Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

DEP E136
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[00:00:00]

Alex O'Brien: I like to tell people whenever you're looking for this stuff, have a wide net. So I like to test for listeria species, so that indicates that listeria might be there. I think if you're finding that between one and 2% of the time in your plant, that's pretty reasonable because as you said it, it's like it's everywhere.

It's everywhere out outside in the soil. And what I really look for is when you're going inside of a plant, right, you have plant controlled shoes. I had one guy in maintenance once, that he had a hobby farm, and he brought in his shoes from the hobby farm and there was like cow manure on the bottom. And he's working in the maintenance area.

And obviously as a young quality supervisor at the time, I'm like, I look down, I'm like, oh, that's, we can't have that, right? So.

Matt Regusci: You're like, you're like, oh crap. Literally.

Alex O'Brien: Literally, you have crap on your shoes.[00:01:00]

intro: Everybody's gotta 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 Regus for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule. Don't.

Eat poop. Don't eat poop.

Matt Regusci: Hello? Hello, Francine. Hey Matt. Hey.

We have a special guest today. Alex O'Brien. What are you? The Wisconsin cheese food safety guy.

Alex O'Brien: Yeah. I couldn't have said it any better myself.

Matt Regusci: Are you a cheese head? Alex? Do you wear one of those cheese?

Alex O'Brien: Absolutely. I was born and raised here. My dad actually got season tickets after waiting 25 years, so.

I'm the most Wisconsin night there ever was. No, I'm just kidding. But yeah, I've been in Wisconsin for pretty much my whole life. [00:02:00] Went away into Minnesota for a little bit, but gotta come back. Yeah.

Matt Regusci: Gosh. All the way to Minnesota from Wisconsin.

Alex O'Brien: I know. So far away from home.

Matt Regusci: So far away. Did that make your accent any anymore "don't you know- ish?" Yeah, there was.

Alex O'Brien: We made a lot of totes.

The pronunciation, the old, yeah. You come back, you're like, wow. I'm definitely, I got the accent. Just gonna embrace it.

Matt Regusci: So Coke or pop man or Orange

Alex O'Brien: Pop or soda pop. Soda pop.

Matt Regusci: Soda pop. Okay.

So we have you on tell us a little bit about yourself and what is it you do.

Alex O'Brien: Oh man. So I wear a lot of different hats. I work at the Center for Dairy Research here in Madison, Wisconsin, part of the University of Wisconsin. And basically I do lots of different things. I'm an auditor, so I audit very small cheese plants and sometimes their butter or yogurt production plants, anything really dairy.

I also help write some guidances and help [00:03:00] out with interpretation of regulations. We also have a brand new, within the past three years, $72 million addition to the Babcock Hall, and that's where we do all sorts of different research. So I help with implementing the quality systems there at our research facility.

Then I also help create short courses. So there's many people out in the industry, right? Maybe you go to college and get a food science degree or something, or biology. But on the job training, we also have just short courses that talk about, we have an advanced sanitation course and environmental monitoring and preventive controls, qualified individual courses.

So, there's lots of different things. I get questions across the state and across the nation too for dairy related questions. I get all these weird questions like, Hey, if I'm dipping my cheese in beer, do I have to declare the alcohol content or. Hey, is this going to be safe? I've got cheddar out on [00:04:00] display, not in refrigeration temperatures. Am I gonna kill someone or is that a legal thing that I can do for display cheeses?

So I get lots of random questions and I don't always know the answer, but I know a lot of people that do.

Matt Regusci: That's awesome.

I mean that not spending time in Wisconsin, but not ever living in Wisconsin. I couldn't think of a more Wisconsin questions than what do I do with cheese and beer?

Alex O'Brien: What do I do that, oh man, it's great.

Matt Regusci: You eat it and you drink it and then you can light 'em together. Comes another thing.

Alex O'Brien: The one another and make.

Francine L Shaw: Cheesy beer.

Alex O'Brien: Yes. Yeah. Or you make alcohol with the whey you can distill that. It's, uh, pretty crazy.

Francine L Shaw: I wanna talk about leaving cheese out at room temperature, and I'm gonna tell you why.

Yeah. When I was a kid, my grandmother had a country store, and I've written about this in I don't know how many articles over the years, and [00:05:00] she would leave her cheese out on the counter. They never refrigerated it. To this day, that is the best cheese I've ever eaten.

Even knowing what I know and doing what I do for a living. That cheese was always in a constant state of semi-mush, for a lack of a better word. It was really soft. Like the whole what? 10 pound log.

Alex O'Brien: Oh wow. That's a big log.

Francine L Shaw: Oh yeah. It was like a commercial log of cheese. It was huge. And I can re, I have a scar on my finger. We would go up and.

We're talking. I was six years old probably.

We would take that cleaver and whack off a piece of that cheese.

Yeah, we're real food safety stuff here and eat the cheese. Kids chopping off a slice of cheese. No gloves, didn't wash our hands on shore. Same stuff the customers were buying. Forget all the other stuff I said, but as far as not being [00:06:00] refrigerated.

