Food Safety Talk 70: A Quick Overnight Servicing

The episode begins with Ben and Don talking about the fall weather and Ben’s podcasting from home (possibly sans pants).  The discussion turns to travel and its potential impact on Don’s jury duty.  Ben has never served on a jury, but has seen many movies about trials.  Don shares that he has seen some movies about trials, notably Capote and To Kill a Mockingbird.  Both guys are fans of the movie My Cousin Vinny, which is not a book.  The pop culture talk turns to television, and Ben mentions The Americans (spelled with a c, not k, but the c does look like a hammer and sickle in the show logo).  Don has been watching Intruders, but he has barely been able to discern what the show is actually about.  Last Tango in Halifax is also good TV; with season two now available on Netflix. Ben wraps up the pop culture part of the show with a mention of a Farm Aid concert he attended with some other foodie-people and mentioned that Neil Young shared about his personal views on some farming issues at the concert.

The conversation moved to politics and cable news.  As a board member of the New Jersey Association for Food Protection, Don was part of a recent conference call regarding the organizing of a GMO foods discussion/debate with invited speakers, potentially including Robyn O’Brien. When Ben got his start in food safety, GMO foods were in the news and he mentioned a recent barfblog post on labeling of GMO foods and their unintended impacts on consumer choice. Ben talked about the summer reading program at NC State, and this years book Tomorrows Table, written by an organic farmer and a food biotechnologist. 

Ben recently participated in an IFT sponsored twitter chat on the safety of packed lunches.  Ben noted the difficulty in answering complicated questions in only 140 characters over twitter and the stress of having answered so many questions in a short period of time. The discussion turned to an article about the temperatures of school lunches, and the importance of considering both time and temperature.  Don mentioned a good FightBac webinar that covered cross contamination, and plugged his recent appearance on Academic Minute that covered some of Don’s hand washing experiments.

Ben recently received a risk-type question during an interview, and he was keen to know what Don would answer (PhD students take note: Ben plans to ask this question at every qualifying exam he goes to!).  The question was: What is the riskiest food-related thing that you do? Don provides two answers: 1) he sometimes doesn’t wash his hands for 20 s with soap; 2) sometimes he doesn’t take the temperature of meat on the grill and just believes it is ‘probably good enough’.  Ben’s answer included eating fresh restaurant salsa with lots of cilantro and eating a lot of berries. 

Ben, Don and regular podcast guest Mike Batz are all trying to eat less and exercise more, and using technology to do it.  Mike and Don are using Lose It; Ben is using My Net Diary and Runtastic. 

Don announced that he has podcast cheated on Ben by participating on another podcast, Better Know a Jackal, and the discussion moves to podcasting workflows in general.  Don is now using an app to send webpage PDFs to Dropbox.

The conversation then transitioned to some humorous turns-of-phrase that Doug and Ben like to drop into Barfblog articles.  Ben was disappointed no one commented on a witty double entendre he included in a posting about finding vomit on an airplane.  Ben has to repeat the line to Don a few times before laughter ensues. 

Food Safety Talk 64: The One With Doug

In a special episode recorded back before Ben went on summer hiatus, the guys invite Doug Powell on for a chat.  According to Wikipedia (which is never wrong), Dr. Douglas Powell was raised in Brantford, Ontario (that's in Canada). Doug describes himself as a former professor of food safety and the publisher of barfblog.com. He is passionate about food, has five daughters, and is an OK goaltender in pickup hockey.

These days Doug is been thinking a lot about soul, and given the Venn diagram of their intersecting musical tastes this leads to a discussion of Mr. Soul and a place where even Richard Nixon has got soul. Any discussion of music and soul leads to a mention of the classic Soul Man, which Don knows from the Blues Brothers movie, and Doug knows from the original version by Sam and Dave. Doug is thinking about soul because of his monthly writing gig for the Texas A&M Center for food safety. The piece he was ruminating on during the call led to a post called "It's Gotta Have Soul" where his central thesis is that most people talking about food safety lack relevance; they lack soul, and fail to resonate.

After the guys bid Doug good night, the discussion turns to managing graduate students, task tracking software like OmniFocus, distracting diversions like Flappy Bird, managing references using Sente or Mendeley and a brief look forward to this special events which are coming, or rather were coming, at the IAFP annual meeting.

Food Safety Talk 21: Food Safety Consultant to Apple Nerds

The guys are still having some problems with Skype though maybe some of it is related to Don hitting the permanent mute button.

Don prepared for his colonoscopy with the Suprep innards-cleansing purple sponge kit. He couldn’t stomach the diarrhea inducing preparation and Ben thought he could have achieved the same effect with some of Lee-Ann Jaykus’ fecal-harvested norovirus. But Don longs for a magic pill instead of eating poop (or drinking Suprep).

