Six years after the E.coli 0157 outbreak in South Wales, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) have finally found the time to produce its response for retail butchery workers to the outbreak, this in the form of a DVD that can be viewed online or by ordering a copy from the FSA.
The DVD is called “E.coli 0157 – A butchers guide to staying safe” apparently focuses on three key areas:
(1) The threat that E.coli 0157 poses to businesses and their customers
(2) The importance of separation in controlling cross contamination
(3) The role of documented food safety management procedures in ensuring food safety and the ease with which they may be embedded into everyday working practices.
Six years? To produce such patronising drivel as this? Notwithstanding this teaching of grandmother how to suck eggs approach on telling butchers on how to run their businesses, I find it staggering that THE ONE really important bit of information /advice that should be passed through the food chain right up the final consumer is missing; i.e., ensure that food is cooked thoroughly, and is kept separate from fresh meat after it is cooked. This procedure kills all bugs that can cause, on extremely rare occasions, food poisoning.
Point one is your typical health scare card that to a bureaucrat justifies it being said, thus their need to be in place to say it. The simple truth of adequate cooking will suffice. A simple statement but an inescapable one. What useful guidance can a butcher give to a customer other than to frighten them to death if they should regale this FSA trash to them?
Point two is sensible enough, but why it should take six years to publicise this case of the bleedin’ obvious, I don’t know.
Point three. Documented management procedures have to be done because they are a legal requirement and indeed, this tick-box mentality might be beneficial to some butchers. The weakness, however, with this statement is that it implies that it ensures food safety. No mountain of paperwork is going to provide the guarantees that a customer requires. The use of the buzzwords “minimising the risks” to justify such procedures are totally meaningless. Time for honesty; your premises can sparkle with cleanliness, you can win a star in every hygiene box, you may win every award going for your product, you may even have the royal seal above your shop. None of these will guarantee any fresh meat product is free from pathogenic bugs that might lead to food poisoning; that guarantee can only come with adequate cooking – end of story.
One, of course, needs to actually see the DVD before making up one’s mind, but history forces me to make a fairly easy prediction:
Local Authorities, under pressure from the FSA, will now up the ante in their dealings with retail butchers, and start flourishing these DVD’s about, with doomsday faces of predictability of food poisoning epidemics should non-compliance occur.
And they’ll get away with it too. Instead of requesting a logical and realistic approach to enforcement from officialdom, my experiences of retail butchers is that their institutionalised fear of officials is worse even than those in the abattoir sector! Often I will get a phone call from a retail customer who might say, with audible fear in his voice – “don’t do your usual delivery , I’ve got a health visit today”, or, “I want to cut down my order so that I haven’t got too much about, I’ve got a local authority visit today.
And, of course, the most common – “ I don’t want to upset officials, they will come down hard on me if I do.”
One reaps what one sows.
I just do not understand this approach. Why not simply say it as it is after acquainting yourself with the facts, and present your business to an enforcement officer, warts and all. You don’t have to be rude, after all, they have a job to do. Equally, you shouldn’t have to grovel either.
A strategy of compliance with, and enforcement of, the law should be the one thing, and one thing only, that should occupy the time and effort of everybody concernedy, no matter which side of the law one might sit.
As the FSA turn their attention onto the retail sector, have the nerve to keep it that straightforward.
To succeed you have to try.
Toby Baker