Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

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Doug Farquhar: And if you're talking about the golden caps out there, what's going to hit international, we are a global society. And when we go down to Walmart, And we buy shrimp. It's not coming from a shrimp or going out on the Gulf of Mexico, pulling in. It's raised in a vat in Vietnam and shipped over. That's where we're getting it from.

And when you look at food inspection, you know, it's border patrol that's supposed to check all these cargo. And so you see these, uh, ships that come in with what, a hundred semi size cargo. They need to be checking for. Illegal drugs, fentanyl, people that are being trafficked, pesticides that are illegal, and illegal food.

They check one out of every hundred. If you are producing something in this country, you're going to be a great deal of oversight. You're producing something overseas, very little oversight, and it can come into, to commerce.

intro: 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 Ragusci for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule, don't eat poop.

Matt Regusci: Hello, hello, Francine.

Francine Shaw: Hey, Matt.

Matt Regusci: We have a special guest today. We are the NEHA conference. We have Doug with us. Doug, how do you pronounce your last name? Farquhar? Farquhar. Yes, that's correct. Very cool. Very cool. It's almost like Shrek.

Doug Farquhar: Almost like Shrek. It's yes, it's actually much more common than you expect, but yeah, Doug Farquhar, people will not forget my name.

Matt Regusci: I'm not making fun. He's much taller than the Farquhar and Shrek. Yeah, much taller. All right. So Doug, we want to tell us a little bit about what you do. We already started a conversation and I realized we should be recording this because what you do is very, very fascinating. And

Doug Farquhar: well, I've spent my past 30 years of my career working with mostly state legislators, but also Congress, local commissioners on environmental health.

You know, what is it, what does it do and how, you know, what's the relevancy. The organization I work with now is the National Environmental Health Association. I had formally spent 30 years at the National Conference of State Legislatures, and essentially what I was hired to do, I worked on a grant from EPA, EPA gave association money to work with state legislators to say, this is the reason we want you to adopt these policies so we can delegate authority to you so you can do environmental health.

Not us. And so I've been traveling the country. I've testified in over 60 times in about 35 different states. And I've worked with every state on environmental health policy. How do you move it forward? What are the elements you want to look for? What's valuable? What works? What doesn't work? And that, of course, led me to food safety, which with the enactment of FSMA and the food code, there's been a, you know, interest.

FSMA is Food Safety Modernization Act. That's correct. and the food code and, you know, trying to get states to adopt the most recent version. You were talking about federalism earlier saying, you know, we need to have a federalist system. And if you really look at, you know, McDonald's is a federalist system.

Wendy's is a federalist system, but the U S isn't. And really, if you are a local jurisdiction or a tribe, even because they have independent authority and you say, I don't want to do this, or I'm going to do it this way, you have the authority to do it that way. even though it may not match what's coming down from the federal government.

Matt Regusci: We are having this conversation, like you said, like McDonald's and Wendy's, you know, they're a federal, like they're national. Yeah. And they can dictate on a corporate level what their expectations are. And every region will have to abide by that expectation as long as they're abiding by or higher than law.

Right. So you can go McDonald's and you can go to Wendy's, And they can say, Hey, listen, what we're going to do is we're going to adopt the most stringent version of the food code that's out there. We're going to tack on our other expectations because we want to be harder than the federal government and everybody across the nation, all of our Wendy's, all of our McDonald's center have to abide by that.

Taco Bell, Yum Brands, KFC, et cetera. They're the exact same way. But when we're looking at federalism, And the difference between what the FDA has control over and the state departments and the county and the municipality, the legal system is very, very different, which means mom and pops look at things very differently and get judged differently, depending upon what state, what county, what city, and this is for both environmental EPA stuff, but also for FDA and USDA laws.

And I'd love for you to explain that because both our current. Domestic listeners and our international listeners find this to be

Doug Farquhar: absolutely fascinating. I took a group of scouts down to the Grand Canyon and on the way down, we stopped in Kayenta in the Navajo Reservation. There's McDonald's there. You go in and one thing I was shocked about is how much food.

a 14 year old boy can buy, and they came out with piles of food using Groupons and whatnot. But I looked up on the board there, and it said you had the McDonald's franchisee, and then it also had inspected by the Navajo Environmental Health Department. The Navajo Nation handles all its own environmental health and food safety.

Before the Navajos were taking it on, it was delegated by the county, so the county would have to come in. If the county was unable, that means the state of Arizona would have to come in. If the state of Arizona did not want to do food safety, then the FDA would have to come in, which means FDA would have to go out of D.

