Longtime city contractor supplies expired food to Brooklyn homeless shelter

 

 NY Daily News

A Brooklyn homeless shelter turned into a vomitorium after at least half a dozen people ate rancid chicken salad served by the city, the Daily News has learned.

The poison poultry – which had a bogus expiration sticker — was offered for lunch at the Fort Greene Shelter on Auburn Place last Thursday.

Shelter resident Edna Smith said some of the sickening salad smelled sour, but she dug in anyway and immediately regretted it.

“All of a sudden I started to get light-headed and I started sweating,” Smith, 53, explained. The projectile vomiting came next.

“The coffee went through my nose and the food went through my mouth," she told The News.

 At least three other people tossed their cookies after chowing down on the chicken salad – which was marked as expiring on Oct. 31.

But that date was wrong. A closer look at the empty containers revealed the original label underneath, dated Sept. 20.

“They’re giving us food that has double labels and I have the evidence," said shelter resident Pierre Landro. “This isn’t the first time this happened. This has gone on a number of times. This is unbelievable.”

 The city Department of Social Services confirmed that a food vendor called Whitsons delivered expired meals to the shelter with inaccurate labels.

 That salad came from Sally Sherman Food, a Mount Vernon, Westchester County based business, and the labels were switched there, according to records and city officials.

“We will not tolerate any action that puts the health and safety of families experiencing homelessness at risk and we have temporarily replaced the food provider at this shelter pending our ongoing review," a DSS spokeswoman said. "We have confirmed this was an isolated occurrence at this location and have required the provider to take immediate corrective actions and submit a quality assurance plan to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

Whitsons won a contract with the city in a 2010 competitive bid process, authorities said.

Under the contract, Whitsons has been providing food to six shelters, at a cost of roughly $35 million since 2014, records show.

In August, the Food and Drug Administration slapped Bronx-based Whitsons with a warning letter after an inspection found “serious violations,” unsanitary conditions and the presence of the germ listeria.

Don't fret! Mayor Big Slow de Blasio is on the case!

NY Daily News

Mayor de Blasio called for an investigation into how a city homeless shelter ended up serving rancid food to residents, leaving them puking poultry while callous staff allegedly laughed at their suffering.

“There has to be an investigation,” Hizzoner said Thursday, after the Daily News broke the story of the food foul-up. “There has to be a look at it to see if it’s a situation that can be resolved. But if we don’t like what we see, we’ll change vendors.”

He also expressed sympathy for the at least six victims who were served rancid chicken salad at the Fort Greene Shelter in Brooklyn on Oct. 24.

“It’s horrible,” de Blasio said at an unrelated news conference. “Thank God, as I understand it, the folks who were exposed are going to be okay.

“But no, we don’t accept that,” he continued. “Any vendor who doesn’t do their job, they’re not going to be a vendor with us.”

 Yes, food poisoning is horrible Bill and you should find a new vendor. Idiot.

Schumer wants FDA to crack down on dirty warehouses

From AMNY:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration should beef up inspections after the agency uncovered gross violations in a rat-infested Brooklyn food warehouse, Sen. Charles Schumer said Sunday.

The warehouse, New Yung Wah Trading Company in Williamsburg, had rodent nests, carcasses, feces and urine, as well as birds flying throughout the facility, defecating on food products, during an October inspection, according to a Dec. 9 warning letter from the FDA. Last year, the FDA sent 90 warning letters to food facilities around the country, according to Schumer. He called for the FDA to treat any facility that got a warning letter as "high risk" and increase inspections; a database for retail food vendors to check on suppliers' violations; and hike penalties.

V.I.P. = very infested place

From the NY Times:

Fans of KoJel kosher foods like instant pudding, hot chocolate mix and instant noodle soup, brace yourselves: V.I.P. Foods, the Queens food supplier that manufactures the products, had about $1 million in inventory seized by the federal Food and Drug Administration because of “widespread rodent infestation,” federal prosecutors said on Friday.

The F.D.A. seized the foodstuffs from V.I.P.’s Ridgewood, Queens, headquarters on March 19, after inspectors visited on multiple occasions between October and February, according to a complaint filed last month in federal court.

On Oct. 25, inspectors “observed over 1,200 rodent excreta pellets, at least 4 live and dead mice, and rodent-gnawed containers of food,” as well as rodent urine stains on and around foodstuffs, the complaint says.

After receiving notice of the violations, V.I.P. told the F.D.A. that the problems were fixed, but when inspectors returned in February, they found the same problems, the complaint states.

FDA shutting down Queens cheesemaker

From the NY Times:

The Food and Drug Administration is trying to shutter permanently a cheese factory in Queens whose owners failed to clean up the plant after a potentially deadly bacteria was discovered on more than one occasion, according to the government.

This week, the agency filed suit in Federal District Court in Brooklyn to halt all dairy production at the company, Mexicali Cheese Corporation in Woodhaven, due to what it called a history of unsanitary conditions and its managers’ refusal to change their practices.

Inspections over the last three years, which were set off by the finding of staphylococcal bacteria in a cheese sample in 2009, have turned up a long list of violations, including equipment that was covered in harmful bacteria; flies, maggots and mold in production areas; stagnant pools of dirty water on the floor; and rodent excrement in the supply rooms, the suit said.

Besides staphylococcal bacteria, which can cause a staph infection, inspectors found traces of listeria, another deadly bacteria, particularly for pregnant women and their fetuses and for people with compromised immune systems. The agency had no reports of illness caused by Mexicali cheese.