Berry Farm Fine & USDA Updates Food Safety

Berry Farm Fine & USDA Updates Food Safety

Berry Farm Fine & USDA Updates Food Safety plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack took advantage of the Cargill turkey recall to revealed new and updated food safety measures.

VILSACK: I think it’s important for people to understand that food safety is one of our principal responsibilities at USDA. It’s important for us to make sure that meat, poultry and processed eggs are as safe as they can be. We obviously want to make sure that folks who are engaged and involved in food safety realize that we’re continuing to do research. We made sure that there was an understanding of the steps that we are taking from performance standards in poultry to doing more sampling and testing of ground beef to making sure that we do a better job of communicating within the federal government when there is a problem so that everyone who has any responsibility in food safety is aware and obviously doing a much better job communicating to consumers about risk and problems and making sure that they understand when there’s a recall how to check their freezer, how to check their refrigerator to make sure they’re getting contaminated product out of their home.

The U.S. Labor Department has fined three southwest Washington strawberry farms a total of $73,000 for employing children as young as 6 years old as pickers. The department says all three employers removed the underage workers and agreed to attend wage and hour training for the next three years. A total of nine underage workers were found during a child labor investigation in June at farms in Woodland and Ridgefield.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

I was reading a book of nursery rhymes to my grandson the other day and he asked me the same question I remembering asking my grandmother when I was about his age, “what is curds and whey?” He was surprised to find out that he often eats curds and whey here at grandpa and grandma’s house, and what’s more is he likes it! Undoubtedly, lots of people eat curds and whey everyday without knowing it. Curds and whey are actually the lumps and liquid found in cottage cheese. Of course, the whey part of cottage cheese doesn’t necessarily taste very good, so modern cottage cheese makers tend to press or wash their product, leaving us the cottage cheese we know today that is mostly curds. The nutritional value of cottage cheese is really quite amazing, with only 165 calories per cup, no trans fat, a whopping twenty-eight grams of protein per serving, and is an excellent source of calcium, vitamins B12, B6, A,C,D, E, and K, not to mention the other vitamins and minerals found in cottage cheese. Little Miss Muffet was ahead of her day in the realms of eating healthy. My grandson had just one other question, “ what is a tuffet?” (Sigh)

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
 

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