Alex O'Brien: Yeah. So I like to say, I sound really smart when I say this. I'm like, it depends. Just the most scientific thing.

Matt Regusci: No, it's the most insulting answer ever, too.

Francine L Shaw: Longhorn, cheddar. Longhorn, and Cheddar.

Alex O'Brien: Yeah. Yeah. And so I like to look at, so cheese is a spectrum of different varieties, right? And I like to go with, there's not just one factor that makes cheese safe.

There's multiple different things and we like to call that hurdle technology, right? So with cheese, especially things like cheddar, right? So standard of identity, you wanna make sure that really the lower the moisture there is the less available moisture or water activity that pathogens can utilize to grow.

That's one different aspect. You got the salt content that can be inhibitive of growth and I'd say probably one of the biggest factors though is going to be whether it [00:07:00] has lactic acid cultures, right? Where you've got bacteria that you're intentionally putting in there and they eat that lactose. They actually are like, we want more of us.

We're gonna make things and outcompete other pathogens in there. I think that's a really big thing as the lactic acid cultures. What's the pH of that? The more acidic, right? That is the less that pathogens really like to grow there. And then obviously I like to start from the top is like, how good is your milk going into that cheese?

Right. So I'm a huge proponent of either thermalization or pasteurization, and some people are like, thi what I've heard of pasteurization before. What is thermalization? There's not a regulatory definition for it, but it's basically heating that cheese melt that you're gonna make cheese with to temperatures below pasteurization that are a little gentler that keeps some of those other bacteria that [00:08:00] would be destroyed or killed in pasteurization, but.

Really when I get down to brass tacks, what's that moisture content? Do you have lactic acid cultures? What's your salt content? Is it pasteurized, thermized, or some sort of heat treatment or some treatment room pathogens? And what's the pH? So.

Matt Regusci: So, just basic food safety.

Alex O'Brien: Basic food safety stuff, so.

Matt Regusci: So like a Parmesan cheese on the counter is going to be very different than a farmer's cheese or a soft cheese. Yes. On the counter over a period of time.

Alex O'Brien: Absolutely. And I would say, 'cause with a parm, the older, that gets like some of that graded parm, right? That can be a water activity of 0.75. Basically it was like, how bound is that water and the water activity, if it's like 0.92 or or lower. That's really helpful.

When trying to reduce a, if there's salmonella or listeria in there, it'll basically either [00:09:00] keep it static or it'll have a log reduction. That's why you have that 60 day aging rule with raw milk cheeses is it reduces that when it's ripening.

Matt Regusci: Got it.

Francine L Shaw: So typically hard cheeses don't have the high water activity, correct?

Alex O'Brien: Yep. You got it. Correct? Yep. Okay. Less moisture. More butter.

Matt Regusci: And so then with the lactic bacteria that you're talking about, al competing. So it's designed, it wants to live in those areas. It wants to live. Where the pathogens don't. Right. And so you could have a pathogen, but they're just going to die out because, so you could take like a PCR machine and potentially find, yeah.

Pathogen proteins that had been in the milk before it was processed, but through the cheese making process, if you kill 99.9% of the salmonella or e coli or listeria that is in there through the cheese making process, then anything that did survive is just gonna get out [00:10:00] competed by the bacteria. That is the environment it wants to live in.

Alex O'Brien: That's the idea. Yep. And I.

That's why it's so important to have high quality milk coming in. 'cause if you get crappy milk and there's high levels of.

Matt Regusci: When we say crappy milk, we literally mean milk with crap in it, by the way.

Alex O'Brien: Yes. That's, yeah.

Francine L Shaw: You know, don't eat poop.

Matt Regusci: Yep, don't do it.

Alex O'Brien: Well. Yeah. Have you guys ever been in a milk parlor before?

Matt Regusci: Yeah, I grew up in dairy.

Alex O'Brien: You're milking the cows and you're like, oh. Bessie's taking a dump right now. I gotta get outta the way, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't deal with sterile things, right? But whenever you're bringing that inside of a dairy plant, right, you gotta make sure that it's got the right somatic cell count, which is basically, hey, that's a number that just tells you how active their immune system is and is.

If that number is high, it's like, oh, now you've got. Mastitis or some sort of infection going on. We don't want that milk or standard plate counts. How, what amount of bacteria are actually in [00:11:00] that milk? So like the lower that number right, the less bacteria you gotta kill and the less even enzymes that break down fat like lipolysis, we like to call that you can have a degradation of that milk at that point.

So the clearer the milk, the better your cheese product is gonna be.

Matt Regusci: When he was, when Alex, you were talking about, oh, step back. So it's just for those who don't know when cows will actually line themselves up, they know when they need to get milked. Yeah. And any woman who's breastfed will know that too. It hurts.

It gets to a point at which I need to get milked, and so they'll line themselves up. It's not like people are prodding these cows to go in there. And also a lot of times these cows are fed grain and molasses and different types of stuff. It's like getting milked is a pleasure in multiple different ways. Both eating wise and relief.

Francine L Shaw: Can I tell you that I never thought, Hey, I need to get milked.

