Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

DEP E75
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Matthew Regusci: One of my kiddos went to China. He's born in the United States. He went to China as well, fell in love with the country. And three of my kids speak Mandarin. I think it'd be awesome to go to China with the kiddos that want to go and just really see what the culture is like and see the people, right? Like we were having this conversation about Beijing news and the government, why they're pushing this article out.

Like what's their motivation. I don't really care about the government. I really want to go to just be with the people, experience the culture, the culture, experience the culture and experience the food too. Like I've been to a lot of different countries and I've eaten a lot of different food, really hard to absorb a culture.

Without eating with them.

intro: Everybody's got to eat and nobody likes getting sick.

That's why heroes toil in the shadows, keeping your food safe at all points from the supply chain to the point of sale. Join industry veterans, Francine L Shaw and Matt Ragusi for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule.

Don't eat poop. Don't eat poop.

Matthew Regusci: Hello. Hello, Francine.

Francine L Shaw: Oi, Matt.

Matthew Regusci: Okay, so I am still recuperating from our lax episode. I don't know how long it's going to take me to recover from discussing heavy metals and contaminants and tampons, but I may need some outside help. You're scarred. Scarred. The absorption rate of that was very heavy on my soul.

Francine L Shaw: You look like you were run over by a steamroller in the perspective we oftentimes because of our schedules being the way they are, we'll record episodes back to back, even though that you're hearing these a week apart. So, we're not a week later and he still looks like he's been,

Matthew Regusci: no, it's only been 23 minutes later, but yeah.

Francine L Shaw: Now, the fact that you have several of your own children and many foster children, 10 children living in your household, and you just had a week long episode of norovirus run through the Rikishi household. And that we just did a podcast on the contamination of tampons that took you out.

Matthew Regusci: Yeah. No problem talking about any other type of bodily fluid at all.

Francine L Shaw: I've never seen you speechless. You really struggled. You just. Struggled with that.

Matthew Regusci: Okay, so China is struggling over a food borne issue, which I find fascinating because I didn't think the population of China really cared much about food safety given their current history and past that hasn't been high on their priority list.

But this is really fascinating. So I don't know if this is okay. First off, there is outrage in China over use of unwashed fuel tankers like petroleum fuel tankers to transport cooking oil. You have petroleum oil fuel tankers. being dumped out at wherever they are, dumping gas and fuel out into whatever type of place they're transporting it to and then dumping it out.

And then they go and they're picking up cooking food oil, like vegetable oil or corn oil or soybean oil, whatever it is, the oil is they're going to cook with peanut oil. What I find fascinating with this article is A food safety scandal has caused mounting public outrage in China days before a high level Chinese Communist Party meeting at which leaders will try to boost confidence in the economy.

Last week, the state run newspaper Beijing News, which I think is funny because Really every newspaper in China is state run, but this one particularly is like the Communist Party newspaper, Beijing News published an in depth expose on the open secret of fuel tankers being used to transport cooking oil without the tankers being washed or disinfected in between.

The report was made by an undercover reporter that found it. The scandal has implicated several major Chinese companies, including state owned oil and grain company, Sinograin, and Hopeful Grain and Oil Group.

Francine L Shaw: They're not very hopeful now.

Matthew Regusci: This week, the Office of Food Safety Commission under China's State Council said that it has been investigating the claims, and that individuals found violating the law through improper use of tanker trucks, We'll face severe punishment when they say severe punishment in China, by the way, they mean it like that.

Melanin in dog food stuff. That dude was hanged like on Chinese news. Because so many food manufacturers stopped buying ingredients, those ingredients from China, that it disrupted that category in China. They hung the dude. Yeah, it's fascinating. And then they go down a little bit more and the news is called widespread outrage in China, where there are deeply rooted fears about food safety after a series of scandals and perceived lack of accountability for rule breakers.

In 2008, six babies died and 300, 000 were sickened by contaminated baby formula. Remember that? I do. In 2013, more than 16, 000 dead pigs were found in a river which supplies Shanghai of drinking water. Last year, images of school canteens Went viral after students found rat's head in his meal. Yummy.

