They let me back in the country this past Thursday night in Houston. My return is from two weeks of not thinking about food safety while visiting Chile and Argentina.
It’s not easy to put aside Job 1. Nor was my attempt at it entirely successful.
The re-entry line for citizens at the border has…
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” said early-American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
But in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, consistency gets greater appreciation. In its recent evaluation of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service…
The Wisconsin-based Roundy’s Supermarkets Inc. is recalling 16,320 pounds of chili and soup after an employee found plastic materials in a bag of soup, according to a notice posted today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.
The ready-to-eat chili and soup items were produced and packaged on Oct.3 and have …
Increasing demand in the U.S. for year-round access to all foods means more foreign food in grocery stores and that means more foodborne illness outbreaks from imported food.
Writing for the March edition of Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, four researchers take a deep dive into outbreak…
One of my many pleasant memories of Chile is the sunny Sept. 1 lunch served for 350 people in a huge white tent during the “Conference International Berries 2016” held in Talca. Most of the conversation was in Spanish, putting me at a disadvantage. Every few minutes, I was getting some translated summaries from international…
SANTIAGO, CHILE — Chile’s raspberry producers came in for some special attention during a conference for this country’s food exporters. All who were in attendance were provided with a glossy 20-page brochure just produced for raspberry farm workers. It’s one piece in a strategy to rebuild Chile’s place among raspberry exporters. Today, among the top…
TALCA, CHILE — The divided highway south of Santiago quickly gives up what much of this country is about as the fields change from grapes to nuts. Chile’s renewable food industry is an exporting phenomenon for this country of almost 18 million. It has grown up quickly and now equals the country’s historic extractable resource…
How many times has this happened to you? You pack up food to take up to the ski condo so on Sunday morning you can pull out the pancake and waffle mixes to make breakfast without having to go out. After all, the overnight snow has left a foot on the truck and it’s still…
USDA’s Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service has erected new barriers to the entry of Chilean blueberries to the United States. Neither fears about last year’s Cyclosporiasis parasite in fresh produce nor Hepatitis A in berry blends had anything to do with the APHIS action. Instead, it’s the European grapevine moth and its cousins that…
The Chilean chicken recall for dioxin contamination expanded Thursday, with the amount being held at the U.S. border growing from 126,000 to 155,595 pounds. Still, some of the product reached U.S retail shelves. 
According to USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, the total amount of chicken involved in the recall has reached 347,637 pounds, up…
Nearly 200,000 pounds of Chilean chicken is being recalled in the United States for dioxins only because the levels found violate Chile’s domestic limits, according to federal food safety officials. In other words, the 126,000 pounds of chicken currently being held at the border is there only because Chile recalled it, not because the U.S.…