C., go to Kayenta, Arizona, go to the McDonald's, and actually do this. And then you got the other half, which is McDonald's, and there's no way McDonald's is going to allow one of their franchises to not be up to speed, even though the Navajo will inspect, the state will, you may see local inspectors, food safety inspectors, you will always see McDonald's inspectors if you're a McDonald's.

You will not have the opportunity not to follow the most stringent standards that McDonald's requires. If you're a local, then you get back to your mom and pop. Whole different story, they aren't going to be inspected by the national franchise. They're going to be relying on the city, the state, the local government, to come in and provide them information on how to not poison people, how to provide a safe and sanitary operation, the most egregious problem, and things we talk about, like cockroaches.

For You know, we say, Oh, my gosh, we can't have that. Well, a lot of countries, not an issue, are going to have cockroaches everywhere. But we have a bifurcated, bifurcated, trifurcated, quadricated system of many elements of overseeing, but they gravitate towards the food safety, the food code, but they don't have to follow it.

It's not like McDonald's. When you're a McDonald's, you have to follow their standards. If you are a mom and pop and you're under the state requirements. You should follow their standards, but they don't have an absolute, you know, requirement that's really going to come down and hammer you.

Matt Regusci: So before we are filming this and you are talking about the EPA stuff with the lead adoption, I'd love for you to talk about that.

So I run Ellipse Analytics, which is the certification analytics body for clean label project. So you know, we're knee deep in. AB 899 with what's going to be happening right now at the State Department of California or Rudy's Law in Maryland, where they're going above and beyond the federal government of expectations of heavy metals and baby food.

And we are working privately with brands that want to do above and beyond the expectations of the government for heavy metals and industrial stuff like pesticides and glyphosate and BPA and all that. And so, there's the, what we were talking about, like McDonald's or the, the, the brands that we work with that are going above and beyond what the government is expecting.

But it's fascinating to see how the adoption happens within each of the individual states and municipality. And I would love for you to kind of give your example of what went on with lead adoption across because a lot of people are really interested in that with what's been going on with adulteration of food and lead poisoning and all that.

But then also how the FDA, like with the food code. Different states are adopting it at different levels, like, like we were talking about, like, what was it? Nebraska, which South Dakota is still on 1995 food code and other states are up to the most recent one. And there's everything in the middle. So kind of give the example of how that works.

And then what do you do then to help alleviate any of this? Or what is your because you're kind of they're trying to help right in the middle,

Doug Farquhar: right? Yeah. And from my point of view, it's nonpartisan and it's just food safety. What's the best way to go with food safety? And when I reach out to state legislatures, you know, a lot of the things I talk about the impact on the private industry.

When you have a situation, you were talking about Boar's Head earlier. Boris head is going to get impacted, but also deli meats are going to get impacted. If you sell deli meats, all of a sudden your market's going to go down. Peanut corporation of America that caused a 10 percent decline in people eating peanuts.

When you got, uh, the leafy greens in California, people quit eating leafy greens, cantaloupe. Western growers had to invest quarter million dollars in a campaign to get people to eat cantaloupes again because Jensen Farms, one small farm in Colorado, caused this huge outbreak and the word got out there.

Well, yeah, Jensen Farms, they went down, but also the cantaloupe industry suffered. And so this is what happens if you don't do food safety, everybody gets impacted. And it's something that really harms your state industry, because if people know, hey, it's not safe to eat. Here, then all of a sudden tourists don't come and people don't trust that product.

So it's very interesting because it's very complicated and the way we do it in this country, as I said, it's a federalist system, the locals, the states, the federal government, they all have to work together, but really the authority, you can do whatever you want to inside your state, inside your jurisdiction, as long as you don't conflict.

With what the FDA is doing. That's a broad area. And when you start talking about what the federal government does on environmental health, it's very narrow. You start, you know, a lot of people think, oh, the federal government did that. No, it wasn't. It was your local government. Now they may have adopted The food code that was put out by the federal government, or they may have adopted the international building code, like everything in here that we're seeing.

It's not the federal government that put this together. It was the international building code and the state of Illinois and Chicago adopted that code and said, we're going to follow that. And that's the reason we have things, you know, set up the way we are. Great example, swimming pools. Swimming pools are all across the country, you know, and very, it takes a lot to keep a swimming pool safe and clean.