Matt Regusci: Oh man.

Francine L Shaw: Just wanna put that out there.

Matt Regusci: She's, my wife is like a milk producing factory.

Francine L Shaw: I never thought, Hey, I [00:12:00] need to get milked. We're like, it's time for my children to eat. And usually they're screaming, mom, it's time to feed me. I throw that out there. Representing the moms out there.

Matt Regusci: Anyway. Yes. But while they're being milked, so they're lined up, they come into the milk barn, and then they're putting iodine on the udders, and then they're putting these suction things on and there's four suction things per cow, and they.

Alex O'Brien: Looks like an octopus.

Matt Regusci: Yes. It's exactly what that looks like.

I'm not an octopus unless you're like old school just actually milking the cow. That takes forever. But they just split those things on and then a lot of times the cows will poop or pee in the milk barn. Yeah. While they're being milked. And so when I talk about, 'cause I've talked a lot of shows about this, but you, it's raw milk.

You, it's so hard for pathogens not to be in there [00:13:00] because literally the udders are right below where they urinate and where they poop. It's like right there, it's like.

Alex O'Brien: Right there. Yeah, right there. So, but yeah, that's, it's that milk, right? It's all about the quality of that milk when you, you know, if it's high in pathogens or high in like somatic cell count or lots of different bacteria if they're hanging out in there, that makes your pasteurizer work harder.

Obviously it makes those other steps later when you're making that cheese, makes those steps work harder.

So it all starts with the quality of the milk. And then once you get past that point and you pasteurize it, right? Most of the recalls and outbreaks for pasteurized products, it's gonna be what we call cross-contamination from the environment.

Listeria Monocytogenes is like one of the top three reasons for recalls in the United States over the past 20 years, and especially with dairy, because listeria can grow like at refrigeration temperatures, right? And it loves wet environments. And that is a cheese plant, right?

We got [00:14:00] coolers, we're putting stuff in. You're dealing with milk, which is 87% water. And you're basically concentrating the protein and the whey you know that leaves that. And then you've got curd, which has got lots of fat, that casein protein, and then depending on the cheese variety, and you're gonna press out whatever water content you want.

And when you're talking about that, log on the counter right now, if that was a queso fresco type cheese, that's what the FDA now. Considers that, they call it QFTCs, like another acronym guys, come on. But that's got like 50% moisture typically. So lots of water for the bacteria that are there. There's also a lot of times no competitive cultures, so that's where it's like, well, the main control is making sure your equipment's clean and after pasteurization, is it clean and are you storing [00:15:00] that as cold as possible. I liked it from the retail standard, 41 degrees and less. That's great. Some of the pasteurized milk ordinance and state regulations usually say less than 45 ger.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. Queso fresco. You could also just put that into Parmesan cheese or like fresh mozzarella cheese or like queso fresco is a particular type of cheese, but some of those other types are very similar in moisture content. Correct.

Alex O'Brien: So, yeah, and that's where it all depends on the aging of it and whether it's pressed, right? The more you press initially, the more water that gets expelled or removed, right? So like with some of these just have higher water content. I'd say queso fresco, that's gonna be around 50 ish percent moisture, or could be higher than that, where your cheddars and your, and that's gonna be like less than 39% moisture. So that's quite a [00:16:00] difference. Significant difference.

So yeah, like basically the dryer, that cheese, right? It's either because you're pressing it during the cheese make process or you're putting it in a ripening room. It's

Matt Regusci: Or a combo of the two.

Alex O'Brien: Yeah. Or a combo of the two. And over time there's one person we help out with a, uh, world cheese contest that Wisconsin Cheesemakers Association hosts every year.

Great competition, but basically there's one person that submitted, they're like, yeah, I've got a 40-year-old cheddar I wanna submit. I'm like, oh my gosh, it's gonna be a rock hard. The moisture over that time is eventually leaving. I don't know what the final moisture content of that was. The younger that cheese is the, the higher that moisture is typically.

Matt Regusci: Wow.

Francine L Shaw: I have a friend several years ago that works in the industry. She went to Europe and she ate Oh sure, cheese. [00:17:00] And the cheese was amazing. And she continued to eat this cheese for two weeks and just not even thinking cheese was, yeah, really good. And when you go to another country, people watch other individuals that live there around them who are acclimated to their surroundings.

And when children. Mexico people who live there drinking the water and they're fine. We're gonna get sick. So she's eating this cheese and she came home. She was so sick because the cheese.

Alex O'Brien: Oh, really?

Francine L Shaw: She was eating wasn't pasteurized.

Alex O'Brien: Oh yeah.

Francine L Shaw: And she got incredibly ill from eating the unpasteurized cheese because everything in our country is, for the most part, very processed and very pasturized. Again, for the most part.

Mm-hmm.

She got incredibly ill and she said, I know better, but she said so good. What was it worth?

Alex O'Brien: How much cheese did [00:18:00] she eat?

Francine L Shaw: I don't. I know it doesn't take that much. I like cheese. I can eat a cheese. My son's wife, she was his girlfriend at the time. We went out in the lake in a boat when they were first dating.

