WATERLOO, Ont. – Each year as many as 9,000 Americans die from food-borne diseases, Canadian cattle industry leaders were told last week.
Many of those diseases are carried in meat.
“We’re in the midst of a food safety crisis because we’re in a period of change,” Texas A & M University meat safety expert Russell Cross told the annual meeting of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association Aug. 10.
It was a message reinforced later in the day by Kitchener, Ont., meat packing executive Matt Gibney of MGI Packers Inc.
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“Food safety and the perception of food safety is mandatory and it is our greatest challenge,” he told the conference. “Consumers demand safe beef today, and I underline the word safe.”
Despite that, there was an incident of Canadians getting sick from eating contaminated beef only four weeks ago, he said.
Cross supported the point, referring to an incident several years ago when several American children died from food poisoning caused by E. coli at Jack in the Box restaurants.
“We may think we have the safest food in the world but if children are dying from our product, we have a problem,” he said.
The solution promoted by several speakers was endorsement and implementation of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system of inspection which requires tests at various stages of the food chain.
Cross said it is important that tests for harmful bacteria be conducted from the farm through processing to distribution, retailing and home preparation.
He said farmers have an obligation to make sure the animals they are shipping are clean and uncontaminated.
Other players in the chain also have obligations but the weakest link is food handling in the home, according to Cross.
He said the current system assumes that cooking at the food services stage and the home preparation stage are sufficient to control bacteria.
“It is not,” he said. “We are going to have to change our thinking on how we distribute our resources.”
The United States, Canada and many other countries are adopting this system of checking food quality at various stages.
Cross said farmers should embrace the regulation and find out how it can apply at the farm level as a way to avoid increasing consumer distrust of food safety.
