Today we're learning something new. We're diving into food safety, but not in the way you've heard it before. This isn't a class. This isn't a checklist. And this definitely isn't a lecture. This is real conversation about what actually happens between the farm, the kitchen, and your plate. I've spent 25 years in this industry, and I can tell you, food safety is one of those things everyone says they care about until something goes wrong. And when it does, it's not theoretical anymore. It's real, and it hits hard. So we're building something here, a series of conversations that break this down in a way that actually makes sense with people who live it every day. This segment is brought to you by Testo North America. You'll start to see where tools, data, and real-world application fit into all of this without forcing it. Today's the starting point, the wake-up call. Why food safety actually matters. I'm your host Carl Fiodini, along with Eric Moore from Testo North America. Let's get into it. Eric, my man, welcome to the program. Hello, hello. I'm happy, very happy to be here. Me too, man. This is really exciting, because I feel that food safety is the... one of the pinnacle topics, not just in food, but in general. I feel like there's a major push when it comes to social media and what people watch and listen to and consume. Food safety is one of those things that sits high in that category. People want to consume and learn about it. For sure. For sure. And you know what, oddly enough, the pandemic actually really ratcheted up people's awareness, understanding, and interest in food safety and also to a level like environmental safety, if you will, and being aware of what's going on in your surroundings and things like that. So it's definitely on a lot more people's radar than it was, say, six years ago. Well, the thing about it is not everyone understands where it comes from. How do you... Is it because it's cross-contamination? Is it shaking somebody's hand and putting your... Wiping your mouth. It's so much deeper than that. It's complicated, right? But it isn't. At the same time, if that makes sense. It's like, I don't know, trying to make biscuits, right? It's not that hard, but it is. Everything is science. Everything comes down to a science. Listen, last week, a week and a half ago, I got a stomach bug, and I was at a commission for almost 10 days. And I don't know how it happened. I don't know where it came from. I can tell you that it was brutal, and I'm okay now. But I'll tell you, it was... You know, these things make you really... When you have moments when you're not in the pain of it, you do some serious self-reflecting on life. You know what I mean? It's pretty interesting how it goes down. Yeah. Hey, let me ask you something. Did you seek medical care? And you got sick? Which I'm glad you're better, by the way. Thank you. As it turns out, I am married to a nurse, and my mother-in-law is a nurse, and my brother-in-law is a nurse, and I'm surrounded by good people that... Obviously, if I have to go in, I go in, but I was taken care of well. Obviously, that's awesome. You have good trained medical staff in close support. As we go further down the pathway here, and we talk... Just keep that in mind, right? Because that isn't unique. Well, it might be unique to be surrounded by so many nurses and medical practitioners for you, but not seeking medical support when your stomach is upset is extremely common. And, you know, as our conversation progresses, I'll try to bring that back into the story here. Well, if I can give you... Well, let me say it like this. If I didn't have that support, I don't know that I would have gone. And, you know, I'm stubborn. I'm one of those people. And the reality is, for me, it would take a lot for me to just have to go bring myself to the urgent care or emergency room. Most people know if you get too dehydrated, you got to go. You got to get fluids. I even know that. But I would wait till the very end. But you're not unique, right? Like, the vast majority of people... And it isn't just in, say, like, Florida, or where I live in Pennsylvania, or it's not a U.S. thing, it's not a North America thing. It's a person thing, right? Like, we just... Unless we're really typically, right? Unless we're, like, bent over in pain, like, to what you were just saying, like, going to get medical help, like, you'll just gut it out. And it just... That is a... That is extremely common. And that's what, like, makes, like, the whole topic of food safety and illnesses related to food and things like that, it makes it, like, very, very complicated to put a lot of statistics around. And that's where you'll see whether it's in literature or even on the news, when news agencies talk about this or run stories about, you know, something that's happening nationally or regionally because of employees or because of food recall or something like that. They always talk about estimates. And the reason for that is that the vast majority of people that start feeling sick out of the blue, they never seek medical attention, right? Their medical attention is a bottle of Pepto-Bismol or some... some Tums or something like that and you rest for 