There's only one federal issue on that, only one federal policy, Virginia Graham Baker Act. That's because Jim Baker, Chief of Staff to President Bush, his granddaughter stuck her arm into a outlet under the water at a swimming pool that could not get her released in time, she drowned. It's a horrible story, but because of that, because Jim Baker's granddaughter was harmed, we have rules out there.

That's the Virginia Graham Baker Act. You have to have protections, the, in your pool, underneath water so children will not drown. Chlorine, that's a state and local issue. Filtration, state and local issue. Size of the pool, state and local issue. Fencing, state and local issue, that's, you know, that's where it all comes down.

And when it comes to food safety, there's still a lot of issues out there. We gravitate towards the food code, but there are many issues when, especially when it comes to meat that are out there. The live bird markets, not covered very well in the food code. Eating of insects, not well handled in the food code, many things that you can do in one state and not in the other.

In Wyoming, with their food freedom laws, up to a thousand head of chicken can be sold out of a facility with no inspections. And so that could be a huge problem out there. So I asked my colleagues up there, well, what about, let's say something like oysters? Well, they're like, we don't have oysters here.

And I'm thinking to myself, do you think there's some entrepreneurial bar in Jackson who wouldn't be putting a vat of oysters out back and saying, we have fresh oysters and they would not be regulated. And as many people say, oh, that's ridiculous. How can you sell oysters in Maine? You can go down to the shore, buy shellfish.

Oysters, clams, scallop, lobsters. Can you turn around and sell it? Yes. Under their food freedom act or what they call food sovereignty act. Yes, you can sell that. And people start talking about this bipartisan back and forth issue in Maine. It was governor LePen, who was the tea party guy and was going to get rid of everything.

He was the one who was fighting the democratically controlled Senate to say, we can't be doing this. Are you crazy? He was the one who was advocating for more regulation. Because he realized we don't want to be selling raw seafood to consumers, to tourists in our state because we're going to have an outbreak.

We're going to be known as poison central. He did not win that.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, and I was really interested to when you're talking about, cause I had thought about this, you know, when the federal government passes a law and the FDA and the EPA write the rules for it, that know really is enacted if there is interstate commerce.

So if states are abiding by our restaurants or food producers are only selling products that are going to be within the state, then the state can create in the municipalities and counties can create laws specifically for those business that bypass what the federal government, all

Doug Farquhar: right. Yeah. It can be absolutely different.

On them we're seeing that very much with the cottage food, food, freedom, through sovereignty. situation. And it's not universal. It's, but you have food sovereignty in Wyoming. That means you can sell up to a thousand chickens without any oversight. In other states, you can sell different products, tomatoes, peppers, whatnot, things you get at farmer's markets.

And now in people buying, it's like, Oh, of course they're safe. No, they haven't been inspected.

Francine Shaw: So a year or so ago, I did a webinar and people started asking various questions about it.

And I'm like, I couldn't answer because it depends on where you are. And people were getting frustrated, but it depends on the jurisdiction that you're in because it's not one law. It all depends on what jurisdiction you're in. I can't, and it's not because I don't know. It's because it depends on where you are.

Doug Farquhar: Yeah, it depends on very much

Francine Shaw: where you are. You know, and I know that the people that were on this webinar were getting frustrated, and it had to do with things like cottage laws, and it was like, I can answer your question. Offline, if you tell me where you're at, I can, you know, look that stuff up, but I can't give a blanket answer because it depends very much on where you are.

Doug Farquhar: And cottage foods in, you know, basically in 2010, there were none. Now every state has a cottage food law. There's some sort of exemption out there that you can sell food to the consumer public without any state or local oversight. And it's a wide range. We're talking chicken in Wyoming to shellfish in Maine, to even micro enterprise kitchens in California, you get, you know, in parts of California, you can go and have dinner at a place or eat from someone's house, which could have cats running around the kitchen, but that's legal because the legislature passed an exemption for such things.

So yeah, you're absolutely correct.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, I was joking with some friends about that movie Chef. Did you ever watch that movie where he gets fired because of something that he says goes viral on social media and he's this great chef and he has like a mental breakdown and he ends up just driving across country with a food truck with the son and one of his previous employees and they're going across and they're making all these different, you know, Sandwiches based upon wherever they are in the most local stuff.

And I was joking with someone that, yeah, that probably couldn't happen. Like why? And I was like, well, because the food truck in every single municipality and every single County is going to have to have some sort of permit is going to have to have some sort of check on them and inspection and it's different.

