The public should know about all food safety crises, not only those outbreaks that result in lawsuits and lots of media. The public should also know when a small businessman was incorrectly, if accidentally, identified as the source of a bad product. Today in the Salt Lake Tribune:
Business has been brisk enough since it opened in April — until the creamery was wrongly implicated in a salmonella outbreak in Salt Lake County.
“It hit us pretty hard,” Kohler said Tuesday. “We got all these calls [asking] ‘Is it safe to eat the cheese?’”
For the record, his Midway farm was never involved in the outbreak and has never been investigated for any foodborne illness.
Last week, the Salt Lake Valley Health Department incorrectly said that a man who sickened at least two people with his unlicensed, homemade queso fresco had used raw milk from a Midway dairy. At least one TV news station initially said a Midway cheesemaker was the source of the outbreak.
The massive outbreak that Midway was wrongly identified in is a 2,000 illness Salmonella Newport outbreak that was caused by negligence, plain and simple. The “Cheese Man” is a case study in how not to produce food, much less unpasteurized food from unpasteurized milk.