing that got the investigation started). It is about food safety, the four page PDF report basically reads as a horror story for food safety.
Eggs from that farm are more or less flagged Biohazard, that's why they are recalled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:48PM
"Employees were observed touching ... intergluteal cleft."
Also what is with the (b)(4) images everywhere?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:46PM (2 children)
Check out the sous-vide stuff, thats how I cook beef tenderloins. Delicious!
Anyway 7.0-log-lethality for salmonella is a sliding scale of a bit more than a half hour at 135F up to a millisecond at 165F.
Given the wide variation in times based on temp I wouldn't push your luck, assume the thermometer is reading 5 lower by accident and you're not temping the actual coldest part of the cut.
I googled for internal temperature of baked cake, and get 210F. Yeah... uh that would be salmonella-proof. The idea of temping a cake is interesting and I might try that.
This BTW is why you can eat somewhat undercooked cookie dough or somewhat undercooked brownies and not get sick, "raw-ish" cookie might be 190F which is way the heck hotter than salmonella can survive.
I'm convinced most casual salmonella infections come from poorly cleaned cutting boards and general lack of sanitation (washing hands) rather than simple under cooking.
A 130F egg looks and textures as raw, for custard making, and you can sous vide the egg for a several hours (certainly more than three) at perhaps 133F and it'll be pretty well pasturized. Definitely not worse than it would be unpasturized Or for homemade mayo making.
Note that you could pasturize chicken shit to 7.0-log lethality if you wanted to eat it and it would be safe. So this is another factor of safety if your meat (eggs in this case) are not utterly filthy, merely cooking to 6.0-log lethality doesn't mean certain illness if the meat isn't contaminated to begin with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:44PM
Page 5 of the shows the pasteurization curves for salmonella. I like my eggs at 65C, then poached in simmering water for about 20secs.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.cookingissues.com/uploads/Low_Temp_Charts.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwitpf3lusbaAhWPnFkKHXHnDugQFjAAegQICBAB&usg=AOvVaw26cEQnH0B01LTD5IV8mX1C [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @02:12PM
Safe from the bio-hazard perspective, chemically I think you're still in potentially lethal territory.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by datapharmer on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:36PM
Sure, but what about your hands that held the egg to crack it and then didn't fully wash them (I mean you put them under the water, but did you really scrub?) and then you touched the dishes or used the spatula.
Oh, you did wash them and it WAS really really well? Well then you didn't make any mayonnaise for that burger or Bearnaise sauce for your steak Oscar or Hollandaise sauce for your Eggs Benedict or a nice Meringue for your pie did you?
These recalls are for a reason.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:50PM
When Austin (Jack) DeCoster and his son Peter went to jail, -- OriginalOwner_ was super chuffed. Two months later we have more so-called "bad eggs." Folks, the farmers aren't the problem. The chickens are the problem. #FreeTheFarmers [twitter.com] #SoGodMadeAFarmer [twitter.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:56PM
The farming industry is highly subsidized by the government; free money means there's less risk born by the supplier.
A farm should want to reduce its risk instead by purchasing insurance, and an insurance company would want to protect itself by ensuring that its clients aren't shitshows like the farm in this story.
Not only is that the way it should work in a free society, but that's the best way to regulate ANYTHING. Real money has to be on the line.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:01PM (7 children)
Here's a thought: cap the size of the factories. Diversification, compartmentalization, and while we're at it can we please not get ALL the eggs from one clone?
FFS people, super-organic-enhanced-cage free-omega 3-4 grain eggs are filling up the shelves at 3 and 4x the price point of the rock-bottom farm eggs for a reason. Can't we just lift up the $0.69/doz eggs to $0.79/doz and back off from the most disgusting 10% of the production cost-efficiency practices? Capitalism is telling you that it has gone too far, but instead of listening the market is going bi-modal.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:09PM (6 children)
Hello, fellow ALDI shopper.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @01:49PM (5 children)
It's not just ALDI, most every restaurant supplier and the processed foods industry also uses these ultra-cheap eggs.
For our house we get the $2.99/doz Cage Free eggs from Trader Joes because: ~80 dozen eggs a year get cooked and eaten in this house and the extra ~$0.13 per person per day seems worth it compared to eating the thin-shelled shit-stained product of the mega-factories. I'd much rather have a better product out of not-so-mega factories and only shell out an extra $0.02 per person per day ($0.006 for the home-cooked eggs and $0.014 for increased costs elsewhere), but that's not an option in our have or have not economy.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 19 2018, @02:23PM (4 children)
What kind of eggs? And do you have a source that indicates your preferred style of eggs has less fecal matter?
http://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/archive/hot_topics/families_and_consumers/purchasing_eggs.shtml [ufl.edu]
There's also "Pasture-raised", "free range", "free-roaming" which all appear to be unregulated terms.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:31PM (3 children)
The terms are all bogus... and brown eggs hide the brown stains better. As for actual fecal content on the eggshells themselves, seeing the brown streaks is much worse than whatever is going on, or not, in reality.