So yeah, first off, we can talk about a couple of things, but one of the things I want to talk about is why is it that the communist party in Beijing news?

is reporting this now right before their meeting. Is this something that they're looking to tackle? Is it something because of how the China economy right now is struggling? Are they trying to clean this mess up because so many companies have stopped buying food ingredients from China? I'll tell you, if I know a food ingredient is purchased from China, I will not buy it.

Because their food safety is absolutely atrocious. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in the United States. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in Latin America, but it's not like ubiquitous, right? There are bad actors and there are people who don't really know. 100 percent what's going on within their organizations in the United States.

I think the same in South America, in China, like they are maliciously adding ingredients and chemicals to change the formulation of how it is tested. In order to get more money. Like the food fraud is so bad in China and they really don't even care. Like they don't care how many people they kill. Like it's so bad.

And I'm saying this, by the way, I have nothing against Chinese people for my kids are like, I absolutely love Chinese people, but the Chinese government and the Chinese food safety, I just don't trust it at all. I think this is fascinating that the government is posting this out for the world to see, I just want to know what their intent is.

What are your thoughts?

Francine L Shaw: I don't know. Clearly they didn't mind that it got out because if they did, we wouldn't be seeing it.

Matthew Regusci: They wanted to get out. Yeah.

Francine L Shaw: So there's a reason, whatever that is.

Matthew Regusci: Do you think that this is going to change anything because they have way more control over certain things than us in the United States or almost any other country could have like their exports, if they were tighten the screw on food exporting companies that go to Europe, that go to Japan, that go to Singapore, that go to the United States.

First world countries that actually care about food safety. If they tighten the lid on that, they could get their food safety like overnight up and going.

Francine L Shaw: I was just going to say, if they wanted to control it, they could control things much quicker than we can

Matthew Regusci: 100 percent

Francine L Shaw: of the ability, much more easily than what we do in the United States.

Because it's a communist country. Yeah. So they would have that control much quicker and much more easily than what we do here. They choose not to it's a choice that they have made. So I don't know what their reasoning behind that would be.

My God, how did that happen? It happened because somebody did it, but how did they allow it to happen?

That oil?

Matthew Regusci: Yeah, so my guess is how it happened would be the same way it would happen in the United States or any other country is these huge national corporations. that are creating this cooking oil was out bidding for trucking and transportation and they went with the lowest bidder and they don't care how those trucks are used beforehand.

They're not doing any type of real risk analysis on what those trucks are.

Francine L Shaw: Logistically, wouldn't you look to see what they were using their tankers to haul prior to your

Matthew Regusci: They could not pass a GFSI audit without checking. Yeah, they're supposed to be checking. They're supposed to have checks that make sure that the trucks are clean, the trucks are sanitized, all that stuff.

They have a cleaning log, blah, blah, blah. But that's obviously not happening. So, and I don't know, are there government contracts that are coming up? And, you know, The communist government is looking to make these guys look bad so that it's easier for them to take these contracts away and hand them off to somebody else.

Because really, truly, we talk about it being a communist government, but really it's an oligarchy. I wouldn't, yeah, I guess you could say it's an oligarchy. It's aristocratic oligarchy that now currently has a dictatorship, right? So Xi Jinping is a dictator. Communist party underneath him is the Aristocratic oligarchy.

I say aristocratic because it's Han Chinese. So it's not just an oligarchy. They say that their philosophy is communism, but really that's what it is, right? They're run as a, as this. So the other thing that could be happening is these guys that run these food companies have gone out of favor with the oligarchy.

And now they're looking to pull these guys out, hang them, which they'll probably do. They'll disappear someday. And then we won't ever see them again, or maybe we'll see them four months later and they don't remember their name or anything like that. And then they'll put in their new cronies that are going to run this company.

And probably no changes may even happen. They could still be providing these tankers of soybean oil in petroleum tankers. And nothing changes, but it's a way of, it's a pawn. So I don't know. That's why I'm curious. Are they really cracking down on food safety or is this just some sort of communist ploy before their big meeting at which the oligarchy swaps out different cronies?

So how we would tell the difference is if there are a couple more like these in different industries, that some undercover reporter quote unquote for Beijing News shows they're providing the equivalent of melanin to increase protein in animal feed in Beijing for pigs. And so now there's a problem with their pork or there's some sort of pesticide that shouldn't be or heavy metals and apples or stuff like that.