72 hours, two days, something like that. Well, that's the truth. I think a lot of this comes back around. People who are sick tend to still go to work, right? And when you do that, that is what opens a lot of this Pandora's box. Everybody in the business says they care about food safety. But the truth is, what does that actually look like day to day? Yeah, well, and that is the very polarizing topic. I will tell you across the industry, as well as across the sort of regulatory and industry audiences or world, people going to work sick. And that is a very, very, very challenging topic. Part of it is you're talking about individuals or a family's economic well-being. That's obviously super important. And it gets super nuanced and complicated because if you're a line worker, a line cook, or you wash the dishes, all of which I've done back many, many, many moons ago, if you don't go to work, you're not getting paid. And if you're not getting paid, you might not be able to pay your bills. And if you're not paying your bills, somebody might not eat. And so it's kind of a vicious cycle. It gets very, very, very tricky to manage, especially as an employer. It's hard for whether you're a kitchen manager, executive chef, single proprietor, owner. That gets really hard when you're in the thick of it. Some of the biggest challenges you have, E. Coli, you have cross-contamination, you have temperature abuse. Like a lot of these things, it's a spectrum. When you're talking about food safety, it's not just like one thing. It's a multi-layered category of potential challenges. Alright, Eric, in the food industry, there's risk factors and there's layers of them. What does it look like for the average person? For them to understand that properly. Great point. Great topic. So really high level. Let me sort of paint a picture. In the United States, and I could actually get into global statistics, but let's just focus on the United States, right? The Centers for Disease Control, they estimate, right? There's that word that I brought up earlier, estimate, because there is widespread under-reporting by their estimates, which are based on historical illness, actual factual data from hospitals and medical providers and things like that. They estimate 48 million people suffer from a food-borne illness on an annual basis, right? 48 million people, that's a lot. It's actually one in, I think, if you break it down, it's like one in every six people get some sort of food-borne illness at least once a year. Of those 48 million, 128,000, it's so sick that they need to be hospitalized. Of those 128,000, and again, these are all estimates, 3,000 people are estimated to die every single year from some sort of food-borne illness, right? And the reason I want to provide that sort of foundational component is that the Centers for Disease Control, along with the FDA, for the last more than 20 years, they have done these very, very in-depth research studies to go in five or 10-year periods where they look at, you know, actual illness statistics, right? So from people actually going and seeking medical care, they cross-reference those with, like, restaurant inspection reports and things like that. And the output of that from the first 10-year study of this was they identified five leading risk factors that were the essential cause of almost all food-borne illness outbreaks. And those risk factors are improper holding of food, right? So whether it's hot food or cold food, it's being... Is it within what is classified as a safe temperature? And I'll generalize this, right? For cold food, it's got to be below 40 degrees in general. And for hot food, depending on where you live in the country, it's either going to be above 140 or above 135 degrees Fahrenheit. And when you have food that falls within that window, the above, say, above 40 degrees and below 140 degrees, that's called the danger zone. That's where bacteria proliferate very, very rapidly. And that is the leading, largest cause of people becoming ill. The next one is personal hygiene. You kind of indicated that just a minute ago, right? People go into work sick. It also relates to improper hand washing, right? Someone picks their nose. They forget they don't wash their hands. Staff is a naturally occurring component inside of your nostrils. And there you go. You could, you know, if you're shedding staff, then you could actually be the root cause of a staff outbreak. Inadequate cooking is the third one, right? So if I've got a piece of chicken, and this is just interesting, salmonella, which commonly found in raw poultry, it's just a naturally occurring thing. If you don't cook the poultry right, then you don't eradicate that bacteria. And if you ingest it, then, you know, up to 72 to X, so many hours later, you could become ill. So improper holding or personal hygiene, inadequate cooking. The next is contaminated equipment. And this gets into actually like when you're in an establishment or you're operating an establishment, allowing people the time to properly wash or sanitize and not just like use a cutting board and knife to, you know, cut up meat poultry, you know, make meatballs or meatloaf, and then go back, go over and