It's not like nationwide. So some places food truck, who cares? Right. It's under the cottage law. I think. It's underneath enough amount of revenue. It doesn't matter. Other places, no. You have to have a permit. You can't go into Miami and just go downtown with a food truck without something, right? And that was just a good analogy of every place you go, if you were to drive across country with a food truck, you'd have to know what the local laws are or else you couldn't exist.

Francine Shaw: And you want to talk about frustrating for those individuals when they go from municipality to municipality with those trucks and the laws are different from one jurisdiction to the next jurisdiction. And they have no idea. what those regulations are and then you go in as the inspector to inspect them and they're like, well, you don't have any potable water.

You don't have anywhere to wash your hands. You don't have the proper sanitation.

Doug Farquhar: Well most mobile food trucks, the requirement is you have to have a base. So let's say you're in Austin and you have to follow the Austin laws, but then you can drive anywhere. And this is something I think they just passed in Texas, which allows you, if you're based in Austin, you're following the Austin laws, you can drive to Abilene and sell your food.

So if Austin says you can sell Cavas, guinea pig, but, you know, very popular in Peru, you know, and even though Amarillo may say it's illegal to sell it here. The local food inspector has little authority to address that. And I'm being very broad here and I'm sure, hopefully your people from Texas, your listeners from Texas will complain and correct me, but that's the way I read the law is it gave great deal of authority to sell anywhere in the state.

If you're licensed in one jurisdiction.

Francine Shaw: So I don't, and maybe that's changed since I was doing them, and it's been several years at this point, but in Pennsylvania.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is Texas. Okay, okay. This goes back to what we were talking about, where it, Pennsylvania is going to be different than Texas, which is

Francine Shaw: Which I know, I complain about this a lot.

Matt Regusci: And, and, but, but also, I mean, you live I don't want to, but you could jump from where you are to another state within minutes. And so a food truck could do the same thing, right? And so you're in Pennsylvania, then you're in Maryland, then you're in Delaware, then you're in New York. And even that is very different.

Doug Farquhar: And you get the situation with cottage food. This is the, one of the more popular things that are going out there, policy wise, is to be able to sell on the internet. Now, this gets back to your Commerce Clause, because before, that was one of the elements when they first come up with cottage food, you can't sell on the internet, because if you sell on the internet, it goes across state or it can go across state lines.

This is an exemption I see pop up in the state legislatures across the country, it's getting more momentum saying, yeah, you can sell on the internet, which means if you're selling, you know, guinea pig in Texas, can you. You know, sell it to someone who in Pennsylvania. Yeah. Is it a violation of federal food law?

Yes. Are you going to get caught? Maybe not.

Francine Shaw: So we talk about this frequently because I got an email not too long ago from somebody asking me if I could print a certificate for them so that they could sell on Amazon. I'm like, anybody that knows me knows I'm not going to do that. It's like, I need to figure out who sent this because when you buy food from e commerce, of no idea who you're buying that stuff from in a lot of cases, it's like rushing a lot.

Doug Farquhar: During your talk, you were talking about federal, state, and local, but you forgot international. And if you're talking about the golden caps out there, what's going to hit international, we are a global society. And when we go down to Walmart. And we buy shrimp. It's not coming from a shrimper going out on the Gulf of Mexico pulling in.

It's raised in a vat in Vietnam and shipped over. That's where we're getting it from. And when you look at food inspection, you know, it's border patrol. That's supposed to check all these cargo. And so you see these, uh, ships that come in with, what, a hundred semi sized cargo? They need to be checking for illegal drugs, fentanyl, people that are being trafficked, pesticides that are illegal, and illegal food.

They check one out of every hundred. If you are producing something in this country, you're going to be a great deal of oversight. You're producing something overseas, very little oversight, and it can come into commerce.

Francine Shaw: And it does.

Doug Farquhar: Yeah. Are you ready for my next segue?

Francine Shaw: Please, please.

Doug Farquhar: Okay. Peanut butter, Nutella, Vegemite.

Okay. Three products. After World War II, all the military of the world came together and they said, our soldiers were malnourished. We do not provide enough proper food in any of these countries. In Europe, in Australia, in the U. S., people were malnourished. We need to get more, you know, healthier food out there.

That meant protein. Well, there wasn't enough meat product at the time to meet their needs. So they had to, well, what do we go for? Well, peanuts, peanuts have enormous amount of protein in them. So they Can I ask you a

Francine Shaw: question? Are you going to ruin peanut butter for me? No, no.

Doug Farquhar: Opposite.

Francine Shaw: Okay.

