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Instead of milk, some BPS kids got diluted sanitizer

The Herald reports Garelick Farms sent BPS some 1,000 milk containers that were filled with a sanitizer solution instead of milk - and that BPS learned of the problem when a student gave his back to a cafeteria worker because it neither looked nor tasted like milk.

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Yeah, we got the email from BPS notifying us of this. They didn't name the vendor though.
Huge f-up on Garelick's part. Hope they drop them as vendor.

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They mentioned this on the morning radio show “the breakfast club” a week or 2 ago as well. It was a different city/state school system they were reporting about at the time. Sad this wasn’t an isolated incident. I agree, that vendor needs to be dropped asap and investigated for negligence at the very least. This could’ve been so much worse for the kids.

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Not that many years ago, I worked as QA director of a food production facility: this is the kind of thing that would happen in my nightmares. Clearly, this was a breakdown of the food safety plan at an operational level (there is a reason workers are trained on HACCP and HARPC rigorously, and there should be numerous checks not only to ensure that equipment has been properly cleaned and tested but also that it is free of chemical residue). As bad as it sounds though, the company appears to have taken quick action in its recall, for which it is financially liable (and no doubt heads will roll internally). There really wasn't a life-threatening food safety danger, unlike with biological contamination that can go unnoticed by the consumer and that can easily kill a lot of people.

Still, a major screw up.

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So it's a good thing that they normally dilute their milk with water during the packaging process, otherwise the kids would've been drinking full-strength sanitizer.

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That's how they sanitize the equipment. Standard procedure.

What isn't standard procedure: failing to flush the tank and lines before returning them to production, including running off some of the new batch of milk to complete the process.

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but thanks for taking the time to educate naive little old me.

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Perhaps they got the GOP Covid treatment.

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But the government here is all run by democrats

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...that Garelick Farms is the government?

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Who hired them for the job? Who is responsible for quality control in the schools?

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answer is below, if you actually care. I doubt it.

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Someone hired them, someone checks the quality of food coming into the schools, and now someone fired them.

https://boston.cbslocal.com/2022/04/09/boston-public-schools-milk-gareli...

“Boston Public Schools are now searching for a new milk vendor.”

https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/tainted-milk-cartons-inadvertent...

All BPS does is give a comment from the spokesperson stating it happened other places too, while the mayor says her office will be the one ensuring that BPS doesn’t do this again. I can appreciate the accountability from the mayor, but it would be nice if BPS showed more of the same, instead of hiding behind a PR spokesperson.

They are called public schools and the public deserves more information from those involved as to how something like this happened. It has now been passed to Boston Inspectional Services and I don’t think anyone will be held accountable.

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Except for the most powerful politician in the state, the governor. And his Lieutenant Governor. And the judges he nominated.

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Ha. Michael Maguire is hilarious. Obviously not a real contender for Governor, but maybe his "campaign" will help shed some light on the food situation in most public schools.

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School lunches may be better than they used to be, but there is a long way to go in food quality regulations. They have to pass very minimal standards in deciding what to feed the children at public schools.

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/amp/blog/why-fast-food-is-healthier-t...

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but that article is distracting in precisely the way the scare-quote in the title is: the biggest problem in the healthiness of student lunches isn't food safety but nutrition, which is in part a consequence of funding and dietary choices, not the stringency of regulations by the USDA or FDA (and don't get me wrong: I'd love to see both catch up on a few things that the EU is already doing). Neither school lunches nor fast food are healthy, so the distinction is moot.

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Healthy options and free for all students. Nobody in the school goes hungry, which contributes to a wonderful learning environment.

There are ways to improve traditional school lunch programs.

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What is quality control?

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beyond "I can tell that doesn't work, because I can see it's broken" is the underlying question what is ontology?

Seriously, though, and I mean this respectfully: At least from a food safety standpoint, it is an internationally recognized set of standards (HACCP was built both by private industry and NASA):

https://safefoodalliance.com/food-safety-resources/haccp-overview/

If you're talking about nutrition and the health of populations, that is a different and (far more disputed) question.

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My point was that there must be no QC at that dairy because they didn't discover they were shipping sanitizer instead of milk.

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