Johanns pics

Alice Welch, a photographer with the USDA, passes along this shot and others today of the March 20 visit of Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns to The Packer offices. Here Johanns is shown the newsroom by Lance Jungmeyer and stops to visit with Fred Wilkinson.

Taco Bell settlement?

Doug Powell, food safety professor at KSU, passes along this update about Taco Bell litigation in an email update from The Food Safety Network.

Taco Bell may pay millions to settle: Montco man, 19 others drop suits to negotiate over E. coli illnesses

.16.apr.07The Morning Call (Allentown, PA)
Stephen Minnis of Limerick Township and several others who became ill after eating food from the Mexican-food chain have, according to this story, agreed to drop lawsuits while Seattle-based attorney Bill Marler tries to reach financial settlements with the chain's lawyers.Marler, who represents Minnis and 19 others who say Taco Bell's food made them ill, was quoted as saying, "We've got a promise from Taco Bell that it will immediately mediate these cases. I'm going to sit down with them in the next 30 days and try to resolve them. If we can't come to an agreement, we can refile the cases. Every indication I've had from Taco Bell lawyers is that they want to seriously sit down and get these cases resolved ."Taco Bell spokesman Rob Poetsch wouldn't comment on specific legal cases, but was quoted as saying, "Our focus right now is to work with each person who unfortunately became ill as a result of the incident to resolve their individual situation."Marler was further cited as saying that, based on past food poisoning cases he's successfully argued, he believes each victim could receive at least tens of thousands of dollars for medical bills and other damages, adding that Minnis and others "who may have been hospitalized for a short period and did not develop complications can [receive] from $25,000 or $30,000 to half a million dollars depending on the severity of the case. Any case where someone develops [severe health problems] could be worth multiple millions of dollars."

TK: Does Taco Bell go after suppliers next? That kind of liability is staggering. Marler matter of factly says "any case where someone develops [severe health problems] could be worth multiple millions of dollars."

Buzz kill for California mandarin growers

Guest blogger Lance Jungmeyer piping in ...

As spring comes along, bees are making headlines, mostly with growers complaining of possible low yields because of decimated hives.

Here's a new twist: California "seedless" mandarin growers say they have nailed down the reason for their seedy fruit in recent years. Too many busy bees. Too much pollination. See the article here.

The article references California Citrus Mutual's Joel Nelson.

"Joel Nelson, president of California Citrus Mutual, an Exeter-based growers cooperative, said that an acre of healthy, seedless Mandarins can generate $10,000 to $12,000 in revenues. But if the fruit has seeds, that revenues can drop to about $3,000.

Nelson estimated that the most recent crop of Mandarins grown in Tulare, Fresno, Kern and Madera counties could have been worth $55 million if nearly 40 percent of it hadn't been lost to the January freeze, so a significant amount of seed development could cost the industry millions of dollars."

Mandarin growers - somehow, someway - want to keep the bees away from their groves, which unlike other oranges are self-pollinating. They say their groves are concentrated, but you have to wonder whether an absence of bees would cause any other fruit or nut crops to be without pollination.

And given the attention to the dearth of bees this year, it would be an odd thing for growers to succeed in their battle against bees.

On a side note, the source of the seeds may be the proximity of valencia oranges, known for their woody pulp and abundance of seeds. Here's an idea: get rid of the valencias. Consumers don't care much for them and one could argue that eating a dry, woody valencia might keep consumers away from oranges for months at a time. Better to rid the marketplace of poor-performing items, and at the same time improve the marketability of mandarins.

