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more jobs and e. coli for everyone!

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  • more jobs and e. coli for everyone!

    story here

    granted this a a political article to an extent, but at the same time, how many of us actually believe that major corporations "police themselves" with regard to federal safety regulations?

    Claims are being made that food safety costs are costing jobs(it's overkill), when the last change in federal food safety regulations were in 1938, shortly after the book "The Jungle" was published. So Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but how exactly does complying with regulations that haven't changed in 73 years costing money? One would think 73 years would be more than enough time to make cost effective changes to comply.....

    And yes I do still work in food safety, I got to unload the salmonella contaminated peanuts that were shipped to consumers in the form of contaminated peanut butter because the company didn't want to dump the batch and instead had the samples tested until they came up negative and ignored all the previous testing(seriously some samples took 7-8 times to show negative), which is perfectly legal by the way, it's called "testing into compliance", and a lot of companies do it.

    I've read my boss' deposition on a company that made ready-to-eat foods for kids, and their quality assurance officer was a radio DJ! The contact surfaces had 4-10x the amount of listeria as a dairy barn full of cows.
    Registered rider scenic shore 150 charity ride

  • #2
    Sounds like an anonymous source needs to contact the media.
    Violence has resolved more conflicts than anything else. The contrary opinion that violence doesn't solve anything is merely wishful thinking at its worst. - Starship Troopers

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    • #3
      "But making sure our products are safe costs money!" is not a good excuse.

      If you're going to do it anyway, then the regulations requiring you to do it are not an extra burden. And while, yes, there is fear of lawsuits to consider, without set standards and required documentation it sure would be harder to win a case. More than that, without the government keeping track it would be hard to spot patterns and to know where a problem came from.
      Last edited by HYHYBT; 09-30-2011, 01:04 AM.
      "My in-laws are country people and at night you can hear their distinctive howl."

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      • #4
        Originally posted by HYHYBT View Post
        "But making sure our products are safe costs money!" is not a good excuse.
        Problem is it shouldn't cost money, companies have had 73 years to comply, I think that's more than long enough to make the necessary changes to be in compliance.

        And honestly, I know what we charge for our testing-it's cheap and can be done in house even cheaper with the right personnel and products. Let me let you in on a fun secret of food safety....all the processes and procedures including equipment lists are available in PDF format on the FDA's website, if you can read, and follow directions, you can do it. An "in-house" quality assurance team is not required to have any background in microbiology. I do testing, highest education I have is a high school diploma-I'm considered "qualified" by my company to do the work.
        Last edited by BlaqueKatt; 09-30-2011, 01:22 AM.
        Registered rider scenic shore 150 charity ride

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        • #5
          Testing is cheap. Throwing away bad product, though, is expensive... and if you aren't *supposed* to test it, you have a ready excuse if it makes people sick. And if you can get rid of tracking cases of food poisoning (or whatever; much of the same applies to most any product) then it's unlikely it ever even will be traced to you at all.
          "My in-laws are country people and at night you can hear their distinctive howl."

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