Doug Farquhar: And in this country, we made peanut butter and we infused, I mean, from the federal government to all the manufacturers, infused peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on our children.

I mean, everybody was forced to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It made the peanut butter industry explode, made Wonder Bread explode. But that's what fed our nation. That's the reason kids had protein. Europe, they didn't have that opportunity. You would think, oh, they can just buy U. S. peanuts. No, the imports, the tariffs, the obligations made it really cost prohibitive.

So what did they do? They found hazelnuts. Now, if you make hazelnut butter, it's horrible. So what do you do? You add chocolate to it. What do you make? Nutella. So, in Europe, all those kids ate Nutella on bread. And that's where they get their protein from. But peanut butter was healthier. But, they couldn't get peanuts.

Australia, no peanuts, no hazelnuts. What do they do? They create Vegemite, which is this God awful paste that's made from wheat and different, you know, different grain products, but they did that. They would put Vegemite on bread and gave it to all their kids. When we were growing up, you know, I never saw Nutella.

I didn't even know what it was. It wasn't until I got to college that Whole Foods in Austin started selling Nutella. And I, oh my gosh, this is so good. Oh, Nutella

Matt Regusci: is awesome. I

Francine Shaw: told you that a few weeks ago. I've never had it. My kids

Matt Regusci: love it. I mean, we eat a ton of peanut butter and we eat a ton of Nutella.

Yeah. I don't even try to give my children Vegemite because I tried that. I've never had it. Uh, yeah, I tried that one time and no,

Doug Farquhar: it's bad.

Francine Shaw: We should apologize to those down under.

Doug Farquhar: But now what's the great thing is, thanks to the World Trade Organization and the spread of international trade agreements, we can sell peanut butter to the European Union.

The European Union can sell Nutella to us and Australia, not only do they have Vegemite on their shells, they have Nutella and they have peanut butter. This is what's going on worldwide and it's because of trade agreements. Now this is going to mean if you are Peanut Corporation of America or Skippy or whoever the case may be, this gives you a whole brand new market.

The U. S. market is saturated, and it's actually going down. We aren't having as many children as we used to. So therefore, the peanut butter industry is under pressure. Where do we go? Well, we got the entire world. And now, because majority of countries have adopted the WTO food safety standards, we can sell Skippy worldwide.

Pretty much, obviously, there are going to be exceptions out there. That can be sold worldwide. You're going to be in competition with Nutella. You'll be in competition with Fegemite, but you know, you still will have the opportunity to go out there and sell it. That's going to really put pressure internationally for one food standard.

We have the Codex Alimentarius and that's just like the USDA food code. But if you're a company, now, if you're a local producer and you want to make wickles pickles in Alabama, you don't have to worry about the Codex Alimentarius because you're not selling overseas. But if you want to sell that product.

overseas, you're going to have to worry about the Codex Alimentarius and modify your formulas and your recipes to meet that so you can sell overseas.

Matt Regusci: Do you see GFSI Global Food Safety Initiative really wrapping around that and adopting within their standards? Because I know they keep benchmarking their standards.

Do you see that code will ultimately be kind of the code that people,

Doug Farquhar: companies just bought it to? We're gravitating and of course that code is going to change. Just like the food code every two to four years changes and you were talking about stringent, you know, you're adopting the most stringent code.

It's not the most stringent. It's the most recent because there are things you had to do back in 2000 or 2005. Which, you know, we're very important. It's not relevant anymore, but there are things now, I mean, when you talk about microbes, when you're talking about these bugs, they're evolving all the time, trying to figure out ways to kill us.

We are doing things now that are going to address norovirus, salmonella, things In 1995, that weren't even in existence, and, you know, against these bugs that are evolving, you also have a situation where you got industry, which is evolving. We got people's push carts out there selling things. We got mobile food trucks.

We didn't have that. We have sushi at the deli. We never had that before. The industry is as nimble as the bugs are.

Francine Shaw: E commerce sushi. Jesus. Sorry.

Doug Farquhar: Jerky sushi. But yeah, and it's, they're nimble. They're coming up with new things. They're selling us new products and things we used to have to worry about. You know.

You remember space bars, remember tang, you remember all the things with the astronauts aided and everything was great. Well, we're not worried about astronauts. Everyone are now we got to worry about the international community and they're saying, Oh my gosh, you really got to try, you know, this product.