use it. It's a classic cross contamination example, right? You then go and you would cut some sort of vegetable or product that is ready to eat that isn't going to go through any additional thermal processing. But that's where this contamination component begins to come into place. And then the final one, which I'm sure you'll get this, is a painting food from unsafe sources, right? Some people probably, they're like, who's going to do that, right? Like who's going to buy food from somebody that they don't trust? Well, it happens more frequently than one might guess, especially when, you know, you're running a restaurant and your, let's say your vegetable purveyor just pulls up and says, hey, you know what? I got a crazy deal on this side of beef. You want it? And I mean, depending on like who you are, where you work and what your, you know, your, you know, statement looks like what your operating budget is, like you might be like, yeah, man, I'll take that. And you have no idea where that meat came from, how it was treated, because it properly, properly slaughtered, anything like that. So those are the five things, right? All those numbers that I threw out earlier, you know, one in six people, 120,000 people hospitalized in 3000 deaths, all of those caught. Those five things are the causes for, I think the statistic is 75% of foodborne illness, you know, issues, right? It's those five things. I'll say it again, improper holding, poor hygiene, inadequate cooking, contaminated equipment and unsafe sources. And three of those are really, really quite controllable, depending on who you talk to. Well, it makes you wonder, like how much of food safety is actually controlled versus, you know, just hoping nothing goes wrong. Oh, that's a, that's, I mean, that's, that's a good one, right? In my, my personal philosophy, I do my best to plan for contingencies, right? Like, and that's where, like, I have sort of evolved into this, this, this sort of, I have a risk aversion to you on a lot of things, especially when it comes to, like, my prep professional, my, my work, right? My career, the thing that I do and the things that I try to try to help are my organization create, right? It's, it's to avoid risk. It's to engineer risk out of processes. But some, some places, some people, they aren't, they aren't like that. They're, they're kind of, they'll cover their eyes and be like, all right, I'm just going to hope and pray. You never really think about these things when you're younger. Like, I can't tell you how many times I've had, you know, you know, order a pie at night. It sits out overnight. You wake up in the morning and you just open the box right there on the table and you just knock it down. I don't think about any problems there, you know, and, and, and I can't tell you how many times I've done it and, and live to talk about it. That's, you know what I mean? Like, well, you, yeah, you, you and me both. And that's where, like, it's so, it's so layered and nuanced. I mean, that's a, that's an interesting, you know, specific example you, you brought up, right? Because the products that you're talking about, right? Like it really gets into this, like you had said earlier, the science behind all of this. And it becomes like the science of bacteria. And I don't think we necessarily need to, to, to, to, to delve, like head over, healed into that. But change the, change the example you use to fried rice, you know, or, or to, to macaroni and cheese or, or some sort of like, like wet, low main. Um, you know, that'll, that could change the scenario quite, quite a bit. It, you know, of, oh, I left it out of my counter all night, or I left it out. I, I went out Friday night, came home, had this, left it out. I slept all day Saturday, Sunday. I'm, you know, still nursing my, my, my, my, my party time. And, and you know, I consume this for brunch and you know, two days later, I'm, I'm, I'm not leaving the bathroom. Uh, so there's a lot of this come down to human error or processes breakdown, the lazy people in general. Like we're talking about food industry right now specifically. Where do you find most of the challenges? Well, you know, I think, let me say it this way. I don't think anybody that works in any food establishment anywhere, regardless of where it is, nobody, nobody's working there. Like to try to intentionally like make something unsafe. Right. The buy it, like that just isn't how humans are wired. Right. Like, unless you're some diabolical evil genius, right. Or like that just didn't, it isn't, it isn't happening. Human error. Absolutely. That happens. Right. And, you know, is that through lack of, lack of adequate education, maybe lack of adequate training. By, by all means, right. Like if, if an individual like undercooks a raw animal product. And, you know, it then gets it's getting served. And what if they weren't properly trained? I can remember like back in college, right. When, you know, I graduated with a hospitality degree. I had two high level cooking, you know, I mean, nothing like culinary Institute of America or formal culinary training or anything like that. But we had two, two cooking classes that we had to take that were, you know, that