We took cheese with us on the boat and she still laughed. She's like, I have never seen people eat that much cheese in my entire life. We like cheese.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. Growing up Swiss Italian man, like everything is a charcuterie board. Everything. Like a birthday party, charcuterie board. Going to the Lake Charcuterie board.

Alex O'Brien: Yeah. You are that guy now, like when you start doing that, you're the charcuterie guy. And if you don't show up at the party with that, you're like, where's the sausage? Where's the cheese? Man? That's a hard burden to carry.

Matt Regusci: So you brought up a really interesting point, is that Listeria being like in every facility. We talk about [00:19:00] this all the time, like Listeria is almost everywhere.

And in a cheese place is gonna be there. So when you're doing audits, and you were talking with us before the show that you help companies and you perform like Good Manufacturing Practice and HACCP audits and consulting and that type of stuff. Yep. When you're over there, how much of an emphasis then is on the environmental monitoring plan and how much are these smaller niche cheese making plants, how much do they understand how big of a risk that is?

Alex O'Brien: I love that question. And so. Man it, the culture over the past 15 years has really changed, I'd say. In at least a small artisan context, at least from the dairy industry, but even big players, right? Basically we, when I teach this course, I say, if you don't find it in your environmental monitoring plan on any of the floors or any of those non-food contact surfaces, you're probably not looking hard enough for it.

Matt Regusci: Right.

Alex O'Brien: Now, I [00:20:00] like to give at least some boundaries to this, right? So if you're finding it in your environment more than 10% of the time you have a problem, right? So I like to emphasize that you want to find it, but if it's so prevalent and you keep finding it in the same spot, you can't figure it out then it's a problem.

I've got. I love, there's two different stories that I absolutely love sharing because we learn really our best from our mistakes. Unfortunately, I like to learn from other people's mistakes instead of my own. So there was a small plant in, I think New Jersey, I think it was called El Abuelito. This is all public information.

If you take a look at that warning letter, they didn't have much of any prerequisite programs or anything. But FDA came in and they swabbed zone two, zone three, zone four surfaces. For those who don't know that is it's, you know how close that is to like food contact. So zone one would [00:21:00] be food contact, but they swabbed pretty much everything but those food contact surfaces.

They found other species of listeria that weren't the pathogenic monocytogenes, but they found Listeria innocua, listeria grayi, listeria. I don't think they found welshimeri, but they found two different ones and they found it on a panel or something really close to a food contact surface or what we call a zone two.

And then, well, FDA obviously gave them a warning letter for that. But literally seven to eight months later they had an outbreak. Hmm. They're like, well, you didn't find Listeria monocytogenes on any of those surfaces, but we found some of those other species. So I like to tell people, whenever you're looking for this stuff have a wide net.

So I like to test for listeria species, so that indicates that listeria might be there. I think if you're finding that between one and 2% of the time in your plant, that's pretty reasonable because as you said it, [00:22:00] it's like it's everywhere. It's everywhere outside, and the soil.

And what I really look for is when you're going inside of a plant, right?

You have plant controlled shoes. I had one guy in maintenance once, that he had a hobby farm, and he brought in his shoes from the hobby farm and there was like cow manure on the bottom. And he's working in the maintenance area. And obviously as a young quality supervisor at the time, I'm like, I look down, I'm like, oh, that's, we can't add that, right?

Matt Regusci: So you're like, you're like, oh crap. Literally.

Alex O'Brien: Literally, you have crap on your shoes. So obviously that was an uncomfortable conversation, but we have those plant controlled shoes, so it's like you can't clean, you know, or sanitize a dirty surface. So we start with having those plant controlled shoes. And then once you get into the plant, you have some sort of sanitizer when you walk in to sanitize your shoes, whether it be like a foam.

Some people like [00:23:00] step into like a little foot bath or I've seen like beads, little sanitizer beads. Each one of them has, everything has pros and cons to each one of them. That's kinda like your hygienic zoning, your lines of defense. It's, I'm not gonna even let this stuff in.

And then once you have that under control, it's like, well, you wanna see is this listeria, like inside walls, inside of drains?

I've seen it before. I like to treat it like a CSI investigation. A lot of times people are like, oh, I found listeria in a drain.

Oh man, I'm just gonna clean the drain and call it a day. It's like the drain if everything's designed properly in your plant, right? It's like everything in that room should fall from the walls, Floors should all go to the drain.

So the drain is just like the indicator, it's just the catchall, right? There's sometimes you can have drain backups or whatever, but. Say 80% of the time it's actually we found, well, we have a hollow leg or like for production equipment, or [00:24:00] have you checked the wall?

There's like, I had one time where there was a roof leak and we couldn't figure, like we had a listeria positive in a drain. I'm like, oh. My manager at the time was like, oh, it's just a drain, like listeria lives and drains. I'm like, well, where'd he come from? We looked at, we're like, but I'm a visual guy. I put it on a map like, so where's everyone going?

