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Danger, food sales with no bain-marie. Salmonella WARNING!
My blog is usually a positive one, but where health and safety issues are concerned, there is nothing positive I have to say about putting the public health at risk.

On the other hand, I do want to share a very positive message of how food poisoning caused by poor food handling and the resulting deterioration in my previous chronic health conditions, a period of disability support which allowed me to rest and recover from extreme ill health and a longer period of time, two and a half years now of positive lifestyle change, has granted me a second chance at life.

 

My story is triggered by my witnessing today, one of the worst breaches of health and safety in food handling. A family of stall holders here at the Nameless festival at Tom Price, broke numerous food handling rules and with one of the easiest to spoil foods, chicken.  The practices I witnessed have the potential to make people very ill and even cause death.

At mid afternoon two stall holders arrived with a large esky type container and they proceeded to unload take away food containers of precooked chicken meals on to trestle tables out in the sunshine.

 This broke several Western Australian,  health legislation's, the first being that chicken in not allowed to be prepared away from the site where it is sold, at a take away food stall, it must be cooked at the site.  Secondly the food must never be in the sunshine, and thirdly it must be kept at or above 60 degrees Celsius.

The food sat there for several hours, all the time I am looking at these warm sweaty containers of what would be contaminated chicken and wondering, ‘why on earth had they not been closed down by the organizers of the festival’.  I even spoke to several people about it and they could see no harm in it. Said, ‘it was good food they had bought some, admittedly when it first went on to the table hot, and they liked it’.   They were not worried about the risk of salmonella poisoning to the public,~~~ I was worried.

So I wandered back n forth, every now and then, keeping an eye on how this food was stored and served and a fellow stall holder, opposite them, was also concerned and watched and she told me, 'the food having gone from hot at mid afternoon to sitting warm in the sun for hours and then going cold, by evening was now being in the microwave ready for sale'. By 10pm people were buying chicken kept at bacteria growing temperatures for hours.

On top of those serious breaches of health and safety laws, the food  sellers were both chain smoking  while handling the food containers, bare hands, no gloves, no hand washing equipment and to add insult to injury the sign at the front of the stall said ‘the money from the sale of the food was to be donated to a charity’, neither I nor the only other person, who seemed concerned about it, had ever heard of, and there was nothing there to indicate there was a genuine charity involved, just the hand written sign, there was  no charity logo, brochure, nothing to show the supposed charity was anything but a rouse to increase sales and decrease the cost of the sites rental.

Every other food stall, as far as I am aware, on the show run, is professional, health and safety conscious and I would be prepared to eat at.  Certain food stalls I do regularly look forward to eating at.  I love my lamb shank, from the lamb van man and I do have a favourite, Asian food seller who makes a delicious chicken and mushroom  dish, the sweet corn van is a must visit at every show for Reg and myself.

I once purchased a dodgy garlic prawn’s dish at the Royal Melbourne Show, it was not from one of the regular food exhibitors I know, I should have read the warning signs and not purchased from a less than well equipped food seller.
I am worried for the health of those eating at the stall I described and urge show visitors, at any take away food venue, to see that cold foods are under refrigeration and hot foods are in a bain-marie.

I took a photo of the left over from today’s, prepared for sale food, on that stall, Iv'e described.  I wish I could have marked the containers as I have a horrid suspicion that, given the food sellers appear only interested in profits not customer safety, I think that food will be served tomorrow to the unwary customers at the Nameless Festival, at Tom Price.  I hope no one becomes seriously ill and hope some official will see the sense in putting these people out of the food handling business, quickly.

Getting back to my own experience with contaminated show food which resulted in a dreadful night in an emergency department in hospital where an impatient doctor decided that I must be ill from a diet of fairy floss, show bag junk and show rides and he never realized I was in fact a hard working show exhibitor, trying to sell my wares and eat as healthy as I could, while working the long hours involved in working on the show circuit. This doctor, abused me about my ‘life style’, and I was in no shape to tell him I felt he was, misjudging me.  He would however have been able to see that I was morbidly obese and so could have, in all fairness, assumed this was from eating junk food.  I sure know you can’t expect, TLC, in that particular hospitals, as, even while ill and in pain,  I was given a sound ‘telling off’ and I was told to ‘put myself on a three year, get back into shape, life style change.’  As much as I thought it inappropriate at the time, the memory stuck with me and once I had gotten over having been bullied while ill, I saw the common sense and the constructive possibilities of the ‘telling off’.

That gastro from the bad prawns, was the straw that almost broke the camel’s back, in my case and I actually had to go on a disability pension for some time, it took me several years to recover from that sever gastroenteritis  and the aggravation that acute illness had on my pre existing, chronic health issues.  I would have been in difficulties and not been able to take the time to recover enough to begin a get fit program a couple of years later, had disability assistance not been available to me.

For most people who need to be on a disability pension it’s not always easy to obtain, and good advice on how to complete your application is recommended.   In the US, Allsup is a leading nationwide, provider of financial and healthcare related services to people with disabilities and they have a 98% success rate in obtaining the disability pension for people who complete the application process through them. I am unsure if they have an Australian counterpart, but they would be a good place to start to make inquiries.   

I think there are far more people who struggle on working, when they would qualify for a disability pension than there are people who would rout the system and sometimes it takes a period of rest following illness, only achievable for most, with some financial support, to enable full recovery to take place and a chance to make those life style changes to allow a second chance at life.    Allsup has been active since 1984, and has helped more than 110,000 people receive their entitled social security disability , Insurance and Medicare benefits. 


Postscript. 
I am happy :-). Beautiful Tom Price, in Nameless Valley, is not going to be in the news for the wrong reasons.
 At 9am this morning, that unsafe food handler/seller, was closed down and everything including table cloths and tables, taken away.
A huge sigh of relief from me.

Postscript. 
Not so happy :-(. 11.40 am, I have heard the news, there has been an outbreak of gastroenteritis, in Tom Price.
 


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