were semester long. And I mean, I specifically remember standing in our, in our, our kitchen and the chef that it was our, our professor telling us how to judge the doneness of meat by, you know, moving your thumb, it closer, like it holding your, your hand out. And then as you make a fist, right. Like that's how you judge doneness of meat. Is that an adequate way to really train somebody and educate somebody on how to properly cook, you know, cook steaks. I think, you know, over time we learned that no, it really, it really isn't. There's do occur. But I think they are a lot of times situationally based. Right. And I think you, you, you just mentioned this, like a process breakdown. You know, where I think that, you know, people will get sort of, and I use this term a minute ago in the weeds, right? Like it's, it's peak production time. It's, it's the, the height of, of the dinner rush or lunch rush breakfast, whichever, you know, pick your meal. And, you know, people will maybe not take the time to do things in a safe way because they feel it might take a little bit more extra effort or time, whether that's a line cook or that's a kitchen manager, executive chef, fill in the blank. It's up to the leaders in those environments, right. To, to say, wait a second, we have this process. It's one, two, three, four. Right. Don't skip three or don't skip two because that creates a breakdown and those breakdowns that, you know, again, I'll relate all this back to, to what those statistics earlier about illness estimates in the US, right? One in six people, 128,000 hospitalized 3000 deaths. And then the other one in the US, when those processes break down, those are the potential hazards, right? Or the results of significant breakdown in a process. Those are what, that's what happens. And, you know, that can be really, really life changing for those individuals that are involved in a situation like that. Well, I have to tell you, I mean, I'm obviously, I've been in this business a long time. I've found a lot of people who work in kitchens years ago. It's traditionally, I should just say, they didn't use the monitors or anything like that. It was you feel it. Yeah, they, and they knew it was, you know, it was just something that, you know, the repetition and learning and whatnot, you just know when it's done. I think we've gotten to a point where it's changing today. You know, we had a month or so ago, we had Chef Thomas Manzik come into the studio. You know, we were talking about stakes and he brought in a plus nine YQ. And it was nice. Yeah, it was, oh man, it was amazing. Oh man, that's delicious. Right. And we were, we got into this conversation about how, and you know, Aaron actually, one of the testos, you know, Aaron, he was, so he was in studio as well. And the conversation came up and ultimately Chef was like, in our kitchen, everything is, is temp. A thermometer is used each and every time. And it's not just for accuracy, but it's to make sure people don't get hurt. They don't get sick. And I think, I think the whole culture is starting to shift that way. And I think that's a positive thing. I, I mean, I, I agree. I agree completely. I'll challenge anybody. Like if you, if you want to figure out, like, if you like, you know, rare to medium rare, or me, stakes, ask the next time you go somewhere that where you're getting stakes, say, Hey, do you guys take the temperature of the stake? Because if you do, I know the exact temperature I want my the inside of my steak cooked to you say like 118 to 120 degrees. And you will be a very happy camper. There are lots of opportunities in the technology available today is drastically faster and more accurate than, you know, when I was in, you know, when I was in college in the, in the mid to late 90s. This is the things that are available today. I think those are those are part of date. They enable better practices, if you will. I think is, is a is a huge positive. Once you build your protocols and you have your, you know, like a lot of people have their asset plans and, and their processes and their critical control points and they figure out, Hey, like what's what? And, you know, how are we going to tackle these things? I think it's, I think it's natural. It's a natural progression to want to temp check everything because, you know, the fact is temperature abuse is a big deal. You know, and it's not, and I don't think that things are done purposely. It's just a matter of you being the unlucky one. If it happens to you, the data actually, it supports what you're saying, right? Improper molding. If you're not holding hot foods hot and cold foods cold, you run the risk of food not being not being safe for your customer. The better you can put a system, a process with supporting components that help deliver those results, right? Or help you achieve the consistency in, in all of your policies and programs, if you will. That's when you really start to figure things out. And that's what I kind of brought it up like super, super quickly earlier. Like it's engineering risk out of the system or the process. That's something that I've just always tried to do, you know, for the last, you know, 20 plus 25 years