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Taking the fear out of farm fresh food | Ken Lee, Ph.D. | TEDxColumbus


[Music]
can we trust our foods to always be safe
food safety recalls are far too common
even farm-fresh foods can deliver deadly
disease so we need a fresh approach to
save to 420,000 lives that are lost each
year worldwide due to food contamination
now massive food recalls in the United
States are far too frequent these
involved ground turkey peanuts cocoa mix
cantaloupes eggs and peanut butter the
2009 outbreak was memorable because it
was not only the biggest in US history
five people died as a result and federal
prison sentences result from that
now these recalls also have something
else in common they have a common cause
any guess the common cause was a deadly
bacteria known as Salmonella and
Salmonella bacteria is the top bacterial
killer in food a million people in the
United States alone are made sick from
Salmonella hiding in the food every year
and 19,000 were so severe they required
hospitalization and I’m sad to say 380
never made it back home now Salmonella
is also the deadly hitchhiker in
farm-fresh eggs and the FDA reports 79
thousand cases from eggs alone with
another 30 deaths a year from
contaminated eggs so have you ever read
the fine print inside of an egg carton
I’m going to read it maybe you could
actually see enough to read along with
me to prevent illness from bacteria keep
aids refrigerated cook eggs until yolks
are firm and cook foods containing eggs
thoroughly so does refrigeration kill
Salmonella no it doesn’t and
unfortunately most of the world
refrigeration is not the practice or
it’s not even possible
our soft-boiled egg yolk sperm is is a
go for easy cook thoroughly
so this well-intentioned warning
statement really does little to save the
illnesses and lives lost each year in
United States and worldwide so no
question that eating raw eggs is risky
raw cookie dough hollandaise sauce
tiramisu Caesar salad dressing and even
eggs over-easy are a few favorite raw
egg recipes that could be deadly are
these foods that we’re willing to give
up or do we need a different approach
now I’m going to answer the question
that’s on your mind right now which came
first the illness or the egg about one
in 10,000 eggs are infected with
salmonella and this is not just surface
contamination everyone none that knows
that shell egg is dirty
you can’t just wash it off every once in
a while the infected hen will make a
mistake she will put Salmonella inside
the egg in the white or the yellow where
it can’t be seen it can’t be detected
but it can be quite deadly now the
average American consumes about 267 eggs
every year so if you just do the math by
the time you reach 75 years of age you
will have consumed two toxic eggs and
that’s two too many
i average two eggs a day and that means
by the time I retire I’m due for toxic
eggs and I personally want every a guy
eat to be safe but I can’t trust that
chicken to make a safe egg for me
so so Rocky Balboa what did he do 4 a.m.
he’s consuming 5 Roy aids to prepare for
the title fight of his life
and that legend lives on Sylvester
Stallone showed up on Letterman just a
few years ago at the 30th anniversary of
his picture and they had a rug toast
now bodybuilders worldwide continue to
obsessively consume raw eggs in the hope
of building lean body tissue and it
works this good protein what the world
record was set by this fellow who
appeared on America’s Got Talent
who consumed 120 raw eggs in 90 seconds
and they followed him into the dressing
room he held it now I’ll just inform you
my picture is not on this slide but I
gave up bodybuilding a long time ago but
I built my expertise in food poisoning
and I had cramps headache tremors –
bucket challenge and I thought I was
going to die in about four days of being
bedridden but by the end of the week I
was wishing that I was dead just to put
an end to the misery that’s how severe
salmonella intoxication can be and it’s
with that severity that the NBC news
program Dateline NBC did an expose where
they discovered that eggs that were past
the 30-day pull date that’s printed on
every carton were being sent back to the
processor which is responsible but then
the processor was able through a crazy
loophole in the law to wash those eggs
and put them back in cartons with new
dates on them so you could just imagine
an egg cycling indefinitely between the
grocery and the packaging plan this
crazy loophole in the law is no longer
allowed but Dateline NBC got consumers
really mad and it got the President of
the United States to actually write an
executive order and
President Bill Clinton who signed the
United States egg safety action plan and
in his executive order he said all eggs
will be Salmonella free by the year 2010
so who remembers 2010 and eggs what
happened what happened to eggs in 2010
well if you recall a recall your your
recall is actually quite accurate
we had a record-setting recall a half a
billion 500 million eggs were pulled off