So their apple juice concentrate that they send over everywhere is super high. If they show a series more of these attacking a couple more industries. I can be like, oh, maybe they are trying to change food safety, but I don't know, but

Francine L Shaw: no, I guess I would agree if it's they start finding or reporting on other random issues as well, then it would show that there's a consistency.

But if it's a 1 off. Then it doesn't seem to be quite as sincere.

Matthew Regusci: Oh, so one of the things that I'd be interested in is, can you imagine doing like really having food safety practices and going in and doing a bunch of audits in China? Like really being able to do audits in China and see just, is it really as bad as we think it is?

Or is it better? Or is it,

Francine L Shaw: do you know anybody that's ever eaten there?

Matthew Regusci: Yeah.

Francine L Shaw: How many of them have gotten sick?

Matthew Regusci: Oh, every one of them, every one of them. So I have a story of this when I was out, I was like 15 years ago, I was doing a huge project for Cisco foods and one of their head guys at food safety, Cisco foods, by the way, has a lot of people in their food safety department, like a lot of people, one of their top guys goes to China to do his own audits on a bunch of different stuff for Cisco.

So Cisco isn't just. Food, right? They sell silverware, they sell toilet paper, they sell everything. They're a broad liner for restaurants. So they get a lot of products from China. So he was out checking up a bunch of different plants and he was there for, well in China, the big companies, they take you out to eat and all that stuff.

Well, they wanted to take This guy out to eat at the best restaurants in whatever city that these manufacturers were from. And so in China, a lot of the best restaurants have, I guess he was saying, there's like a zoo basically in the restaurant because they want to show that the food is super fresh.

They're slaughtering the animal right there when you come in, so it's super fresh. So he's, look, obviously we don't have this in the United States, right? Like you don't, not often. Some seafood places will have live tanks or whatever, but it's not like you're walking in and you see a chicken. So he's looking at all these different animals because there's a ton of different interesting animals like monkeys, like snails, lizards, snakes.

all these different types of animals in there. So he's intrigued at the animals. So he's looking at them. Well, in the Chinese culture, I say this broadly, but China has a ton of different cultures. It's like the United going to South versus multiple regions in Pennsylvania, like Pennsylvania itself has 14 cultures.

So I say this broadly, but they are much more Attuned to body language, you may say, right? So if you are observing something, then they think that's what you want to eat. So he's looking at all these very unique animals that we may not have in the United States and he's intrigued by them and he's really asking questions and all that stuff.

Well, they think that's what he wants to eat. So he's got a monkey one day. So then I'm really intrigued to this because I'm in my early 20s, mid twenties, and this is just fascinating to me. learning about all these different cultures and all that stuff. And I said, so what did you do after that? It took me like a few days to realize that's what they were doing.

They're buying the animals that I was looking at. I said, so what did you do after like the third day? I just started staring at the chicken. I walk in the restaurants. I'd find the one animal that I wanted to eat. And I just stare at the whole entire time. So there you go.

Francine L Shaw: I would be walking in with my eyes shut, just asli.

I scoped out like the beef or the chicken. .

Matthew Regusci: Be looking at this big cow. We'll take that.

Francine L Shaw: I look at a monkey, all my heavens, I'd be devastated.

Matthew Regusci: Indiana Jones movie where like an eyeball pops up in the guy's soup and. They have like the monkey head and they pop off the top of the skull and they're like, monkey brains.

No, that's a winner. Have you ever been to

Francine L Shaw: China? I

Matthew Regusci: haven't either. I want to though. I want to go to a bed. I'd love to go take my kiddos with us. But two of my kids are Chinese, but they're half Chinese, half Korean. They were born in the United States and we adopted them from the United States. Other two kiddos.

We're in orphanages in China. One of them moved over when he was like five years old, six years old. He has no desire to ever go back to China. His experience there was so terrible in the orphanage that he has no desire to go back there. One of my kiddos went to China. He's born in the United States. He went to China as well, fell in love with the country and three of my kids speak Mandarin.

I think it'd be awesome to go to China with my kids. The kiddos that want to go and just really see what the culture is like and see the people right like we were having this conversation about Beijing news and the government why they're pushing this article out like what's their motivation I don't really care about the government I really want to go to just be with the people experience the culture the culture to experience the culture.

