E coli Mexican Grill

[Big_Hitter]

What is your reaction to the E coli illnesses attributed to eating at Chipotle Mexican Grill during the past several months? As a retired food safety professional, I find it most irresponsible for this chain to be so poorly managed in the area of food safety.

my reaction? The CEO is too skinny.

 

[LiveBelowMeans]

We call it the quality death spiral

In manufacturing we called it the quality death spiral. When you shipped a defective part, the customers quality department would pay extra attention to your next several shipments and they would invariably find something else wrong, even though they normally would accept the product as is. So they would reject the next shipment as well and would do even more inspection and find even more problems. In Chipotle's case, I believe they occasionally had problems like this before, only now everyone has heightened awareness, and every problem is now being reported nationwide. There may actually not be any extra risk in their processes or product, just the focus on the issue. Its a death spiral. Tough to break the spiral. JMHO

 

[HadEnuff]

Of course this is why in the early US hard cider was preferred to water or milk. A bit of alcohol seems to keep many bacteria at bay. Perhaps then if alcohol works against e-coli alcohol containing salad dressings here is a link to a post a blog on scientific american about alcohol and e-coli: Strong Medicine: Drinking Wine and Beer Can Help Save You from Cholera, Montezuma s Revenge, E. Coli and Ulcers 1 - Scientific American Blog Network
The post discusses cholera in Inverness in 1832 and alcohol. Perhaps then Cipotle should serve some straight vodka with their food.

Wine, such as it was in ancient Rome and medieval Europe was the drink of choice specifically because it was less likely to kill you right away than was the available drinking water, especially in cities.
Benjamin Franklin supposedly once said, "In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is strength, and in water there is bacteria"...I don't know if he really said that but I am willing to give him the credit.

 

[JoeWras]

10 years ago I was on a business trip in Silicon Valley and went out running on the various levees in the area for exercise.

What I saw appalled me to no end.

There are little pop up farms around there, right in the heart of tech country, that grow vegetables like lettuce, celery, etc. Running along the levee, on my right, were "shacks" where the migrant workers lived. On my left was a dry river, and toilet paper and feces everywhere. My goodness, I wish I had taken a picture of that!

Right there, in the heart of rich man's country, were migrant workers using the side of a levee as a toilet! This sounds unbelievable, but it happened.

Now imagine those workers doing their business, then walking across the levee to the field. They drag <whatever> into those lettuce and celery fields.

Suffice it to say, I'm not surprised we still have an E. coli problem with fresh produce.

 

[Fermion]

Don't fool yourself that you are safe from E-coli if you prepare your own food from the grocery store.

You might be ok if you cook everything and never eat a fresh raw fruit or vegetable.

 

[braumeister]

In manufacturing we called it the quality death spiral.

I once saw an interesting way to combat that.

A company produced an industrial product (not food) and they had the capability to ship an extraordinarily high quality. Let's call it 99.9999% pure.

But they had a major customer who set a standard of 99.93% pure, and they put a very high value on consistency from batch to batch.

So the manufacturer would check each batch and add enough adulterant to their highly purified product to get it down to 99.93% and everyone was happy.

 

[Clone]

The quality death spiral is interesting. When you couple this with the almost hypersensitive social media and pseudo news business, you end up with a scene where the original producers of some products (be it food or other materials) are run out of business when flaws are found. Taken to extremes, we kill the business locally, and begin to bring the product in from other places. Sometimes from places where we have little regulation or visibility of how quality is maintained.

Are we in a better place? Or did we simply suppress the bad news?

Many years ago I would end up going through the kitchens and back storage rooms of a number of very high end hotels and their associated restaurants. The food looked much better on the plates out front.

I am not ready to start only eating goo from a sterilized foil packet.

 

[Nodak]

3 hundred years ago most people drank wine or beer because water was not safe. The Pilgrims landed where they did because they were running out of beer.

 

[bUU]

As I recall, when e coli outbreaks at restaurants could be tracked to an identifiable source, many came about because uncooked food such as lettuce (or precooked food) came into contact with residue from raw meat during food prep.

I haven't seen anything indicating that any such cross-contamination occurred at any of Chipotle's restaurants with regard to the recent cases.

 

[youbet]

The details of the current Chipotle investigation make me think that if you're really concerned about food safety, you'll avoid not only Chipotle restaurants but any restaurant serving raw food. No salads. No fruit at breakfast. No fresh toppings such as tomatoes or leafy produce of any kind. And cooked foods must be very cooked.

