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Produce Safety Horror Stories
26 Plays1 year ago
Produce Safety Technicians Landen Tetil and Micah Hutchison swap produce safety "horror stories" from the field and share solutions to these frightful food safety situations.
Additional Resources:
Hand Sanitizer vs. Hand Soap (Nutella video)
Contact a Michigan Produce Safety Technician
Funding for this podcast was made possible in part by the Food and Drug Administration through grant PAR-16-137. The views expressed in the posted materials do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the Department of Health and Human Services, nor does any mention of trade names, commercial practices or organization imply endorsement by the United States Government.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the Agri-Food Safety Produce Bites podcast, where we discuss all things produce safety and dive into the rules and regulations surrounding the Food Safety Modernization Act Produce Safety Rule. Hi, everyone.
Meet the Experts: Landon and Micah
00:00:15
Speaker
This is Landon Titel, a produce safety technician in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Hi, I'm Micah Hutchison. I am also a produce safety technician, and I work with growers in Southeast Michigan and the Thump.
Produce Safety Horror Stories
00:00:29
Speaker
Micah and I just so happen to be the two most seasoned technicians around in the state. You can say oldest.
00:00:42
Speaker
So Micah and I are here today to come together in the spirit of Halloween and talk about some produce safety horror stories that we've seen in our collective decade of experience working on farm with growers and talk about what farms are doing to address these
00:01:05
Speaker
frightful food safety situations in ways that is realistic and also effective.
Hand Sanitizer vs. Hand Washing
00:01:15
Speaker
So I think one of the scariest things I see is the use of hand sanitizer in place of hand washing. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I don't think there's any bad intentions about it. I'm just so surprised how many people out there aren't aware that hand sanitizer is not a replacement for hand washing.
00:01:36
Speaker
I would say that's most people. To be completely honest, I don't really know if I knew that before taking this job. So, Landa, why isn't hand sanitizer a good replacement for hand washing?
00:01:52
Speaker
Well, that's a great question. And I always like to preface this explanation by saying that using hand sanitizer is better than not doing anything, than not even attempting to clean your hands at all. However,
00:02:09
Speaker
It's not really good enough. So while it's better than nothing, it's really not good enough, especially when we're talking about situations where people are going to be handling fresh produce. So any sort of food contact activity, whether that's harvesting or packing or
00:02:30
Speaker
you know, washing those sorts of things. And the reason for that is that hand sanitizer, the way it works is that it binds to organic matter. And so if there's any sort of dirt or debris in your hands, it's going to bind to that. And even if your hands don't look visibly dirty, the natural oils on your skin is also an organic matter and the hand sanitizer will bind to the natural oils on your skin.
00:02:58
Speaker
essentially making the hand sanitizer ineffective. So while the bottle says it'll kill 99.9% of germs, if you haven't actually washed your hands before using the hand sanitizer, that percentage is going to be much, much lower depending on the level of dirtiness that your hands are.
00:03:18
Speaker
As we often say, you can't sanitize a dirty surface. You cannot sanitize a dirty surface, hands included. Hands included.
The Ineffectiveness of Hand Sanitizing
00:03:27
Speaker
One of the best visual examples of this I've seen is have you seen Phil Tocco's video on washing his hands where he puts Nutella on his hands and then uses hand sanitizer? No, but I'm picturing it right now and I'm imagining the smearing. It is a great
00:03:47
Speaker
visual example of how hand sanitizer works on, like dirty hands versus how soap and hand washing works to remove that gross Nutella off of his hands. All I can picture right now is like my toddler after she's eaten Nutella, no amount of baby wipes
00:04:08
Speaker
can remove the Nutella from her face. No, you gotta get in there with soap and scrub.
Risks of Dirty Hand Towels
00:04:13
Speaker
That's great. One other analogy that I really like is comparing it to never brushing your teeth and only using mouthwash. Isn't that what we're supposed to do? No! I kid. I think our dentists would say otherwise.
00:04:35
Speaker
You're gonna wanna actually physically wash something with soap and water and then give it a rinse with clean water before a sanitizing step occurs. Scrub your hands, soap and water, 20 seconds. 20 seconds. 20 seconds. And make sure you're drying your hands. Single use towels or reusable towel, but use it only once and then it gets washed.
00:05:02
Speaker
Speaking of reusable hand towels, I have seen some really bad ones. What do you mean? I mean, I have seen quite a few off colored, maybe crusty. Crusty. Oh. Like crusty. I've been kind of dirty. I've been used a lot, but I'm still hanging here next to the hand washing station. Just never been washed. Never.