Yeah. Pink

Matt Regusci: sauce. Pink sauce. Yeah. Pink sauce was this influencer was selling her. Pink sauce, she called it. And it ended up being like this crazy stuff. 'cause labels were wrong and some of the sauce just exploded. But she was just selling it and

Francine Shaw: it was awful. It was awful. And she was selling a ton of this stuff.

And then the FDA knocked on her door and

Matt Regusci: it was all just influencer driven, so she was making it within her thing, but, but it would've been fine as a cottage industry within her city. But because she's an influencer

Francine Shaw: and she was supposedly a chef. She should have known about it. But anyway, that was last year's drama on the internet.

Doug Farquhar: Yeah. And it's, yeah, and people come up with, they, they keep on thinking of new ways and you know, granted they're not trying to kill their customers, but they do. Yes. Jensen Farms in Colorado, they were trying to make organic cantaloupe. That was their big thing. Well, organic. Does not have a kill step. If you don't have a kill step, stuff can get in there.

And of course they were like, it's a skin, you know, you're not going to be able to get, well, the bugs ferreted out, you know, and, uh, they killed 33 people.

Matt Regusci: Right. Yeah, I remember that very, very well. And it seems like every decade we have a huge new listeria outbreak. And so back to the bugs evolving, evolving because listeria is ubiquitous is everywhere.

And we have a great system generally, if you're not immunocompromised against listeria. But if you get listerosis, your chances of dying are like 20%. It's very, very, very bad. And everybody was using listeria as just an organism to see how I'm doing my cleaning regimen for environmental testing. And now all of a sudden, they're like, Listeria is killing people.

Doug Farquhar: It's crazy. You know, and norovirus is another one, salmonella another one, but, you know, and where people, where the media and where people hear things and like, oh, that's a problem. It's not listeria. It's the peanut butter, listerian peanut butter. I don't think there's listerian peanut butter, but it's the products.

I'll let you go there.

Francine Shaw: No, you said the media, and I'm sorry, this doesn't really, I have a lot to do with what we're talking about right this second, but the media gets so involved and sometimes the reporters really just don't know what the hell they're talking about. So yesterday, the girl that works with me, and she pulls sometimes things for our podcast.

And she found something on the internet about food safety, and she was so excited because she's like, they're going to actually talk about some of these corporations and what they're doing wrong with food safety, and they're really going to name the names. And she was so excited about what she found, and she opened it up, and she's looking at it, and it said something about, don't ever And she starts to read it and it talks about, you know, hot foods supposed to be stored at these temperatures.

And then you start to read the article. And everything that they list, they're throwing these companies under the bus, right? Everything that they list had nothing to do with food safety. I'm like, why would they do that? Because now people are reading this, they're doing damage to these companies. The consumers don't know that these aren't food safety issues.

You know what I mean? They're all quality issues. It had to do with the dryness of the poultry. And, you know, the color of the poultry and they are saying that, you know, it has to do with like the cooking temperature and that's not scientific. You don't, you know what I mean?

Doug Farquhar: Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.

I mean, I got a call from Fox News once. And they said, is it illegal to eat raw hamburgers in North Carolina? And I'm like, you know, what are you talking about here? And he was trying to make it like, this is government overreach. Well, you can't eat her on hamburgers anywhere because. You have to make sure the internal temperature gets to a certain point that is not, you know, above 100, 140, maybe 160.

Raw

Francine Shaw: hamburger?

Doug Farquhar: What's that?

Francine Shaw: Did you say raw hamburger?

Doug Farquhar: Raw hamburgers.

Francine Shaw: Yeah.

Doug Farquhar: If you want to, rare, I'm not raw, rare hamburgers. So, if you want to get that internal temperature to 160, it's not going to be rare anymore. Yeah, that was a push nationwide saying, you know, you need to get the internal temperature to 160, which means you can't sell rare hamburgers anymore.

So it wasn't North Carolina that did this. It was, you know, the, the USDA food co, you know, food operation out there, but, you know, Fox News wanted to spin it. In a way that I was like, that's not correct. And that doesn't serve the consumer or the public about what's really going on.

Francine Shaw: Right. Well, and this wasn't a local station.

This was like national media that printed this. And I'm like, this is wrong.

Doug Farquhar: It's bad, isn't it? Right.

Francine Shaw: And I haven't had a chance to address it yet because it happened right before I was leaving for the airport. But I will address that because that's wrong. It's wrong to those corporations. They have enough problems.

with the things that you know, they shouldn't be doing. Let's not when they're doing something correct or not doing anything wrong. Let's not do this to them because you don't know your job.

