EHO Knows: Sushi- Happens w/ Kylie D’Alton

Shane: [00:00:00] Welcome to the next episode of EHO Knows.

Now, when I first heard this talk, I was just blown away. Like what we’re about to talk about is the ultimate food poisoning weapon. Um, and we’re talking about something that is absolutely everywhere, and I am sure that the problem that we’re about to address is absolutely. Everywhere. Um, but we’ve finally got one council that was prepared to own the problem and to try and solve the problem.

And so this is their journey on how to try and make the ultimate food poisoning beast safe for the general public. So, welcome Kylie Dalton from uh, Waverly Council. Um, yes, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. now we’ve previously done eggs, and so there’s a good argument that eggs are the ultimate food poisoning, um, entity.

Um, but here we’re talking about sushi. Um, [00:01:00] what’s so, what’s so good about sushi when it comes to food poisoning? Uh. Well, first of all, can I say the popularity of sushi has just exploded? I dunno about where you live, but around Waverly, there’s sushi shops on basically every corner. Okay. There’s so many, so, so criteria number one, everyone’s eating it nowadays.

Yep. Okay. Yeah. And a wide population, like I would say, kids love it. Like there’s a huge amount of young people also eating it. So it’s super, super trendy amongst kids, um, adults. Okay, so everyone’s on board. There’s so many other things. There’s so many places where the preparation of sushi can go wrong.

So perhaps first of all, that people don’t like to eat it cold. They’re lucky about room temperature. They think that the cold rice. Is it crispy or they don’t like it? Really cold. Okay. So it’s a food that we’d like to put straight into the danger zone and really get the [00:02:00] bacteria. It’s stored in the danger zone.

Most sushi shops either have a sushi train or it’s being displayed. You know, it might be cool, but it’s not in the, um, it’s not cold enough to keep it safe, and most shops are using the two hour, four hour rule of some kind. Yes. So sushi cha uh, trains, they’re, they’re incredible because you can just watch the same dish come by time and time and time again.

Um, and then there’s others that just so, you ever go to a sushi train, you wanna sit there for one lap and just make sure that you’re not getting something that’s been sitting there for way too long. Okay? So, everyone’s eating it. Uh, we’d love to store it at room temperature. Um, uh, we’ve got.

every second place is now making it, and in fact, it’s worse than that. Every supermarket feels compelled to be making it, and it could be made fresh, could be made offsite, and it’s sitting there. Um, so, so you can now buy it anywhere? It’s manufactured. Oh, [00:03:00] sorry. It’s created by almost everyone. Okay. Yeah.

There’s a few other things. Most of the products are raw. Yes. Some of the parts that are cooked like chicken aren’t reheated before they’re sold. Okay, so let’s now take seafood, raw seafood and let’s dump that in. And then store it at room temperature, so that’s a winner. Okay. Or if we’ve got chicken, pre-cooked chicken, not necessarily reheated, cut up on a chopping board, bunged into, um, the sushi and left at room temperature.

Okay. Big batches of rice. So we found lots of the big companies are. Cooking their rice off site, like at a headquarters and then shipping them around town, but big batches, um, being stored like that, sometimes under temperature control. But again, they’re using the two hour, four hour rule Yes. Of rice. Yeah.

Um, and so depending on who’s. Doing it, there’s the perception that, oh, it’s rice, it’s safe, or, you know, yes, [00:04:00] it’s a potentially hazardous food needs to be kept, um, you know, to our four hour rule. and rice is awesome because, um, you know, let’s be serious. When it comes to rice, it’s the, it’s the ultimate in, um, in food poisoning.

So, yep. once it’s contaminated, that’s it. It doesn’t matter what you’re gonna do, but we’re not gonna do anything because we’re gonna just wrap it up. And leave it in room temperature and consume it. Okay, so we’re on a roll. Anything else about sushi? There’s a few. I’ve still got a few. There’s a few other which go into preparing safe sushi.

Um, so some of the others are about the recipes. We have some people using traditional recipes, so they don’t actually have a recipe written down about how they acidify the rice. So it might be something that someone knows but is written down. That’s hard for us to check on. So, jumping ahead a little bit, once we start talking about walking into, especially the small sushi joints or the places where [00:05:00] sushi’s just like a little bit of an xray on the side, where do they get their recipes from?

Well, that’s a good question. I mean, we do ask that we need to see their recipe so we know if they’re acidifying it correctly. So quite often it’s just someone. The cook who’s not there at the moment makes it. But um, yes, we’re trying to make that change. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, recipe may be a traditional recipe, maybe just something off the internet.

yeah, so questionable recipes in the first place. Um, okay, what else about sushi? One thing that we have found is, which is perhaps our biggest concern is the discounting of sushi at the end of the day is becoming ingrained into our society that sushi will be put on the counter at the end of the day, very heavily discounted.