Micah's E. coli Experience
00:05:32
Speaker
Can I tell you a produce safety horror story of my own? Micah, that's this whole podcast. No, I mean like me personally. Yes. So as a produce safety technician, we had a big shed cleanup at our district. We do a lot of like, you know, community cleanups and community events. So we pick up a lot of trash. We had one of our employees, her in-laws allowed us to dump
00:06:03
Speaker
trash in their dumpster on their farm. So we go to the farm and they had baby pigs. And I'm a sucker for pigs in general, but definitely baby pigs. So I'm petting the pigs. I'm in hog heaven, pun intended. And then we're done and I go home. And on my way home, I start eating the pretzels that were in my car. A couple days later, I had E.coli. Of course you did, Micah.
00:06:33
Speaker
You gave yourself a foodborne illness. I gave myself a foodborne illness. So the critical point here, you didn't wash your hands after playing with the pigs and before eating, which is that hand to mouth contact, which is almost certainly how you gave yourself that illness. Oh, absolutely. And it happened so easily. And even myself with a pretty healthy immune system,
00:07:02
Speaker
I was out for like 10 days. Gosh, I, and honestly, it could have been a lot worse. So I'm happy you're okay. Yeah. That's, you know, healthy immune system. I have another story, but this is way before I was a product safety technician. So I used to work for a local nonprofit and we ran quite a big garden that donated all the produce to the community.
Grocery Bags and Contamination Risks
00:07:25
Speaker
So every week we would bring all of our used grocery bags to the garden.
00:07:32
Speaker
and pack them with produce. Our used store grocery bags, we would put raw fresh produce in them. Totally unaware if we had had chicken in them before or any other things that could make, like could put bacteria on the produce and then make the people we were donating the food to sick. We also didn't have a hand washing station.
00:08:02
Speaker
And it wasn't until the produce safety technician who was in this position before me did a risk assessment on that garden that any of us realized, oh, these are things that are of concern. Right. Yeah. It's that, that aha moment of, Oh, I never thought of that. Yes.
Farm Animals: Risks and Benefits
00:08:25
Speaker
You know what else is an ideal? What? Animals in the field.
00:08:30
Speaker
And I'm not talking about working animals or horses used to plow or farm working animals, but I mean dogs or chickens. Well, for the sake of seeing different sides of the same coin, I would argue that a lot of farm dogs are working dogs. Not all of them, but I think a lot of them do have a job. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously it depends on the farm and the dog.
00:09:00
Speaker
but I have seen a lot of dogs that I would say have a job and that's usually something to do with like excluding wildlife. So I've seen dogs that are trained to run deer out of the field or I've even actually seen dogs that were trained as mousers. So catching mice and voles and ground squirrels and things like that. So kind of wildlife control. And that to me,
00:09:26
Speaker
Um, obviously having a dog in the field is a risk. And so that sort of enters, it opens up the conversation of, okay, so I have a food safety risk and that's a dog, but you know, they're providing a benefit to food safety as well. So they are both a risk and a benefit to food safety. So how do I manage the risk to still access the benefits that they are providing without
00:09:55
Speaker
compromising the food safety of my crops.
Managing Animal Risks in Produce Fields
00:10:00
Speaker
So while the rule does not prohibit the use of working animals, you're saying minimize food risk and kind of follow that recommendation of no working animals in the field when the edible portion of the crop is present? I guess I am saying it all boils down to risk management and I think that that's
00:10:24
Speaker
kind of the whole point of the produce safety rule is saying, yes, I have risks to food safety. I know what they are and I have a plan in place to manage those risks. And so if you know that you have working animals and you know that they are a risk to food safety, what is your management plan so that they're not causing more harm than good? Whether that's, you know, training them to never ever use the bathroom in the field,
00:10:53
Speaker
or keeping them out of like only letting training them. So they're only allowed in like the, the walkways or the tractor lanes. I think that the management policy can look a lot of different ways. My emphasis is just, you know, we need to acknowledge that it is a risk and then decide on a management policy. So you're not compromising your entire
00:11:20
Speaker
field of crops just so your dog can run deer out of the field. My dogs would make terrible working animals. I can't get one to not pee in our basement. Without a block, I couldn't imagine controlling her in a produce field. Mine is very good at staying out of the garden. I worked very hard on that. Mine are terrible.
00:11:44
Speaker
Um, so Landon, working animals is something. What about chicken pruning? Does that include, would that be included as a working animal? Chicken pruning? Yeah, using your chicken to prune your plants or get bugs in the middle of your produce fields. Oh, chickens are so dirty. I would say, I would say in most cases,
00:12:11
Speaker
chickens should never be allowed in produce production areas chickens poop a lot and everywhere unless you have a diaper on a chicken there is no way it is not pooping every what three five steps they poop everywhere and so i guess if a produce production area
00:12:36
Speaker
is completely harvested. It's the end of the growing season and you want to let your chickens in there to like scratch it up and like have a little treat for whatever left is remaining in there, but you are not going to go in there and harvest anything else. And they're going to be out in plenty of time before, you know, you're, you're planting again in the spring. I don't love it, but I, it's not, not allowed.