NRA's intent

Donna Garren and the NRA have come out with a statement today about produce safety guidelines:


"The National Restaurant Association and National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation were pleased to host a farm-to-table produce safety conference in Monterey, California. Over 175 restaurant and produce industry professionals attended the two-day conference.
"The conference was a positive step for all companies involved in the farm-to-table continuum to develop and implement enhanced effective produce safety management programs.
"In the short term, the Association will support the Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) metrics developed by the produce industry, and will support the California Produce Marketing Agreement. It is important to emphasize that our support and call for enhanced produce safety is broad and not limited to leafy greens or produce solely from California.
"In the long term, we will rapidly move forward to further define and assure implementation of scientifically sound food safety management practices along the produce supply chain.
"We commend the National Restaurant Association for leading the efforts to actively engage restaurants, produce organizations and their members to support a collaborative, comprehensive set of produce safety recommendations," said Dr. Jim Gorny, senior vice president of food safety and technology with United Fresh Produce Association.
"Food safety is a shared responsibility," said Garren. "The Association will continue to work with our partners in the produce industry to instill consumer confidence in produce items served in our nation’s restaurants."


TK: I have a call in to Donna about what this might mean.. Her statement that "In the long term, we will rapidly move forward to further define and assure implementation of scientifically sound food safety management practices along the produce supply chain" is vague enough but also seems to promise tougher standards in the future.

Imported food quality

Guest blogger Lance Jungmeyer checking in here ...

More and more, we are beginning to see mainstream media focus attention on the lack of inspections for imported foods. See this story on Fox News, which declares:

"Just 1.3 percent of imported fish, vegetables, fruit and other foods are inspected — yet those government inspections regularly reveal food unfit for human consumption.

Frozen catfish from China, beans from Belgium, jalapenos from Peru, blackberries from Guatemala, baked goods from Canada, India and the Philippines — the list of tainted food detained at the border by the Food and Drug Administration stretches on."

I would expect to see government make the fruit and vegetable industry accountable to Country of Origin Labelling at some point. It's unfortunate that media and the consuming public will want to point blame at producers for the law being delayed all these years, when in fact Congress bowed to pressure from the retail industry to delay implementation. I'm sure retailer lobbyists will find a way to spin the story in their favor.

Personally, I worry more and more about what I eat at restaurants. Who's to say where the product came from? And can we expect the same quality (i.e. safety) as foods from the U.S.A.?

In the eyes of buyers, prudence plays second fiddle to price, always.

Another notch in the belt of CIW

The St. Petersburg Times tells the story of how McDonald's bowed to pressure from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and has agreed to pay a penny a pound more for Florida tomatoes.
From the story by James Thorner:


