With frozen foods, burden of safety is on you

[Amelia]

With frozen foods, burden of safety is on you

Processed food firms increasingly unable to ensure items are pathogen-free

By Michael Moss

The New York Times

May 14, 2009

The frozen pot pies that sickened an estimated 15,000 people with salmonella in 2007 left federal inspectors mystified. At first they suspected the turkey. Then they considered the peas, carrots and potatoes.

Threatened with a federal shutdown, the pie maker, ConAgra Foods, began spot-checking the vegetables for pathogens, but could not find the culprit. It also tried cooking the vegetables at high temperatures, a strategy the industry calls a “kill step,” to wipe out any lingering microbes. But the vegetables turned to mush in the process.

So ConAgra — which sold more than 100 million pot pies last year under its popular Banquet label — decided to make the consumer responsible for the kill step. The “food safety” instructions and four-step diagram on the 69-cent pies offer this guidance: “Internal temperature needs to reach 165° F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots.”

Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30747767/

[phkrause]

Pretty scary I'd say. But you can't live your life wondering all the time! Otherwise we'd never do or eat anything.

pk

[Tallmark]

Stay away from processed foods. They're a killer!

[GreatLakesGramma]

I went to the emergency room in the middle of the night with possible food poisoning. I had steamed frozen mixed vegetables earlier in the day, but whatever caused my extreme nausea and vomiting never made it past my stomach, as I didn't have any intestinal involvement. There were some of the mixed vegetables in the vomit, but it was hours previously that I had eaten them. So I don't know if they were the culprit, but it wouldn't seem they could have been, or else I would have been sick much earlier.

What a bad night!