Our local mega-chain (Publix) has secured "cage free" from some supplier for $2.69/doz, but those are very hit and miss on the shell strength, some are paper-thin, others are basically normal - and the weird part is: in my experience all the crappy paper-thin eggs are coming from one store, while another store in the same chain just 3 miles down the road consistently has "good eggs" in the same packaging. Why there's a difference between the stores I don't know - once is an anomaly, twice a coincidence, but this has gone on for over a year, roughly 50 dozen eggs from each store, and from one store I may have opened one carton with some thin-shelled eggs in it, whereas the other I'd be rejecting over half the cartons that come off the shelf for being broken, and even when I get them home the wife complains about the eggs collapsing from thin-shells when she cracks them (and I notice too...)
As for what kind? Chicken, usually Large (not extra large or Jumbo which tend to have more shell issues), generally white from Publix (for the $2.69 Cage Free in green styrofoam, or brown for $3.69 Cage Free in the yuppie targeted clear plastic), and generally brown from Trader Joes ($2.99 for Cage Free, or I think $1.69 for their "regular" brown eggs, both in pressed cardboard boxes.)
The brown streaks show up mostly on Publix's cheaper eggs, particularly their main-line bottom price stuff.
And, it's just eggs, there are more important things in life, but... when you consider that we're averaging over 240 eggs per year per person consumption, I do start to get concerned about all the myriad "trace amount" things that can be accumulating in our apex predator bodies.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aclarke on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:13PM (2 children)
Sounds like maybe you're getting real eggs. We have our own chickens. Some of the hens lay large brown eggs. Others lay small white ones. One used to lay an egg with a gross soft rubbery shell every couple weeks. Sometimes they're dirty when we pick them up.
The grocery store experience of most foods is quite at odds with the historical reality of food. All eggs do not look the same. Tomatoes are not always perfectly round, etc. I do agree though that if one is able to buy eggs for US$0.69 per dozen, that's an indication that something is very wrong.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:39PM
Have you seen a chicken factory? More to the point, have you smelled a chicken factory? Something is has been more than very wrong with chicken and pork production for a long time - it's highly cost optimized, we're eating more chicken and pork than ever for unbelievably low prices, and it's not all a good thing.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-is-china-treating-north-carolina-like-the-developing-world-w517973 [rollingstone.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:42PM
They are sorted and graded, ensuring that the supermarket customer gets a consistent size. Eggs that don't make the cut can be used in liquid egg product, for example, or sold to commercial buyers.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @02:55PM (3 children)
Excuse me, but don't all eggs have Salmonella? What is the problem here? Why would we recall perfectly normal eggs?
Everything with a vaganus has Salmonella. That includes birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish.
Salmonella indicates that the egg wasn't made from recycled plastic in a Chinese factory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @04:50PM
Don't think all eggs have Salmonella, for one reference see the opening part of,
https://www.cdc.gov/features/salmonellaeggs/index.html [cdc.gov]
"The inside of eggs that appear normal can contain a germ called Salmonella that can make you sick..."
In the 1970s I used to make milkshakes in a blender and add a raw egg to thicken it up a little. Never had any problems except one funny time -- a neighbor in the dorm showed up and had one of my shakes, really liked it. At which point I mentioned the egg and he turned pale and almost vomited (at the thought of raw egg, no actual symptoms of food poisoning or allergy).
My guess is that USA farms were smaller then and farmers actually took care of their animals (as opposed to agribusiness where the owners are far from the farm).
Not directly related, but well into the 1980s we bought raw milk from a Mennonite dairy farmer. It was obvious from picking up the milk in his milk house and visiting his barn that things were all nice and clean, animals checked on a regular basis. Again, never had any problems with this delicious milk. Then his brother convinced him that his calling in life was to become a missionary in South America...so much for great milk.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:24PM
No [slate.com], or at least not the variety that makes you sick. That said, if you do get sick, the vast majority of the time it's not that bad [cdc.gov]: Most people will basically go through digestive tract hell for about a week, and then go back to normal without any specific medical treatment.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by datapharmer on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:40PM
Unless they are irradiated, which many "shell eggs" are just because you can't expect the average joe in his kitchen or line cook to follow proper food safety. It is out of an abundance of caution that this was recalled, but it is harder to keep eggs from making you sick due to cross contamination than many people think.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @04:33PM
Does nobody care about this?:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=25163&page=1&cid=669054#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
The inspector saw people sticking fingers up butts (not sure if their own or each others) and then touching the eggs. Also for some reason this document is littered in what looks like redactions.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:49PM (2 children)
You don't want to do that
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:10PM (1 child)
Any idea of how you were infected?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday April 20 2018, @12:52AM
It was at first diagnosed with Hepatitis. After I left my boss a message about that, he called me back later and wanted to know everywhere I'd eaten recently. I don't really know but expected that my boss notified the public health department.
During the given time frame I was only eating stuffed I cooked myself or meals from the Apple Lunch Room.
But when I called him back and said it wasn't Hepatitis but Salmonella, he didn't want to know anymore where I'd eaten.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday April 20 2018, @04:37AM
Well, clearly what we need here is less regulation. Less oversight. Less big-government. The unregulated free market will provide better eggs, cheaper eggs. Everyone (that survives such a system) wins!