Food-borne illnesses prevented with checks and balances

Now, consider how many people eat out in Las Vegas on a given day; at the MGM Grand alone, the estimate is as high as 35,000. So how in the world do the valley’s resorts and stand-alone restaurants keep from making crowds of tourists sick?

By treading very carefully, it seems.

There are many ways to get food poisoning, and many ways it can be prevented. Let’s first consider the pistachios and peanuts and all of the rest that in the recent outbreaks have been compromised at the supply end of the food chain. Barring a crystal ball, it can be difficult for a haute-cuisine chef or mom-and-pop restaurant owner to ensure that those won’t end up on the plates of their customers. But they do have help.

Gregg Wears, environmental health supervisor with the Las Vegas Strip office of the Southern Nevada Health District, said federal agencies have inspectors in the field — such as processing plants and actual farm fields — to regulate food-handling practices. In this way a lot of contamination is prevented — although, as the pistachios-with-salmonella prove — not all of it.

“I hate to say this, but no system is perfect,” Wears said.

If a problem is detected, he noted, the agency — typically the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — sends advisories to health districts, suppliers, supermarkets and other entities. Wears said the information is passed on to health district staff members so that they’re aware and can notify businesses when appropriate, but the news spreads fast. “We’ve gone to stores to check on products and they’re already knowledgeable of a recall,” he said.

That’s because they’re also in the business of obtaining information any way they can. Tim Jones, executive director of safety and health for MGM Mirage and the industry representative on the Southern Nevada District Board of Health, said the company gets information from a variety of sources — the FDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the health district, vendors and even out-of-state health agencies.

Once they are notified of a problem, the detective work starts. Purchasing agents at the various properties are contacted and asked to communicate with vendors to find out if any of the food and drink they’ve purchased are subject to recall. If the reply is affirmative, the food-safety committee at each property notifies each food outlet, including tenant restaurants.

Sometimes the vendors already have notified them. When asked how he prevents the spread of recalled foods, Todd Clore, chef/owner of Todd’s Unique Dining in Henderson, said, “The most honest answer is we buy from reputable people that track things.” The produce company he deals with, for example, tracks each product from the time it’s harvested through processing, packaging and delivery, documenting every step, he said.

“So if there is a scare, we know those peanuts came from this farm and that it wasn’t one of the ones affected,” he said. “With the amount of recalls and problems that we’ve had lately, it’s almost a full-time job to keep track of which farm and where did they go and who was the label. We make sure to know where everything comes from and track it back if we have to.”

Clore is a bit unusual in that he has perspective not only as a sole proprietor but also as a corporate employee. While his restaurant typically serves between 500 and 600 meals a week, he formerly worked at Bally’s, which served about 10,000 a day. Plus, because of commissary practices, Clore said the kitchens at Bally’s were producing some food items for five hotels.

“It became critical that everything was documented,” he said. “The temperature of the batch when it was made, bag number, the invoice.”

So — as is the case with MGM Mirage and other companies — if it was discovered that scallions used in batches between, say, lot 400 and lot 500 of chicken salad were subject to recall, those lots could be tracked to which hotel they went to and to which outlet in which hotel.

“It gets more intense when you get bigger,” Clore said.

In the case of many recalled food items, the general public doesn’t even know about it. Jones said MGM Mirage recently was notified by a supplier that some lot numbers of Samuel Adams beer were “suspicious” in terms of bottle damage.

“They knew before we knew,” he said of the supplier. “They advised us and we pulled it off the bars and out of storage.”

For obvious reasons, relationships with vendors are critical.

“We want to know their background and history,” Jones said. “We consider it a partnership with all of our vendors. It’s not adversarial when we get to a recall.”

Safe food-handling practices are facilitated, Wears said, by the fact that anyone holding a permit to operate a restaurant must acquire foods only from approved sources, which have been permitted by and are regulated by a government agency.

“When we go out and do a restaurant inspection, our inspectors look at labels, look at invoices,” he said. “Sometimes we find unlabeled products, which raises a red flag as to where this product comes from.” If the source can’t be verified, he said, the product will either be put on hold until it can be, or it’s destroyed. Wears said there have been several instances in Clark County of unpermitted meat-butchering operations.

“People can go and buy a cow or a pig on the hoof and have it butchered and it’s done in very unsanitary conditions, often outside,” he said.

But he emphasized that such incidents are the exception to the norm.

“Our charter is to have these restaurants get good food and help them keep it good all the way to the customer,” he said. “That happens a lot every day. What we hear about certainly catches our attention, but it is the tip of an iceberg of food handling, food production and food sales; it is not the iceberg.

“Most of it you never see, because it all goes right.”

Contact reporter Heidi Knapp Rinella at hrinella@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0474.