The discussion then turned to the inter-relations between food safety, social networking and the Internet. Don explained that the Internet was an interconnected series of tubes invented by Al Gore. This surprised Ben. Don then briefly detoured by reminiscing about the dinner he and Kristin had with Merlin Mann at the House of Prime Rib while on a trip to San Francisco, where the WWDC Apple nerds overlapped with the ASM micro nerds. This led to the story how Dan Benjamin asked Don to talk some food safety sense into Andy Ihnatko and Dave Nanian.  This inspires Don to proclaim himself food safety consultant to the Apple nerds, truly a golden god.

Bill Marler retweeted a reference to Don’s post on barfblog about hand-washing which received some criticism from a be-sandeled curmudgeon for lack of credit. Maybe he could use The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator which (essentially) made Don an overnight Internet semi-celebrity thanks to a re-tweet by Merlin Mann.

When Ben (finally) got a word in he thought it was important to contribute to the food safety conversation on the Internet and for food professionals to know what is being talked about. Ben’s biggest challenge is finding the best way to engage with all the various social media outlets. Ben believes that people are only trusted if others can see they are real – such as Bill Marler as compared to USDA live tweet session about food safety “Ask Karen.”

While Ben and Doug’s twitter feeds are clearly food safety related, Don felt that his own was more random, such as asking Jesse Thorn for a link to the audio file for Jesse’s classic interview with Dick Dale. Don also uses Twitter as an outlet for his frustrations with a life in academe, but he was also curious about trying to socially engage random strangers reporting vomiting, diarrhea and food poisoning. Ben monitors some of these terms with TweetDeck, though he may switch to Hibari. Ben also pitched Lee-Ann on the idea of a team of graduate students engaging with those who are already reading and talking about foodborne illnesses and outbreaks as part of the NoroCore project.

Don recounted his recent appearance on Dr. Radio, a satellite radio show hosted by nutritionist Samantha Heller. He gave the podcast a plug, though the causal link with the growth in the FST podcast listenership is unknown.  Don did note that about 40% of blog traffic was thanks to links from barfblog. The guys were grateful to those who had left reviews, including Mike Batz, who struggles with multiple twitter personalities.

While Don knew that the guys from Car Talk were retiring, he found out from Jesse Thorn about a post written by Ira Glass about what public radio shows should do with the slot and the response to it. The success of Car Talk reminded Don of John Gruber and Merlin Mann’s South by Southwest Interactive 2009 talk about building a blog to be proud of. All you need is Obsession + Topic + Voice, something the guys are striving to perfect.

Another opportunity for a podcast plug will be Don’s IAFP webinar on “Making the Most of Your IAFP Annual Meeting: Tips for Students and First-Timers” Tuesday, 10 July 2012, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM (Central Time). Ben recalled FST Episode 0 (on StoryCorps) and their first IAFP meeting experiences. The guys then talked about what they do and don’t do at conferences. This includes leaving sessions if they are bored.

Finally, the discussion turned to music and Ben shared that wishes he was food safety’s Neil Young. Don agreed that Neil Young’s Americana was amazing, but that he hasn’t quite got into Sloan, like Ben and Merlin.

Food Safety Talk 21: Food Safety Consultant to Apple Nerds

Food Safety Talk 6: Animal Neuroses and Guilty Pleasures

In Episode 6 Don and Ben talk petting zoos and risk management strategies. Ben rants about his neuroses with animal contact while Don analyzes these fears (for free).

• An outbreak of E. coli O157 linked to the North Carolina State Fair.  
• What a well known quickserve restaurant might look like (here, here or here).
• A list of petting zoo-related outbreaks.
• The North Carolina State Fair.
• Some other pathogenic E. colis.
• 2004 North Carolina State Fair petting zoo-linked E. coli O157 outbreak (108 cases).
• What a hippie Ben looks like, and a picture of his Birkenstocks and water tub.
• Why Ben is worried about railings, sawdust, etc at petting zoos.
• Howling Cow; NC State Ice Cream.
• Fireman Sam, who Ben's son often emulates.
• Valuing a safe petting zoo.
• Freehold Borough, in the garden state, where Don lives and can't raise chickens in his backyard.
• Deli meat risks and pregnancy another risk benefit trade-off.
• Potential for microbial contamination of spinach through feedyard air/dust growing in close proximity to cattle feedyard operations.
• Benefits that raw milk drinkers see that can outweigh risks for some individuals.
• Ben on TV; those are not his jazzy hands at the bottom.
• A way of getting things off of Ben's TV.
• Handwashing encouragement signs at the North Carolina State Fair (October 16, 2011).
• Inspecting food vendors at the North Carolina State Fair.
• North Carolina petting zoo sanitation and communication regulations.
• NC State Expert Offers Insight On E. coli Outbreak.
• Risk of Salmonella from reptiles.
• Quit touching my toilet paper.
• Journal of Irreproducible Results.
• Ah, graduate students.
• Foodborne illnesses aren't just numbers.
• The satire of bridging masters.
• What professors looked like before iPods.
• The Pearl Jam documentary that Ben is obsessed with.
• The Bridge School benefit concert.
• Don's guilty pleasure.
• Why Don and Kristin may never leave the couch again.
• The Instapaper sage Marco, who has blogged about TV watching. 
• Merlin likes sports.

Animal Neuroses and Guilty Pleasures