And experience the food too. Like I've been to a lot of different countries and I've eaten a lot of different food. Really hard to absorb a culture without eating with them. It is really hard to do because food is so much of what people do and how people live.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah. I would love to go. I've been to Europe.

I've been

Matthew Regusci: to almost every country in South America in the Western Hemisphere, but I've never been outside of that. I love absolutely love every single culture. I've been in South. I haven't been to Venezuela, but I think I would fall in love with people in Venezuela to every single place I've been. I try to just absorb myself into the culture, try to understand their cadence.

I may not be able to speak the language. understand the cadence of how they speak, which actually really is helpful in communicating too. Cause a lot of times if I get to learn their cadence, I can learn what they're saying to me when they say it in English. It's just fun. People are fun, but this is sad.

This is what we're talking about here with cooking oil being mixed with petroleum Lordi, the amount of heavy metals and nastiness that's in that, that people are consuming. If this is what they're eating every single day, then their lifespan is not going to be very long.

Francine L Shaw: Does it say whether or not that they recalled that they disposed?

Matthew Regusci: It's just an expose.

Francine L Shaw: This is another thing. While it's an expose and it was reported, was it reported within China or only outside of China?

Matthew Regusci: Nope, within China. It's an outrage of the food safety scandal within China.

Francine L Shaw: Is the reporter still alive?

Matthew Regusci: The reporter could not have done this article without the CCP's blessing.

Francine L Shaw: So do you remember there was a, there was something done a few years ago I can't remember what it was about, but the reporter ended up disappearing. It wasn't

Matthew Regusci: published in Beijing news, though.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah, that was published within China. I can't remember where it was published, but the reporter ended up disappearing.

Matthew Regusci: Yeah, it would be impossible for this reporter to have written this article and written it. In Beijing news platform without the CCP's blessing. It is their newspaper.

Francine L Shaw: Right? I think what I'm talking about might have had to do with COVID.

Matthew Regusci: Yeah. So, in fact, here's a paragraph in this investigations into consumer and public health issues.

used to be relatively common in Chinese media, but in the past decade, space for independent reporting has been dramatically squeezed and the CCP maintains a tight grip on what kind of information can be published. Yeah. So they wanted this to get out. So why is it really for food safety? We shall find out.

Francine L Shaw: And then there's things that weren't published in that article as well. They only published what they wanted us to know.

Matthew Regusci: Yeah. What they wanted their people to know. The world, you know, well, there you go. All right. Do you have a myth for us today? Francine?

Francine L Shaw: And that's been a fact Do you have any idea how many diseases are spread through food?

Do you know what the number is? I'm not trying to put you on the spot because I don't know. I have no clue. I said we don't know everything. Believe it or not. No. Between the two of us, we talk about a lot, but we don't know everything.

Matthew Regusci: Don't tell my children that. I'm all knowing, all seeing. No, they know I'm definitely valuable.

Okay. I would assume somewhere in the hundreds, one to 200 ish.

Francine L Shaw: More than 200 diseases are spread through food. I bet the average person would be shocked to know that because we only really talk about the big six. There are six that we talk about on the retail side because they're the most prevalent right in the retail side of things in general.

I think there's probably maybe 10 that we talk about regularly more than 200 diseases are spread through food. That's a lot. I think the average person would be really surprised to know that millions of people fall ill every year and many die as a result of eating unsafe food. Diarrheal diseases alone kill an estimated 1.

5 million children annually. 1. 5 million children die every year. Because of these illnesses and contaminated food or drinking water is abnormal and 100 percent unnecessary.

Matthew Regusci: Yeah, and I bet the majority of that comes from drinking water. The contamination of Yes. The majority of it

Francine L Shaw: These illnesses are attributed to contaminated drinking water.

Matthew Regusci: Yes. And it's because if you start adding parasites, You start adding like certain toxins you can get from bacteria. It adds up pretty quick. And that's why the drinking water is really bad because a lot of that is just prevalent in the drinking water. So sad.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah. And so many areas don't safe drinking water.

Matthew Regusci: Can you imagine as a parent, I know just think about this, like. A hundred years ago, even in the United States, late 1800s, early 1900s, people were still having 10 kids and only like five or two, three survived, right? And the majority of the reasons why those children died was because of these types of diseases.