in working in food safety. It's like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sit, I'm gonna watch, I'm gonna analyze what's going on here. And then I want to figure out ways to make it easier and safer at the same time. A lot of time comes down to something as simple as a thermometer. It's as simple as that. You know, just temp, temp the meat, you know, for all the different proteins, you know, how many pork dishes, how many chicken dishes, how many beef, you know, just probe it. That's all you have to do. Testo carries all of these products. It's something that, you know, obviously there's going to be links and everything you can find all over Wacken Tuck Media. But at the end of the day, it's simple stuff and it saves people headaches, aggravation, pain, even their lives. Even like one, one step removed, you know, from just actually probing food and taking, you know, individual product temperatures, right? It's knowing that you're holding equipment hot or cold, right? Like if you've got bain-marie's, right, that are holding, you know, soups, casseroles, whatever, or your refrigeration units. It's knowing and ensuring that they're operating at the right temperatures as well. It's a blend of both, you know, pieces of technology at different stages and places within the, you know, the whole, like, culinary creative process, if you will. Well, look, I'll tell you this. This will be my last story for this segment, but a few years ago, we went to, we went, it was a four-star hotel, older place, but nice. I'm not going to name it out. I'm not going to call it out. I knew, I knew when I walked in to the front desk and I saw fruit flies and I'm thinking, wow, that's weird that there's fruit flies here at check-in. And then maybe 50 yards, you know, down the corridor is their dining room, which was open. We got in late, it was like maybe close to midnight, but it was still open. There was still serving some food. So we go in and as soon as we walked in, you know, crossed the threshold into the dining room area, I saw the bar, I saw fruit flies. I was like, oh man, this isn't going to be good. Sure enough. And let me tell you something, but just for the record, I normally, I don't get sick. I have a steel stomach, like I can manage myself really well. So I, you know, I said, all right, you know what, I'm going to have a burger. It's on the menu, I'm going to do it. Sure enough, next day, I got hit. And, you know, I brought up twice on this particular, on this right here now in this segment, two different times where I had some sort of, you know, food bug, stomach bug. Never happens to me. But when it does, I literally, I literally passed out with this one. Yeah, it was bad. I mean, I hit my head. It was, that's so fun. It was brutal. Yeah, it was really, I thought I was having a heart attack or something. My wife, you know, it was a whole, a whole thing, but all this to say, you know, you have to, when you walk into a place to eat, be aware of your surroundings. I always check the bathroom. If it's a dirty bathroom, it's a dirty kitchen, it's the truest, it's the truest saying in the world. Look for fruit flies, look for all those things. And if it is meant, walk out, leave, that's all. Yeah, I don't, I don't like, I don't go to overboard. Like when I go out to eat anymore, but for a long time, my wife wouldn't even join me. Like he just took everything apart. Like it's no fun going out to eat with you. You know, I think you kind of nailed several like key indicators of, you know, like, how do you, how do you know, like where you are dining? If it is safe, reputable, etc. You know, there are certain places in the US where the local regulatory jurisdictions have tried to take some of the guesswork out of that where they are required to actually post their health department rating. Even those places, they could have an A placard in the window. Just keep in mind, that's a spot in time inspection that resulted in that, in that rating that they may or may not have had prior knowledge of it actually taking place. So, being able to like have good judgment, I think goes, goes a long way. It goes, it goes a heck of a long way. All right, Eric, listen, so for our first, first segment here, I think this went pretty well. I'm, I really, I want to start getting a little deeper into, into food safety, man. I think it's going to be cool. I love to get into cross contamination and there's just so many other, there's so many things I think people are going to want to adhere to. So with all that to say, I appreciate your time. I appreciate you hanging out. I love doing this together. How do people find you? Pesto, you can find Testo on Instagram at LinkedIn. It's under just Pesto, North America. If you want to check out my background, see what I'm about, you can look at my LinkedIn profile. It's Eric 4001. Got a lot of stuff there, links and things like that. So feel free to check it out. Carl, this has been awesome. I've had a blast too. I look forward to continuing our conversations and yeah, let's keep it raw. Excellent. One of these days, I'm going to get you down to the studio as well. In the meantime, I'll catch you on Side B and we are out. Thank you.