Human Waste vs. Animal Manure Risks
00:13:04
Speaker
I've always kind of looked at it as maybe following that 120 days of the US organic standard of spreading manure on fields. Yeah. So the 90-120 day rule is, so from the day that the raw manure hits the soil,
00:13:24
Speaker
to the day that you harvest your next crop, 90 days for crops that do not directly come into contact with the soil, and 120 days for crops that do come into direct contact with that soil. Yes, so like leafy greens would be that longer. Right, or carrots. Or carrots, onions, anything that grows in the ground,
00:13:51
Speaker
like touches the ground or can be splashed by the soil. Very like irrigation. Right, versus a trellis tomato plant that's not going to touch the ground. That could be, that falls in the 90D category. And so if you allow enough time between when the chickens are on that space and when you are planting and harvesting again, theoretically it could all be okay.
00:14:20
Speaker
You know, I'm already seeing a theme emerging in our conversation here. The answer to all of the food safety risks is it depends. It depends. I thought you were going to say, stop believing everything you read on the internet. That's a good one too. Ask a produce safety technician. Yes, ask a produce safety technician. Look for reliable resources and
00:14:49
Speaker
I guess I do just wanna throw it out there that the proto safety rule is very non-prescriptive and that it doesn't say, you know, you have to do things this specific way to reduce your food safety risks. It's more, you can't do this, so figure out a way to do it without doing this. And it's very open-ended and it's
00:15:17
Speaker
It gives the farmer a lot of wiggle room to find a solution that works for their particular farm. There's a lot of right ways of doing things. Landa and I would completely agree. I think there is one thing that the rule is not flexible on. Yes. And that is the use of raw human manure on produce fields. Humanure. Humanure. We talked about the one 20 90 day rule for raw manure.
00:15:47
Speaker
but that does not apply to human waste. Oh, so you're only talking about animal poop. Why is human poop a greater risk to food safety than animal poop? Human poop can contain so many different pathogens, bacteria, viruses, parasites. It can include some medication, heavy metals, and those pathogens potentially in human poop can include the bacteria,
00:16:16
Speaker
and the pathogens we hear that get people sick, like E. coli and salmonella. Who better to get people sick than other people? Exactly. I mean, like, don't get me wrong, animals can carry and spread human pathogens too, but humans are kind of guaranteed to do that. While animals can make us sick, humans are just better at making us sick. We're so good at it. We're so good.
00:16:46
Speaker
From my understanding, human poop can only be used if it is treated in a very different way than we compost animal manures. Right. So you can't throw it in a pile and heat it up to 131 degrees Fahrenheit the way that we treat animal poop to turn it into compost. It has to be done in an industrial
00:17:12
Speaker
sort of composter and that we're talking about biosolids. You know, this actually, it kind of comes full circle here because, you know, we were talking about human poop kind of through like a soil amendment lens, but you can also get human poop on foods through inadequate hand washing. And so, you know, tying it back to that first scenario that we talked about where hand sanitizer is not good enough, you have to wash your hands. It's kind of like a full circle.
00:17:42
Speaker
A full moon. It's a full moon. Full Halloween moon. It always comes back to hand washing.
Funding for Hand Washing Stations
00:17:49
Speaker
And if anyone has questions on how to build a low cost, cheap-ish portable hand washing station, contact your local produce safety technician. Yes, we've got the plans. Last year, we've had some pretty exciting news as produce safety technicians.
00:18:06
Speaker
Are hand washing stations something that would be eligible for cost share for farmers? Yes, if you need that one little extra push to get a hand wash station on your farm or get another hand wash station on your farm or something else even that could directly benefit the food safety of your operation, reach out to your local produce safety tech. As of just this last year, we
00:18:35
Speaker
have a little bit of funding available to give out to folks for things like that, things that are going to directly benefit the food safety of their farms practices. Well, you know, Micah, that wasn't so spooky after all. No, unfortunately, our job is a lot more tame than what I expected. We can credit farmers to that. I mean, no one wants to get people sick and
00:19:03
Speaker
by and large farms are already doing the right thing.
Improving Farm Safety Through Education
00:19:05
Speaker
I think just sometimes a little bit of education and some outside perspective can make, elevate the farm that much further up the food safety ladder. Absolutely. And in five years, the only person I know who has gotten sick is me. And I did that to myself. Hard lessons learned. Hard lessons learned.
00:19:31
Speaker
Links to anything referenced in this episode are provided in our show notes, which can be accessed on the website at c-a-n-r dot m-s-u dot e-d-u slash agri-food underscore safety. Thank you to everyone for listening and don't forget to tune in next month for another episode of our Produce Bites podcast.