McDonald's signature hamburger, the Big Mac, doesn't even come with a slice of tomato. The global fast-food giant buys a scant 1.5 percent of Florida's tomato crop.
But when a coalition of Florida farm workers pressured McDonald's last week into handing a 75 percent raise to tomato pickers, the decision was judged a precedent that could upset the fruit cart all across Florida.
Mickey D's bowed to a two-year "fair food" campaign led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, named for the agricultural town south of Tampa Bay in Collier County and representing mostly pickers from Mexico. It was the CIW's second deal with the fast-food industry. In 2005, after four years of farm worker protests and boycotts, Taco Bell parent Yum Brands agreed to similar pay concessions.
Fresh off the celebratory hand shaking and photo shoot at Atlanta's Carter Center, where the deal was announced, CIW is plotting its next move: turning up the broiler on Miami-based Burger King, another gobbler of Florida produce.
"Eventually when Yum Brands and McDonald's get behind the idea, it becomes the norm for the rest of the fast-food industry."
Agricultural companies, including those operating in the tomato heartland from Ruskin to Palmetto in Hillsborough and Manatee counties, acknowledge the McDonald's precedent. That doesn't mean they're happy.
In their opinion, CIW used extortion and manipulated the media to blacken the name of the $500-million industry. They resent that burger behemoth McDonald's, several steps up the supply chain, can dictate how to pay workers for other companies. They complain that higher-priced domestic tomatoes could, like cucumbers and squash before them, eventually surrender the market to cheaper Latin American imports.
"Obviously, they made a corporate decision to play ball," said Reggie Brown, vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange in Maitland. "We're disappointed."
McDonald's didn't play ball from the start. Initially, it insisted its 15-year-old code of conduct for suppliers was enough to ensure decent working conditions in the fields. So the farm workers borrowed tactics that had already proved effective against Taco Bell.
Rallies and protests - most recently a "2007 McDonald's Truth Tour" - increasingly generated bad publicity, especially when words like "slavery" were tossed about.
CIW allies made minimal purchases of McDonald's stock to give them a seat at the shareholders table. They slipped a resolution on workers rights into the agenda of the company's May 24 annual shareholders meeting. McDonald's tried, and failed, to pull the resolution.
For last week's truth tour, a caravan of farm workers headed to Chicago to rally in front of the chain's headquarters, supported by the likes of AFL-CIO head John Sweeney, the Presbyterian Church USA and activists. Though the April 9 agreement with McDonald's made the tour less protest and more celebration, it went on as scheduled.
McDonald's denies it caved to CIW pressure and frames the agreement as corporate enlightenment. Pickers who harvest McDonald's tomatoes will get an extra penny a pound. It amounts to a raise of about 75 percent because pickers now make 40- to 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket, or about 1.3 cents a pound.
"We reached the point where we both concluded the end result would be far more impactful, far more sustainable, if we worked together instead of separately," McDonald's spokesman Bill Whitman said.
Based on the 15-million pounds of Florida tomatoes the company buys, the extra cent could cost McDonald's $150,000 a year. It's a blip in a company that posted a profit of $2.9-billion last year.
The burden on Florida's independent growers is potentially greater. If the 1-cent raise were expanded across all the state's tomato farms, growers would pay million of dollars more in wages each year. With production of about 1.3-billion pounds a year, tomatoes are the state's largest vegetable crop.
CIW views tomato pickers as chronically underpaid. Wage rates for such workers haven't budged in decades. But low wages are a product of supply and demand, and here CIW's own clientele plays a role. A flood of mostly illegal immigrants from Latin America ensures a steady supply of migrant labor to work at prevailing rates. The tomato industry says good workers earn the equivalent of $9 to $11 per hour in a season that runs from late September to mid July.
What troubles Lisa Lochridge, spokeswoman for the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association, is that the pay hike applies only to Florida.
"McDonald's should hold all of its vendors to the same standards across the board," Lochridge said. "Farm workers in Florida should be treated the same as those in California and Mexico. We don't want to see Florida workers placed at a competitive disadvantage."
But CIW's Perkins calls the agricultural industry an "equal opportunity exploiter" that needs prodding if it is to ease workers' plight.
Florida's tomato crop is too dominant - nearly 90 percent of the country's domestic winter supply comes from here - to droop from foreign competition, she said.
"We didn't see the tomato market shift after the Yum Brands agreement," Perkins said, "This is something consumers have called for. Consumers are asking for fair food, not just fast food."

The farm workers' agreement with McDonald's that takes effect during the 2007 tomato growing season has three major parts:
1. Workers get an extra penny for every pound they pick. It's about 75 percent more than they make now. It can add up to more than $50 to $100 per week for some pickers.
2. McDonald's will require its suppliers to follow a stronger workplace code of conduct written in collaboration with farm workers.
3. A third party will monitor conditions in the fields and ensure workers get the extra penny as promised.

From just a year ago, The Packer's Doug Ohlemeier reported:


Lisa Howard, McDonald's director of corporate media relations, said the Oak Brook, Ill., company endorses the SAFE effort and has its own standards that provide employee status for workers who pick for growers, access to Social Security benefits, workers' compensation, safe and affordable housing and health and wellness programs.
She said McDonald's has commissioned a study of its program. If the review shows the economic value of the McDonald's effort doesn't meet or exceed the penny-per-pound increase -- which the coalition has proposed -- McDonald's would request that its five produce supplier-distributors, who buy 1.5% of all Florida tomatoes, make up any difference.
With the ongoing SAFE and McDonald's' audits, many of the suppliers know the standards and are making changes to their operations because they understand it's a condition of doing business with McDonald's produce suppliers, Howard said.
Because the SAFE and McDonald's programs are more comprehensive, they will positively affect many more thousands of workers than the penny-per-pound proposal, she said.


TK: What happened, McDonald's? With both McDonald's and Yum Brands on board, it will be tough for chains like Subway and Burger King to avoid falling into line with CIW.