Where's everyone stepping? Where's all the wheels going? And we're like, wow, it's following a path. And then we followed that path and I looked up and there was like a roof leak that no one saw, and it was going down the side of the wall and the forklift was like going over that puddle. So I like to say it's, for the most part, we call it seek and destroy. We wanna find it.

But if you find it like, man, over 10% of the time, that means it's made a home and it's trying to stay there. So that's at least my thought on that.

There's probably one other scenario. There was a big manufacturer that had an outbreak and they looked at the data and they had [00:25:00] 82 salmonella positive in their environment over I think a two or three year period.

They were actually vector swabbing, which means they're like, okay, we have it here. We're gonna swab all the way around this room, see where it's coming from. And they had like 32 vector swab positives, but they couldn't find what the root cause was. And then they ended up having an outbreak. And I don't believe that plant is open right now.

There's varying levels, I like to say you gotta find it, but really what the FDA cares about is they want you to find it. But they want to make sure you know what's causing it. Yeah. What's the story? It's basically story time. Yeah. Explain what happened.

Matt Regusci: Working with like food safety people over the last 20 years, I've boiled it down into like four different types of food safety people, right?

The first are like the food safety document people, right? That's like your baby food safety people. Those are the people that understand, yep, okay. Here's the where what I'm supposed to do. Mm-hmm. [00:26:00] This is how I'm supposed to make sure that it gets done. And so it's like a food safety secretary.

Some of the best food safety people in the beginning were food safety sec. Were like secretaries. They're like executive assistant, the CEO. And the CEO is like, Hey, I need to do this food safety thing. I have no clue. I'm gonna find the person who, one, everybody's afraid of. And two is the thing that she works with people all day, or he works a paper all day and can handle this, right.

When I first started, that was the people that were doing food safety and it worked because at least it was getting, the basic checklist was being done. Right.

Going up a step from that is really understanding what the potential risks can be in the facility. Mm-hmm. And then figuring out how do I put things in place to minimize those risks.

The third level up I think are like similar to like crime scene investigators. This bacteria or whatever the risk is within that product that you're [00:27:00] doing. So with lettuce it's gonna be more like e coli and listeria with listeria is everywhere. I put listeria in everything. But tomatoes is gonna be more salmonella or cheese is gonna be like listeria and then anything dairy e coli as well.

But if you're pasteurizing things, theoretically it, that should get rid of it. And then it's like, okay, I know it's in here somewhere. I'm going to find it and I am going to kill that mofo. That's what they do all the time, and they're always out trying to find it along with all the other stuff. And they might have built a team to do a lot of that paperwork and all that stuff.

And they're out there just getting their team involved and finding and destroying this on a perpetual basis, right? Because it's the enemy. We're gonna destroy this enemy.

And then number four is when you get to that level. Sometimes people stop at that level and then your upper management can't figure out why you're spending so much money on this crime scene investigation thing.

Uh, and then they cut it or they fire you or something like that. So the fourth level [00:28:00] is being able to explain to everybody in their own lingo why this is so important. And you get everybody involved, including your CFO, your COO, your CEO, understanding that this is the enemy and we must find and destroy it. Not one time.

Every single day, every time, because you think you've in seek and destroy. Like I've heard Food City, people go, oh, I found it and I killed it. Great. Now what? No, it's gone. No, it's not. You're still getting loads of tomatoes every single day. You're still making stuff every, it's going to be in there tomorrow, right?

Yeah. It's not done. Your job is not done.

Francine L Shaw: It's an investment, not an expense, and so many people think it's an expense.

You said something a while ago that is just so important and so many people just don't understand this. You can't sanitize something that's not clean and a lot of people in the industry don't [00:29:00] get, don't take dirt things and on both sides of the industry you can't, can't sanitize something that's not clean.

Matt Regusci: Right.

Francine L Shaw: And I see it all the time.

Alex O'Brien: Yeah. I love, so I love Neil Bogart. Have you heard of Neil?

Francine L Shaw: Yes, I know who he is.

Alex O'Brien: I've,

I, I, I love, yeah, I love his music. He's got a, you can't sanitize dirt. He's getting his music career behind him now. Yeah, that's one of the things we love talking about in sanitation is there's a difference between cleaning and sanitizing.

100%, two totally different things. Then people like to throw in sterilizing. It's Nope, that's also not right.

Francine L Shaw: Right.

Alex O'Brien: Sterilizing is killing everything or it's sterile, but yeah, people really get confused that.

Francine L Shaw: Sterile. Yeah, they're, and people use them interchangeably and no. Yeah, no.

Alex O'Brien: Yeah. And that's even like with pasteurization, people think, well, that's killing everything.

No it's not. Well [00:30:00] that's why your milk, you got your milk in the fridge. That's why it has a date there that says, hey, maybe three to four weeks. 'cause there's things or you know, that survive pasteurization that aren't pathogenic, but they're spoilage.

And that's another big thing people don't realize too.

It's like you can have the tastiest thing in the entire world, right? Well, this isn't spoiled. It should be fine to eat. It's like. Those, a lot of those pathogens are not spoilage organisms. Yeah. You're not even gonna know and you're like, wow, this tastes me.