They are reporting sick individuals who did NOT eat at Chipotle's as well as those that did. I hope the fact that Chipotle's is large enough to be a popular media target and also has deep pockets so will automatically be popular with litagation fans isn't causing the investigations to be too focused.

We all need to remember that you can't be too careful when scrubbing fresh produce for home consumption.

 

[marko]

The details of the current Chipotle investigation make me think that if you're really concerned about food safety, you'll avoid not only Chipotle restaurants but any restaurant serving raw food. No salads. No fruit at breakfast. No fresh toppings such as tomatoes or leafy produce of any kind. And cooked foods must be very cooked.

We all need to remember that you can't be too careful when scrubbing fresh produce for home consumption.

The 'fresh' food you eat could have been on the other side of the planet two days ago; who knows what was going on before and during transit?

At the same time, I've seen some pretty scary treatment of food grown 'locally' before and during it's own transit to market. Just because it was grown a few miles away at a local farm doesn't always mean that it was treated respectfully and carefully; many times just the opposite of something coming from a factory farm with better controls.

Scrub it and boil it!

 

[haha]

Scrub it and boil it!

Marko, how do you feel about bagged green salads like are often sold at Trader Joe? They are extremely handy for someone like me who lives alone, and also cheaper than trying to make a salad with assorted ingredients since for a household of one, some will inevitably be wasted.

I use many bagged greens, but I always cook them for taste and safety.

I eat raw fish, but only at a quality sashimi restaurant or oyster bar, or if I am doing it at home, that I buy from a Japanese fish market. Those guys are as picky as I am about their fish.

I also need to go to Ballard to buy some pickled herring. Christmas could not exist without freezer chilled vodka and pickled herring!

Ha

 

[marko]

Marko, how do you feel about bagged green salads like are often sold at Trader Joe? They are extremely handy for someone like me who lives alone, and also cheaper than trying to make a salad with assorted ingredients since for a household of one, some will inevitably be wasted.

I use many bagged greens, but I always cook them for taste and safety.

I eat raw fish, but only at a quality sashimi restaurant or oyster bar, or if I am doing it at home, that I buy from a Japanese fish market. Those guys are as picky as I am about their fish.

I also need to go to Ballard to buy some pickled herring. Christmas could not exist without freezer chilled vodka and pickled herring!

Ha

Had sushi last night. As you say, "those guys are picky about their fish". I do eat salads from a bag sometimes but generally I stay away from vegetables overall. My 86 year old mom hasn't eaten a vegetable in over 60 years...

 

[Walt34]

A Chipotles restaurant just opened a few weeks ago near here. Although it may be the quality death spiral, I do not foresee the time coming when we eat there. From my perspective the company has a system-wide problem and a few years after it's fixed I may consider eating there. But probably not. For me, their reputation is shot and they might just as well close up shop and go home.

The newspaper periodically publishes the results of health dept. restaurant inspections. It isn't hard to spot the ones that consistently have problems and we avoid those too.

 

[meierlde]

Marko, how do you feel about bagged green salads like are often sold at Trader Joe? They are extremely handy for someone like me who lives alone, and also cheaper than trying to make a salad with assorted ingredients since for a household of one, some will inevitably be wasted.

I use many bagged greens, but I always cook them for taste and safety.

I eat raw fish, but only at a quality sashimi restaurant or oyster bar, or if I am doing it at home, that I buy from a Japanese fish market. Those guys are as picky as I am about their fish.

I also need to go to Ballard to buy some pickled herring. Christmas could not exist without freezer chilled vodka and pickled herring!

Ha

Of course you could do like expats in Indonesia in the late 1980s and wash all greens in Clorox. (produce there on sumatra was quite suspect).

 

[braumeister]

Christmas could not exist without freezer chilled vodka and pickled herring!

I don't know about Christmas but my father's family (from northern Germany) were all religious about making sure everyone had a piece of pickled herring on New Year's Day.

I maintain the tradition and have only missed it once in all my life (the year I was in Vietnam).

As to salad greens, I think the simplest solution would be to use the technique recommended by the US State Dept. We were always advised to rinse raw vegetables before eating them. The usual method is (as best I can remember) about a tablespoon of household bleach (Clorox or the equivalent) in a gallon of water. That doesn't give any chlorine taste to the greens, but should be good enough to kill most nasties on the veggies.