the grocery shelves because guess what
potential contamination with Salmonella
now that was a call to action we could
use traditional technologies to clean up
Salmonella you hard-boiled or in a
you’re killing the Salmonella because it
is heat sensitive so if you he takes
just to the point before it starts to
boil to solidify you can kill the
Salmonella but unfortunately you made
the egg white cloudy or worse yet you’ve
soft-boiled EA you can also use a
technology called food irradiation where
you use gamma ray x-ray and that is also
very effective but it has the opposite
effect opposites effective heat it makes
the egg white more fluid and as you know
irradiation still has a consumer
acceptance issue so
we need to understand the FDA has a food
code and they prohibit raw eggs from
hospitals nursing homes and in k-12 food
programs because people who are very old
very young or immune compromised cannot
take the risk of getting Selman analysis
or food poisoning now in these cases
they have to use pasteurized powder or
pasteurized liquid eggs but these
pasteurized eggs come with a significant
taste penalty and in my field of study
which is food science if you’ve got a
taste penalty it’s game over nobody will
eat it so maybe we need a fresh approach
and that fresh approach is to use ozone
ozone is three atoms of oxygen linked
together the air were breathing right
now is two atoms of oxygen ozone forms a
layer over the stratosphere that
protects us from the harmful radiation
from the Sun sometimes after a lightning
strike you smell a sweet smell that’s
actually ozone that was made by the
electricity and some people are now
using ozonator x’ in their hot tubs
replaced the questionable chlorine so if
there’s Salmonella hiding inside of an
egg ozone can get to it and a very
inventive colleague of mine dr. Ahmad
Yosef discovered that if he pushed ozone
into that egg under pressure he can kill
any bacteria and also avian influenza
any bacteria that’s in that egg and he
patented the technology and this is his
patent and him and I’ve received federal
funded research that proved the ozone
process produced safe aids they exceeded
the thermal pasteurization by 90% in
terms of efficiency and there was no
taste penalty eggs continued to have
their fresh food functional properties
so this is a great discovery but it was
even better because what we did is we
started building these prototype eight
processing machines this was the first
one where we could actually sterilize
our pasteurized two dozen eggs in a
batch and that’s professor Yosef in the
middle surround the smiling man in the
middle and he’s surrounded by his
other smiling gentlemen who happen to be
egg farmers and these egg farmers had an
exclusive license to his patent and
they’re happy because they they can now
produce healthy not harmful eggs for
their customers we invited an executive
chef panel and these were chefs from
large institutional feeding operations
like the hospitals and from four-star
restaurants and they verified that these
eggs worked in their favorite fresh food
or fresh egg recipes the eggs were not
cloudy and they behaved like fresh eggs
which was wonderful now we have to trust
fresh foods and when we produce farm
fresh milk we pasteurize it before we
give it to our children we trust that
milk to always be safe the same should
be true for farm-fresh eggs and it’s
with this argument that the state’s
economic development agency gave my team
three million dollars to help bring the
ozone safe egg to the market so we’re
building the nation’s first commercial
scale Eidos own factory this was
actually built and we have coming out of
the chamber six thousand three hundred
eggs that were made safe with ozone and
the yeas again fresh not cloudy
functional three family farms got
together and created this symbol that’s
yellow check symbol which they intend to
stamp on every egg and when it gets to
the commercial market
and much like USDA Organic or
gluten-free kosher heart-healthy or
double-a grade this is the consumers
assurance that these eggs have been
pasteurized for safety these may be
coming soon to a restaurant near you so
people can pick pasteurized for personal
peace of mind we leave or first or
second in the nation for whole shell egg
production so what we do here could
impact the world and we hope it does we
need to create a future where we can
trust farm-fresh foods that have no risk
of illness and certainly
risk of death I look forward to a time
when we can look back and wonder how
weird it was that we actually consumed
fresh eggs fresh out of a dirty chicken
I really look forward to a time when all
foods are both healthy and safe so every
person on the planet can live a full
productive life now I went up to the
factory yesterday and I picked up some
eggs and these eggs were well these are
truly pure ozone safe eggs and I’m not
just making a wisecrack here to say
doctors of food science can cure sick
foods
you
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