Matt Regusci: Right. Absolutely. To your point too, you're talking about how, you know, the food safety outbreaks don't just ruin individual companies that have the outbreak.

It ruins the industry. And you're talking about the meat and the hamburger being at a certain temperature. There was so much issues of the jack in the box, the whole jack in the box outbreak. That the beef industry themselves asked the federal government to create E. coli as an adulterant because it was ruining their industry.

Absolutely. So when the, when the industry itself goes, hey, listen, can we get more regulation? Because actually people not eating our product because they're afraid of dying from E. coli is actually killing our market. That's when you know, like, oh, this is a real deal.

Francine Shaw: And so we're now to the point where E.

coli isn't like our biggest issue. We've now moved on with Salmonella and Listeria being our bigger issues than E. coli, which is kind of amazing. Yeah,

Doug Farquhar: we start talking about the food safety system. And one of the things I was trying to bring up earlier was with the cottage foods, and they started about 2010.

Well, the last time CDC did an analysis of food safety, it came out about 2010, from about 2005. You hear it all the time. I'm sure you've used it. We have 135, 000 hospitalizations. We have 3, 000. That's from data. from 2005. They have not updated since then. So we don't know if these cottage foods had an impact or not.

Now, I do know. Anecdotally, the Wyoming Department of Health has said that's where 40 to 50 percent of all our food borne outbreaks occur is within the cottage food. But I can't get them to verify it.

Matt Regusci: Well, I'll say that one more time, what state said that Wyoming Department of Health. Wyoming Department of Health.

Doug Farquhar: And this was coming from the Casper Star Tribune. The only time I've ever found any data out there, any source, that said cottage foods are causing a problem, because I keep looking for this, I found something in the Casper Star Tribune, and they said that, but when I called the Department of Health, they wouldn't verify it.

Francine Shaw: So, okay, 2005. So which that makes sense to me because his numbers haven't changed in like forever. Now if you look at the number, if you go, and you would know this, if you go dig into the CDC website, you can see like the outbreaks per year, the number of reported outbreaks per year, and it breaks it down.

So you can see where the number of reported outbreaks per pathogen have started to move. Okay. So, how often, 2005, that's a long time ago, when do you think the, uh, you've been I've

Doug Farquhar: asked them, and they said, it's on the to do list. 20 years. It's a 20 year to do list. If you look at, like, the reporting system you're talking about, and you go to Wyoming, you'll think, Wyoming's the safest place in the world.

Nothing ever happens there. Well, you got to have inspectors, you got to have people out there, and it's not like they don't have any. It's just, they don't have an efficient reporting system that really responds. I mean, you would say, oh my gosh, New York's the worst place in the world because we have all these out.

Well, it's because they report.

Francine Shaw: They have, yes. They have the infrastructure

Doug Farquhar: to

Matt Regusci: report. Okay. So, your role. As a director of government affairs at NEHA, National Environmental Health Association. What are you working on, like day in and day out, like what are you working on right now? Is there like some big project that you're working on with state departments and the government and uh, the federal government and municipal, like what does that look like?

Doug Farquhar: Well, there are things that pop up every day and that's what, you know, makes the challenge, the fun. One thing I am working on right now is the food code and there's a big initiative and FDA, uh, you know, to their credit, is trying to encourage. States to adopt more recent versions of their food code. Bless you.

And it's a real mix. You know, about half the states are really good. They have a system in place where Pennsylvania, Colorado, you know, in 2022 when the more recent version occurred, it didn't automatically And in what happened in Pennsylvania, they took the code, they did the regulatory changes, they did the regulatory promulgation, and now they are following the 2022 code.

Then you have the other half of the states. And the further out you are, the more difficult it is to adopt the food code because you're making the bigger changes.

Matt Regusci: I get it. So like if you're in South Dakota and you're in 1995 food code, adopting the 2022 one is going to be a lot more complicated because it's a bigger jump.

Doug Farquhar: And Indiana is even a better example because they've been following the 2001 food code for years. And they've been saying, we've got to update this. And they called Michigan and they said, what should we watch out for? And they, Michigan told them, watch out for the gloved hands because you're going to get pushback on that.

You know, it's not just because there's a regulation that people get upset. They get upset if it's going to, Impact them if it's going to be financial, yeah, financial, getting a certified food protection manager on staff and whatnot. And that's what they're told to watch out for. Indiana is in the process of promulgating a regulation to adopt the 2022 food code.