And in fact, man, this is probably seven, eight years ago, I had, I was taking Guy Fieri's advice with the Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.

There's this one taco place and I was like, this is the best taco I've ever had. And about, uh, it was like 24 hours later, I was like, I have salmonella. I was like on the couch. I'm like, when you're a food scientist you're like, you're not just like, oh, I've [00:31:00] got diarrhea, whatever. You're like, oh my gosh, I have chills. I have... You start self-diagnosing. You're like, I'm, I had salmonella and it was, oh man. I was out for probably a week or so. But.

Matt Regusci: Still, here's a completely disgusting question. You have a lab. Yeah, did you just, you like, I'm gonna take a stool sample and I'm gonna test this thing. Have you, has that ever gone through your head?

Alex O'Brien: It's so funny because I would've asked my younger self, I was like, I didn't re, I report that or anything like that. Like I'm a food safety professional and I didn't do anything with that. And so many times I ask that when I'm teaching a course is like when people are like, well, I haven't had any complaints.

I'm like. The complaints are the tip of the iceberg. How many times are you actually mad enough or ill enough? You're like, I'm gonna call this number and I'm gonna complain. So I really like [00:32:00] to bring up that point. It's, man, I should have known better. I'm a food safety. I didn't call it in, but I was like, man, I had salmonella. I'm pretty sure I had salmonella.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, yeah. I don't have that type of lab, but I used to. I wanted to one time, and my microbiologists were like. No, we're not. We're not taking a stool sample in here. Don't. It is not. Okay Matt like doing that. I get your passion. I get your under, but no, we're not gonna do that.

Francine L Shaw: You can't bring your poop to work.

Matt Regusci: I know. I was so bummed.

Alex O'Brien: This is a positive control.

Francine L Shaw: Work in a restaurant, you can't bring your own food to work. When you work in a lab, you can't bring your own poop to work.

Matt Regusci: Oh, please. They're like, no, Matt, no. We don't even wanna think about you pooping. Let alone you bringing it in. What the heck?

Alex O'Brien: This is for a friend.

Matt Regusci: No, Matt. No. Okay.

So we had [00:33:00] someone here talking about UV, Bob Comstack, talking about Comstock, talking about the UV and milk. What are some of the pros and cons that you see with pasteurization versus UV? Ooh, that was a poet. Didn't know it.

Alex O'Brien: I really like the new technology. Obviously with everything there's pros and cons.

It all depends on your final application of that treatment, right? For UV, right? That's a, you've got the wavelength of light that's killing bacteria. That also is not very great for fat that can cause lipolysis that way. Now, if you're doing like just fluid milk. Hey, you're not gonna probably detect those issues within three to four weeks.

But I've had anecdotal evidence from some of the trials I've heard people conducting that they were not the technology that Bob was working with, just some other R&D trialing with some UV treatment that they aged some cheese. It was like, oh, it was [00:34:00] bad because of just all the lipolysis. It just a lot of off flavors because of that.

You got shorter fatty acids and what my professors used to call as well, it's baby vomit flavor. So like when you have those short chain fatty acids or when you break those apart, you're gonna get those types of flavors.

Now there's some cheeses where you actually, it's desirable like provolone. You are literally adding something in there to get some of those off flavors where it breaks off some of those fats. So it all depends on the end variety.

And I think too, there's a lot of bioactive components in raw milk. I'm not gonna say that's not true, but I will say it's a little overplayed. And so much like anything like the dose makes the poison. Also the dose makes how effective maybe even a vitamin [00:35:00] is, right?

So, many of these things you'd have to like lactoferrin or some of those immunoglobulins you'd have to drink, you know, gallons of milk at one time for, to get the functional effect, right? So like it's all about the dose that you're giving to yourself. So yeah, there's a lot of things that do exist there.

But you also have to think of the practical as well. Am I gonna be consuming 10 gallons today? Okay. Probably not.

Matt Regusci: I I get what you're saying. That's interesting. So, but if it was being used like in infant formula or in protein powder where you are getting a concentrated dose of that protein, right. Then you could see the effects even more.

Alex O'Brien: Yeah. And I would say too, if we're talking about the big proteins, right, like the casein or something like that. Major proteins, they aren't really as much affected by that. By that heat treatment, you'd have to heat it pretty high [00:36:00] in order for it to have that denaturing. And even at that point, when it's denaturing, it's, that doesn't mean it's less functional necessarily.

Matt Regusci: Got it. Got it.

Alex O'Brien: Even man, there's certain temperatures where you wanna stay below one. Don't call me on this. It's gonna be in, in the mid one seventies where that's where you actually have some of the denaturation of, well, I think whey proteins. But it's, I'd say there's different types of casein too.

There's the A1, A2, but ultimately, like our bodies, they're very functional factories. And I like to think of it from a perspective too, from an allergy perspective. A lot of times, whether it's you're drinking like a, something that's heat treated versus if it's raw, you're still gonna have an allergic reaction to it most of the time.

Yeah. And it's all about, it's like there's a certain targeted protein chain where it's, if that gets clipped, your body is like, [00:37:00] oh my gosh, that's a foreign invader. I'm gonna kill it.