Francine L Shaw: Well, most people assume that everybody has public drinking water, even in the United States. And that's not true. When you live in a very rural area, many of us have wells. And I live in an area where cisterns are still common. There's a lot of spring water. There's a lot of cisterns. I was in a house a couple of years ago where I asked them where their well was.

The well was in the middle of the living room. The house had been built around the well, literally around the well.

Matthew Regusci: That makes sense.

Francine L Shaw: You had to pull up a rug in the living room and there was a square. You lifted that up and the well cap was under the floor in the living room. I had trouble selling that house.

Because no one wanted to finance it because it was such a unique situation. Now, there was nothing wrong with it. Very rural area. The guy that had owned the house was an engineer and was just very creative in the way he designed the house. And you wouldn't even know it was there in the middle of the living room.

One of the most unique situations I've seen. Other places they're under the back porch when people built around these, but I have a well. You just, not your farmland. You make sure you get it tested.

Matthew Regusci: Does your well get pumped to a tower and then come into your house or are you just pumping? Direct from the well.

Direct from the well. Yeah. So my old house in California, we shared a water tower with Five of my neighbors and we had a well and the well pumped up to the water tower and then was distributed gravity flow to it was pumped as well, but also gravity flow down to each of the neighbors.

Francine L Shaw: That's like a community system where everybody's sharing that system.

Most people in this area have like, private wells on their own property with. We have our private wells.

Matthew Regusci: We had an E. coli issue with our well, and the person who maintained the well, the company that maintained the well, tested for generic E. coli every, and we had a spike in generic E. coli, a pretty high spike in generic E.

coli. And so then he's all, we're just going to shock the well. And I said, okay, well, when you shock the well, I want to do another test in, in a month. And he's like, well, all we have to do is shock the well. I said, well, why is there E. coli in the well? And then I said, second thing is I want to test for pathogenic E.

coli, not just generic E. coli. And he's like, well, why would you want to know that? And I was like, dude, you may have a lot of customers that don't care. I understand if there is E. coli in here, there's a reason why E. coli is here. I want to know, one, why is there E. coli in there? And two, what type of E. coli in there?

And in shocking the well, You don't do that once a year, and then you're just good if the problem is there. We found that the problem was like a crack in the tower that we were able to then line and fix, and it was pretty expensive to do. But I want to know, was it coming from the piping? Was it coming from, where was this issue?

Francine L Shaw: I always told people, make sure that you get the water test. Always get the water test if you have a well. But it's not uncommon to find coliform or E. coli in the well. And again, we know way more about this than most homeowners or buyers would, but my husband and I have a water treatment system. We get the water tested once a year, but again, most people don't, they get it tested when they buy and they never test it again.

Matthew Regusci: If they get tested, then it's, Oh, we just shock it. Everything should be fine. And people like, Oh, okay, but no, there's an issue. Where's the issue? What is the issue? And so that's why I was curious with is an ongoing systemic or no.

Francine L Shaw: And you know, sometimes you're surrounded by. Farmland where it's some of it's.

How's it getting in there? Why is it getting in there? Yeah. How do you fix that problem? The house has just sat for a really long time and

Matthew Regusci: right? Yeah. So if it's, yeah, and the water hasn't been used and circulated and all that stuff. Yeah,

Francine L Shaw: types of bacteria, different types of.

What not but yeah, so wow, we went way off track there Well, that was very interesting fact, but it's not really that we're talking about different types of bacteria

Matthew Regusci: That's not saying it was very interesting fact about how many contaminants there are.

Yeah, I fit perfectly with this Chinese Article because lordy I can only just imagine they probably have all 200 of them On a daily basis, like their population is like immune to this by now, which is why like us as Americans, when we go to different countries and we eat and drink the water and stuff like that, like we're, our system is not used to it anymore.

Francine L Shaw: Well, and some people have a higher tolerance to those things than others do. And some people are just going to get sick because your immune system can't handle it.

Matthew Regusci: We're so blessed, Francine. We very much are. All right. With that note, don't eat poop.

Francine L Shaw: I'm sorry. I keep going back to our last podcast.

Matthew Regusci: Don't eat tampons either.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah, no tampons. No poop.