 

[Big_Hitter]

We eat black eyed peas - Hoppin John if you will on NYD. No ecoli yet.

 

[JoeWras]

I've been going to Chipotle about twice a month for the last 7 years. I shall be going today.

I am looking forward to reduced lines.

If ya'll think you're OK getting your stuff <wherever:home, restaurant #2>, I've got news for you: you are not. Not when the people picking the stuff are making slave wages and dragging waste through the fields on their feet.

 

[marko]

A Chipotles restaurant just opened a few weeks ago near here.

Now there's a franchisee with exquisite timing! He probably started the process about a year ago....poor bum.

 

[youbet]

A Chipotles restaurant just opened a few weeks ago near here. Although it may be the quality death spiral, I do not foresee the time coming when we eat there. From my perspective the company has a system-wide problem and a few years after it's fixed I may consider eating there. But probably not. For me, their reputation is shot and they might just as well close up shop and go home.

The newspaper periodically publishes the results of health dept. restaurant inspections. It isn't hard to spot the ones that consistently have problems and we avoid those too.

While you suspect a system wide problem at Chipotles, evidence (and OP, a retired food safety professional) point to local sourcing as more likely the issue. That means, if you suspect any restaurant in town might be sourcing from a local farmer, you'll be subjecting yourself to the same risk as dining at Chipotles. If a local organic farmer has an e-coli problem with his lettuce, you're taking a chance whether you're eating it at Chipotles or at Bertha's Diner.

It's really a scary thing. I'd feel much more comfortable if the problem was tracked down to a central source. And I wish there would be more info published about the folks who are sick and did not eat at Chipotles.

 

[Clone]

Is there also an issue with our immune systems becoming less resistant to some of these 'bugs'. It is possible that we are seeing bigger badder bugs, but it is also possible that we have protected our children from so much of the 'ick', that this generation is not as robust as the past?

When I would travel, I would see the fresh vegetable carried on the backs of oxen to the river. They were washed in the river, downstream from where they washed the water buffalo. Downstream from where the raw sewage went in. Downstream from the cremation grounds. Most foreigners would get sick (almost guaranteed) if they ate the fresh foods. Yet the locals did mostly just fine. And when the folks from that country came to the US, our food would make them sick. A different set of bacteria or germs than what they were used to?

I suspect that what we see is a combination of many factors. In a few cases, we have some super germ. In others, we have poor handling practices. We have increased visibility and communication. And we have folks with agendas putting forth theories about what is going on.

I think that the local food kick can do many things. I think the freshness and taste can be impacted. Many vegetables that are commercially grown are varieties that are selected for the ability to be shipped, for how long they stay fresh, or for yield.

 

[haha]

When I would travel, I would see the fresh vegetable carried on the backs of oxen to the river. They were washed in the river, downstream from where they washed the water buffalo. Downstream from where the raw sewage went in. Downstream from the cremation grounds. Most foreigners would get sick (almost guaranteed) if they ate the fresh foods. Yet the locals did mostly just fine. And when the folks from that country came to the US, our food would make them sick. A different set of bacteria or germs than what they were used to?

What you can't see is that these people have a large parasite burden, with anemia and other results that makes them less able to work, and that causes daily pain in many cases. Many children in these situations never make their first birthdays. If the food and water supply gets cleaned up they often are 6" taller within a generation.

Ha

 

[aja8888]

I spent several months in Jakarta, Indonesia where 6 million people have no sanitary treatment system and use canals built by the early Dutch for all kinds of things. Those people (the ones that don't die within 6 months after birth) can handle unsanitary conditions and food laced with bacteria.

Me, not so much!

Chipotle has a problem and it is in trouble, but in the big scheme of things, it's not a deal killer.

 

[sanfanciscotreat]

Bloomberg Business website has an extensive article today re Chipotle's problems, elaborating on many of the areas I have mentioned above.

 

[Midpack]

Attempting to be all natural, organic, non GMO, no antibiotics leaves a lot of territory to audit and verify in the area of food safety. A large national chain would need to expend a lot of money and expertise to monitor all these suppliers.

I don't gave any basis to debate, but does anyone else notice how counterintuitive this seems. KFC and McD may be safer (nutrition, processing, etc. aside) than your local farmers market and farm-to-table restaurant. Doesn't pay to be a hipster...