So I would say there's a lot more research that has to be done. And at least I think the FDA has a really good page. It goes through like each one of the different things where it's like, well, yes, this isn't raw milk.

Right? Or even like the cultures, right? It's like, well, there's natural cultures that you get from that milk. It's like mostly like with probiotics, right?

Francine L Shaw: Most

Alex O'Brien: of the time you're consuming a probiotic when it's in the billions of sea views before you actually get. Functional effect. And if you got that much bacteria in your raw milk, that stuff's going to that shelf life is gonna be bad. Yeah. So I like to say that the dose makes the functionality as well as the poison.

Matt Regusci: And you answered that exactly as a university person would answer that. In the [00:38:00] real world, there are people that believe this like a religion.

That's true. And so regardless of what the science may say it, that doesn't matter.

Right. It's true. Raw milk is going to have a market regardless of whatever that is. Right. It just is. Yep. Because it, it is. And so I think it's gonna be interesting to see as a UV becomes more ubiquitous, let's say in the milk market. Yeah. The studies from you guys and from Davis and from other organizations coming out and seeing, because raw milk is prevalent, so is raw milk cheese is becoming, yep more prevalent. Mm-hmm. And so what can the industry do and the associations and the universities like yourself that can do to go Okay. How do we fulfill this marketplace and make sure people don't die [00:39:00] acutely of salmonella, e coli, listeria, et cetera, et cetera?

Alex O'Brien: That's a great question, and I will say when you're looking at the data, it's basically a statistics problem.

Like the more people that consume this, the higher the risk. Right? Right. What, so my parents, they grew up on raw milk. Nothing happened to them. Right. But I think it's the discussion with whoever is consuming this, right? I think we need to monitor it from, if this is gonna be a thing, right? Make sure that you're as close to the source of wherever you're getting that milk as possible, right?

Really making sure there's no temperature abuse, right? Is you're not buying warm, you know, you're consuming it as close as after milking as possible, right? I'd say those are, and obviously having that good relationship with whoever the farmer is, right? And there's some states that are having some [00:40:00] sort of extra standards.

If I were to do this, which I wouldn't suggest doing this, but if you're a farmer, you're like, Hey, I wanna sell raw milk. I would want to know, Hey, what is my bacteria counts on a routine basis, and especially. We can also get carried away as well. If I'm doing all the pathogens every single time, that's gonna be like at least a hundred bucks every time you do that.

Matt Regusci: I wanna reframe what you said. You're not talking about like an ATP or TTP testing because there's gonna be a lot of bacteria in that milk because that's what people want to consume when they consume raw milk. Yeah. You're saying the farmers should be doing pathogen testing.

Alex O'Brien: Yes, yes, yes. That I agree with e coliform type of, or enterobacter.

It's like another indicator, right?

Matt Regusci: So a fecal coliform test would be something. Yes. So a fecal coliform test would be like a test for about all the different pathogens at one time. You're not seeing if it's particularly e coli, salmonella, but [00:41:00] you are seeing that there are pathogens in there, like fecal cold.

Alex O'Brien: Yeah. Yes. And we're coming a long way too with the advent of ai. I know here on campus someone was doing AI research to basically in real time do counts of the cells coming through and trying to quantify them. So there's a possibility there. There's also quicker methods that are being developed. Right now.

There's I think, a two and a half hour test for some of these pathogens. That's just like a indicator, not like a actual diagnostic test, but there's something that. In a very short amount of time, you can say, well, maybe there's something I should worry about here. There's also someone here in Wisconsin I that I have a lot of respect for.

They actually don't do necessarily testing of the product itself because like right now it's, we like to say it's a needle in the haystack if you're gonna actually get a pathogen, right? You're testing what, 25? [00:42:00] 125, maybe 375 grams out of a whole tank. So I like to test the filter 'cause all the milk is going through that and it's going to accumulate on that filter.

So I would do the filter testing and that will indicate, oh wow, for that day, hey, maybe we have an issue.

Matt Regusci: So when you're testing the tank, if you find it, it's a systemic problem, versus testing the filter, which is an indicator problem. Was the pathogen in there, yes or no? Versus is the pathogen. Like, like growing and living and, and thriving in this tank.

Alex O'Brien: And someone was actually doing that. 'cause they make raw milk cheese and I applaud them. They say, well we're not gonna release that cheese until we have that filter result. And if it's a positive, then they've actually, they went back to the cows itself. 'cause like we couldn't find it in some of these environments.

They found that two out of their hundred cow herd or thereabouts. [00:43:00] Had listeria as a carrier, they were actually carrying it. So they actually removed those cows from the herd and then their actual filter results went back to negative.

Matt Regusci: Wow. So they also were able to remove their genetics out of that too, because if their carrier, then potentially their babies could be carriers, et cetera, et cetera.

Alex O'Brien: Exactly. So there's, that's I'd say the most pragmatic or if you're gonna do it right, that's how I would do it. Have a very robust way that you're gonna check for this stuff, right? Making sure that whatever you're putting out in the environment, you're limited to some of these tests. A, it takes a few days to do.