They go in 2001 to 2022. That's a great jump, but it's going to be tougher for South Dakota. Louisiana says we're unique. We have special foods, we have special cuisine, therefore we can't adopt a more recent version of the food code. New York is like, we're New York, and California does basically the same thing.

They have their own versions of the food code. Now technically, New York says they follow the 2001. They modify it dramatically to meet their clientele in, in the state. So it's a very, you know, it's New York, New York's just a very unique situation.

Francine Shaw: Well, in New York City is, yeah, it's own world there, it's own little cluster.

And I, I'm not saying that negatively. It just is, they do their own thing. Yeah, they do their own

Doug Farquhar: thing.

Francine Shaw: Yeah. So, and back to Pennsylvania, I live in Pennsylvania. Even though we've adopted the current version.

Doug Farquhar: 2022.

Francine Shaw: Right. Within the state, the counties are still all diverse in what they do from county to county.

Doug Farquhar: And I know I'm not going to speak as an authority on Pennsylvania regulatory system, but in certain states, the state has a great deal of authority and in other states, it's much weaker. In Alabama, everything a county does, even if Tuscaloosa tried to raise taxes, it went to the state legislature and the legislature said, no, you're not going to raise taxes.

Now Colorado, on the other hand, legislature doesn't have that authority at all. They can't stop what a local government does. They can say you need to meet a certain standard, but they can't go in and say, you have to adopt this. You've got to do it this way. So there's wide variety.

Matt Regusci: I saw that in COVID. So, so I live in Colorado Springs and during COVID, Polis was actually very open.

Like Trump, I think had Polis over talking about how Democrats could run and not shut everything down. But he allowed each county, just like we were talking about to do what. They wanted to do, and Denver was completely shut down and Colorado Springs was much more open. I see it as living in Colorado.

Same with the cannabis side of things. It's the opposite. Denver is like, you can have cannabis on every other corner, like a Starbucks and Colorado Springs is like, no, we're not doing recreational cannabis. It's fascinating. Well,

Doug Farquhar: and that's the reason that cannabis passed in Colorado, because of that political system.

In that where you have a lot of variety out there. So it gave Denver the opportunity to pass it and Colorado Springs, the opportunity to ban it, whereas in Alabama, that was not an option, but it was really fascinating how they got cannabis passed in Alabama. Because, you know, even the liberals there are conservative.

I mean, they aren't in favor of it. And, but there's this one member of the legislature, she's the only openly gay member, and they all love her, they all respect her, but she has no clout. You know, anything she says doesn't happen. And she introduces a bill to legalize marijuana in the state during a campaign year.

And of course, they were like, we're not going to back you because one, you know, we never back anything you do and two, it's an election year. I'm going to get primary, you know, and but they had the hearing and she brought in these parents that were saying, you know, my child has this problem. I am being forced to go to Colorado to treat my child because, you know, You're prohibiting this, you know, and they talked about it and they figured out, okay, how do we legalize cannabis in the state of Alabama?

Well, what they did was saying, okay, you have to go to the university of Birmingham hospital, the state, basically the state hospital, you can get a prescription there. You can get the cannabis liquid cannabis, not, you know, smokable. from the University of Birmingham, University of Alabama, UAB, and in that situation, you know, even the most conservative, it passed, and they were like, yeah, I can back this.

I can support this. Anybody who challenges me on this from the far right, I'm going to say, no, this was the right thing to do for the state of Alabama. But Colorado doesn't have those resources.

Matt Regusci: I'm going to keep your card here and I think we may have you back on again as we're looking at different stuff that's going on within each of these state departments and the federal government and all that. It is the craziest part of not just food safety, it's the craziest part of our government in general.

The hardest thing for anybody to wrap their head around is just how independent. Every single state, county, municipality is from the federal government. And it's just fascinating how, thank you for explaining that so well. And I'm sure we're going to have follow ups.

Francine Shaw: Yes, thank you. It is definitely an eye opening experience.

I'm sure for most of the people that listen to us, you explained it much better than we do. Even though I understand a large part of how it works because I've worked it. I admire what you do. Thank you. I know how frustrating it is to be on this side of it. So, thank you.

Doug Farquhar: My pleasure.

Matt Regusci: Thank you. I look forward to talking with you in the future.

Great. And we let everybody know, we give one piece of advice and that is don't eat poop.

Doug Farquhar: Do not eat poop. No matter where you

Matt Regusci: are, no matter if it's a federalist system or not, just not a good idea to not eat poop or not to eat poop. Do not do that. Thank you so much. Thank you.