Food Type

RSS

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA’s FSIS) has proposed a regulatory framework that would change food safety in the poultry industry, including new flock testing requirements, enhancing process control and verification, and implementing enforceable final product standards.

As part of the Closer to Zero Action Plan, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to conduct an independent study to assess young children’s exposure to mercury from consuming seafood.

Many of the techniques used in creating a HACCP plan are shared with other types of plans, such as food quality and food defense plans. This article discusses regulatory changes in the dairy industry through the years, including the Grade "A" Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO), the National Conference on Interstate Milk Shippers Dairy HACCP Pilot Program, and the incorporation of the Food Safety Modernization Act Preventive Controls Rule within the PMO.

A continuous improvement approach may be useful for poultry operations aiming to reduce the presence of Salmonella in their flocks, in light of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s initiative that includes increased quantitative microbial monitoring of incoming flocks to processing plants.

A recent study has estimated that removing products with a concentration of Listeria monocytogenes higher than 1 CFU/g could greatly reduce food contamination and associated foodborne illness cases. The study also found ready-to-eat (RTE) foods to be of greatest concern.

A recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization raises a concern with the limited existing data on seaweed food safety, and recommends several actions to close knowledge gaps and increase the safety of seaweed consumption.

Arkansas is the 29^th state to enter into a cooperative agreement that allows for Arkansas’ inspection program to inspect meat products produced for intrastate shipment under the State Meat and Poultry Inspection program.

A California U.S. District Court has upheld the authority of swine processing plant employees to pre-sort animals prior to slaughter as outlined in the Modernization of Swine Slaughter Inspection Rule under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s New Swine Inspection Service.

To understand and eventually reduce the risk of salmonellosis from poultry meat, it is necessary to understand the poultry production system, the introduction of the microorganism into the poultry ecosystem (as well as its gastrointestinal tract), the sources of Salmonella during production, and, subsequently, strategies to control or reduce the risk from this microorganism at both the pre-and post-harvest stages. Part 2 of this article series examines pre-harvest controls during grow-out.