Well know what tools you have and I guess just explain to the public, then it's, well that label better say that there's a chance. And if you look at the, just how it lays out. From across the country, you have an 800 times more likelihood of getting pathogen contamination [00:44:00] from raw milk than pasteurized milk.

But when you look at the United States as a whole, like most healthy people, when they're consuming like listeria, they have a robust immune system. Right? And that's why when people that are pregnant. Or people that have bad immune systems, when they drink, that likelihood goes up an order of magnitude. I think just explaining, just saying, Hey, I think the messaging from, I guess academia or it's like if you drink it, you're gonna die.

No, that's not the case. It's all about numbers. It's a risk. Right. And depending on who, I'm not gonna give it to an infant. Right. I'm not gonna give it to my pregnant wife or something like that. I wouldn't, you gotta know what populations are gonna be susceptible to stuff.

Francine L Shaw: Well, and for pregnant women, it's not necessarily the woman, it's the [00:45:00] fetus.

Alex O'Brien: There's, yeah, there's, yes. Yeah, definitely. 'cause they, that listeria can cross that blood barrier.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. That's why it ends up like basically aborting the fetus and stuff.

Alex O'Brien: Yeah. There's a recent story from Florida about that they had a, someone had a miscarriage due to, they think raw milk consumption.

Obviously she survived, but the the baby did not.

Matt Regusci: So sad.

Alex O'Brien: It is. So it's that kind of thing can happen. I think what the messaging is, I think we just need to do a better job of what pasteurization is. 'cause many times I've talked to people, even relatives of mine, they're like. It's because you're adding chemicals in the milk.

No, that's not what's ha. It's we're literally putting it in different plates and it's, there's, we're heating it. Because the joke was, someone on TikTok was saying like, well, raw milk, we've discovered pasteurization because they're like, what if we boil it or we, we heat it to a temperature that's [00:46:00] below boiling?

Like, you mean 1 61 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know for 15 seconds, maybe?

Francine L Shaw: We also as individuals, other than the natural aging process, don't know when our immune systems might be becoming weaker. Yeah. Illness, because how many people discovered that they have cancer laid into the illness. Mm-hmm. Or another disease laid into the illness. So you may have an illness that you're not even aware you have.

You drink something that you know is contaminated or eat something that's contaminated and all of a sudden become ill because your immune system was weakened when you didn't even know that you were part of that high risk population. Yeah. So that's a factor as well. So yeah, the whole, there's just so many factors and we'll have people.

I live in Pennsylvania.

There's a huge Amish population and there's a lot of raw milk. [00:47:00]

Alex O'Brien: I've been tracking.

Francine L Shaw: A lot of raw milk, and there are just so many factors to take into consideration that people don't understand. While there's benefits that I understand, there's also a lot risk that people don't take into consideration. It's like, well, they've been drinking it their whole lives, and they're fine.

Sure they are, but they've also acclimated to this since the day they were born and for generations. You start drinking it when you're 20, you're introducing this into your system and you've never had it before. It may impact you differently.

Matt Regusci: They're also milking very differently as well. It's.

Francine L Shaw: 100%. It's a whole different process.

Matt Regusci: It's so different. Amish people going out and milking their cow is very different than milking a hundred cows three times a day or thousands of cows, like in California, thousands is the dairy market that I'm from.

Francine L Shaw: There's so much that we can talk about, but yeah, we're running that time. Yeah, it's very different.

Matt Regusci: Yes. Yeah.

Alex O'Brien: Wow. The time has gone by fast. Holy cow.

Matt Regusci: It [00:48:00] has. This was a fascinating conversation, Alex. Thank you. Thank you for reaching out to us. And I'll tell you that UV conversation with Bob Comstock has gotten four people coming to us and be like, well, we wanna talk about more about the science of this. And I'm like, Francine and I have been like, this is awesome.

This is great. Because this is a big issue within America right now is the raw milk thing. It's And it's not going away. It's not going to go away.

Alex O'Brien: No, not going away.

Matt Regusci: And so food safety people. We need to do two things. One is particularly in the dairy industry. One is realize it's not going away. We can't put our heads in the sand and go, this is going away.

And two, really help find solutions for this so that people stop dying. Because convincing people to stop drinking raw milk is not going to happen. It's not. And telling people that they can get sick from it, obviously hasn't stopped them from doing it. So how do we as an industry, provide solutions? And, and thank you for coming on.

Francine L Shaw: [00:49:00] So, Alex, the day of, we had our conversation on LinkedIn, I said. I love milk. We, we, my husband and I stopped somewhere and I got a, like a pint of chocolate milk and as we got this and I was drinking it, I thought about you the entire time. Said, you know, that was.

Alex O'Brien: Well, I'm honored.

Francine L Shaw: Well back.

Matt Regusci: Well. Thank you so much, Alex, for being our resident cheese head.

We would love to have you on again. Pleasure. Over the next couple years as we're figuring out solutions for this. I'd love to have you on again and yeah, don't eat poop.