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All stories relating to food safety

Batch of Neilson milk recalled due to cleaning solution contamination (yikes!)

(Image: Canadian Food Inspection Agency)

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency sent out an alert this morning warning people not to drink Neilson Trutaste 2% microfiltered partly skimmed milk, specifically the kind sold in four-litre bags with the UPC code 066800 00404 4, best-before date February 12 and best-before code 1590 FE12 H7. Saputo Inc. of Montreal decided to recall the milk, on shelves in Ontario and Quebec, after learning that some of it was contaminated with a cleaning solution. So far, one person has become sick after drinking the milk, but the Star reports that they didn’t require a hospital stay and have since recovered. In a slightly unsettling twist, the solution-laced milk can cause nausea and vomiting, even though it looks and smells normal. So keep your eyes peeled for those bewildering codes. Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »

The Dish

Pantry Raid

December 12, 2011 | 4:00 pm

3 Comments

New study confirms eating cookie dough is bad for you, ruins the holidays for everyone

Separated at birth? E. coli and raw cookie dough

It’s probably a given that raw cookie dough consumption will only increase as the holidays draw near, despite maternal warnings that the delicious paste is potentially poisonous. Now there’s new evidence that mom was right all along—however, it’s not salmonella that’s to blame, it’s Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli. A Centers for Disease Control study published Friday in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases examined an outbreak in 2009 that missed Canada but hospitalized 35 in the United States. The report found store-bought cookie dough to be the most likely suspect, with 33 of the patients (that’s 94 per cent) admitting to a prior raw indulgence. Specifically, the flour in one brand wasn’t put through heat treatment (a bacteria “kill step”) like other ingredients were. One other interesting factoid: 71 per cent were under age 19. Sometimes the stereotypes ring true. Read the entire story [CBC] »

(Images: bacteria, Mattosaurus; dough, Rae du Soleil)

The Dish

Foodie Follies

November 30, 2011 | 12:09 pm

7 Comments

Truck-off: why Calgary’s food truck program works and Toronto’s doesn’t

Toronto’s food trucks are not permitted to operate on public streets in the downtown core

Somehow, inventive, high-quality food served out of a truck has become one of the hottest food trends across North America over the last few years, and Toronto entrepreneurs—like Suresh Doss of Food Truck Eats, or Zane Caplansky—are doing their best to keep up. But such ventures have succeeded despite some strict regulations that keep most trucks off public streets downtown. And although we have no desire to write yet another how-Calgary-is-better-than-Toronto article, that city is halfway through an impressive food truck pilot program that has 10 new trucks roaming the streets. We called around to find out how Calgary got started and see whether the same thing could happen here.

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The Dish

Aprons & Icons

November 25, 2011 | 5:01 pm

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Q&A with Nathan Myhrvold, the author of Modernist Cuisine, 2011’s most talked about cookbook

(Image: Renée Suen)

Unless you’ve been hiding under some kind of rock where no foodies are allowed, you’ve probably heard of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, the stunning six-volume, 2,400-page, 50-pound, $625 cookbook that came out early this year. Nathan Myhrvold, who spent five years working on the tome (three-and-a-half of them with a team of 30 in a 20,000-square-foot lab), was in town this week to speak to about 250 food and science nerds at an event hosted by The Cookbook Store at the Isabel Bader Theatre. A staggering polymath, by age 23 Myhrvold had already acquired a pair of master’s degrees (economics and geophysics) and a Princeton PhD (theoretical and mathematical physics), before working with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, holding the chief technology officer job at Microsoft, running a patent empire called Intellectual Ventures and dabbling in photography, paleontology and, of course, cutting-edge food. We sat with Myhrvold over breakfast to talk about the surprising success of Modernist Cuisine and what the future holds for the project.

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The Dish

Foodie Follies

May 4, 2011 | 4:33 pm

5 Comments

Could a Toronto underground street food market force us to eat our words? We sure hope so

A couple weeks back, we told you about the San Francisco Underground Market, an all-night street food bacchanalia that we predicted could never happen in Toronto. Now Hassel Aviles wants us to eat our words, and frankly, we’d be glad to. If Aviles has her way, T.O. Underground Market will be set to delight Torontonian taste buds this fall.

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The Dish

Pantry Raid

April 29, 2011 | 2:42 pm

5 Comments

Want to know how much salt and fat there is in your food? Tough luck, thanks to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency

Do you know what’s in your food? (Image: Jason Lam)

While Canadians decide who they want leading the country, the bureaucracy in Ottawa is largely spinning its wheels until the next guy comes to boss them around. With all that spare time on their hands, some bureaucrats are turning to the time-honoured tradition of leaking to the press, and in this case we’re glad they are: it looks like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has gotten out of the business of checking out the nutritional claims made by food producers on their labels.

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The Dish

Pantry Raid

August 5, 2010 | 10:42 am

16 Comments

Food safety experts want us to stop rinsing our chickens

No bathing: rinsing raw chicken can do more harm than good (Image: snowpea&bokchoi)

Somewhere there’s a vegan flipping through Eating Animals and peacefully enjoying a veggie burger.

Just days after the Canadian Food Inspection Agency warned the country about pathogen-laden sausages and deli meats, the Toronto Star steps up to tell us that washing raw chicken—that first step in pretty much any chicken recipe—is a great way to increase one’s chances of contracting food poisoning. The reason, explains the British Food Standards Agency, is that more than half of raw chicken contains bacteria that cause food poisoning and washing the meat just spreads the bacteria around the kitchen. The best way to combat the bacteria is to cook it to death, so better to put that chicken sashimi on the backburner. Literally.

• Stop washing raw chicken, food agency advises [Toronto Star]

The Dish

Pantry Raid

March 17, 2010 | 2:43 pm

4 Comments

Potentially salmonella-tinged spices latest thing to make lunch terrifying

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is issuing yet another recall. This time, it’s spices that may contain salmonella. Here’s hoping no one jazzed up their Siena deli meat sandwiches with this stuff. The seasonings in question are from Frontier Natural Products (full list here) and Whole Foods Market 365 (full list here). Combine this with the deli meats, the mystery infections and Toyota’s massive recall, and lunch breaks are deadlier than ever. It doesn’t matter if someone is packing his or her lunch or driving to McDonald’s—everyone is screwed.

• Certain Frontier Brand Seasonings and Spices May Contain Salmonella Bacteria [CFIA]
• Various Frontier Brand and Whole Foods Market Brand Seasonings and Spices ay Contain Salmonella Bacteria [CFIA]