Food safety 101

Above, David Durkin and Dave Gombas

Food Safety 101 was the title of a short course yesterday here in Chicago at the United Fresh Produce Association's Fresh Marketplace show.

Among the speakers, Dave Gombas, vice president of scientific and technical affairs with United Fresh Produce Association, David Durkin, lawyer with Olsson, Frank and Weeda, P.C., Washington, D.C., Ryan Novak, epidemic intelligence service officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta,Ga., and C.J. Reynolds, director of education services, Silliker, Inc., Homewood, Ill.

Gombas summarized pathogens and produce succinctly.

“The good news is we have fresh produce and everybody loves fresh produce,” he said. “The bad news is we don’t have a kill step,” he said.
In a question and answer session that followed his presentation, Gombas noted that 2 billion bags of packaged salads are sold in the U.S. each year.
“Preventing contamination at a rate of less than one in 2 billion per year…that is a tall order and you’ve got to do it,” he said. A couple hundred illnesses can be linked to fresh produce each year, or hundreds out of billions of bags. “Still, people who get sick, they don’t care about statistics, they care about the absolute numbers” he said.

The audience size of the session was just right, small enough so that speakers could roam around the front of the room and comfortable enough so that anybody in the audience feel like they could ask a question.The four-hour "short course" didn't seem that long, and each presentation is worth exploring more in upcoming coverage.