Kids on the way home from school, parents on the way home from work will get it. It’s on, on the counter. It’s not under temperature control, [00:06:00] and it might be at the end of the four hours. So then people are. They’re taking it. They’re taking it to the beach. They’re taking it home for their kids. Four hours is already up and then it’s being fed to a vulnerable, potentially a vulnerable population.

And, and people expect that. And so that’s really the, the perfect, you know, storm now brewing. So yes, fantastic two hour, four hour rule. We’re doing the compliant thing. Um, and we’re, we’re selling it for immediate consumption. Um, and then kids are. Wandering past, at the end of the day on the way down to the beach, or mom or dad are going past and going, oh, excellent, I’ll grab this.

They might take it home, put it in the fridge, but the next day they’ll pop it in the lunchbox for the kids. Or you take it down to the beach and you, you know, go for a swim, surf, whatever. And three or four hours later you come back and you have your little bit of, of sushi. [00:07:00] fortunately today, it’s only 30 degrees. You know, today’s a beautiful day. A couple days ago it was 42 degrees. yeah, so anyone listening in, in America, um, apart from, you know, Mexico, yeah, we don’t have problems with snow here. We just have problems with it hitting 40 degrees every summer. We’re tough in Australia. Uh, so, so yeah, we’ve got the perfect, uh, it’s portable and so we can just drop it in the kids’ lunchbox. Um, or Yeah, yeah, we can just slip it in our pocket as we head down to the beach or whatever the case may be. So, yeah, so, so we’ve got dodgy rice, dodgy, um, seafood, dodgy chicken, um, being left.

Out while it’s in store, being left out, while it’s being held or whatever. Um, so sushi really is the perfect food poisoning, food item. Uh, okay. So what brought it to your attention, Liam? We looked at our complaints. We know [00:08:00] anecdotally, um, that sushi shops were overrepresented. But when we did our numbers, we could tell that our sushi shops weren’t performing as well as they should be, and the complaints were just too many, too many complaints.

We found there was a lot of complicated work for people about measuring pH, and that’s really where the. They were starting to go wrong, the pH, and using the two hour, four hour rule, that’s where we could see the sushi shops really overrepresented in, in, uh, um, areas of non-compliance. Yeah. Okay. And to be really, really clear here, we know that your particular council area just has dodgy restaurants.

So this is a problem that is 100% isolated to your area. Um. And so how big a problem you, so, so we haven’t got the stats, everything that we’re about to talk about right now totally made up on the spot. Like all good stats should be. Um, [00:09:00] how big a problem do you think it is Nationally, it’s unknown and I think that’s a problem with foodborne illness.

Most people where they get sick, they blame the last thing they ate or the last time they went out. People don’t necessarily know the source of their illnesses, so. We, we just need to be more careful. I think we could, there’s a lot of work that we can do and other counselors can do with sushi. To ensure there’s a higher level of compliance.

Um, I guess also sushi is slightly different to if you go and have a bulk prepared dish at a restaurant and a whole bunch of people suddenly get sick. But these really are just little time bombs and, um, and so you’ve just got a couple here that have been left until the end of the day and someone might eat one that day, or they might eat it the next day.

And so you’re just gonna have all these little pockets of, of. Food poisoning outbreaks as opposed to one massive outbreak where you can do cause and effect. That’s true. Um, combined with the fact [00:10:00] that you’re talking about lots of little places. So it’s just a small problem just bubbling away, um, and just hitting individuals all over the place.

Um, so why do we even eat sushi? How do we make sushi safe? There’s lots of ways. That we can make sushi safe. We need to really put all those controls in place to make sure that from the rice to the sushi, to the hygiene, uh, to the, the pH certification of the rice to good record keeping, putting all of those things in place can mean that the sushi can be a very safe product.

And we had a few, we have plenty of shops, which were perfect. It can be done. It’s not impossible. It just requires education, um, compliance enforcements, and we found education compliance wasn’t working for us. We also knew that we had one particular food shop, which was giving us [00:11:00] some grief. About three years ago, it received three or four pins.

The year after that, received a full prohibition order. It just, we weren’t getting any, any better. So what we did is tried to open the communication through this program. We went through the inspections very slowly with them measuring pH, all that education rather than the threats. We were talking. We were opening the communication and now you wouldn’t believe it if it’s a five star sushi shop.

Same staff, same owner. We haven’t had to go anywhere. European improvement notice prohibition, their education worked and it was about taking the time. And rather than just taking that strict compliance action and taking that education and being it’s kindness, it’s not necessarily about not not issuing those fines.

It’s about spending some time with them, making [00:12:00] sure that they’ve got the guidelines in their own language and that they have what it takes to. Um, comply with the guidelines. Yeah. So, uh, if this is the one that you talked about in your talk, I know where you, when you first stepped in, what were they like?

They were terrible. I mean, we found pH records that had been completed for the day, so I was there like eight o’clock. I’m like, why have you completed your records already? You’ve made it up. Yeah. So that could pass for some people. If I went later in the day, I might have been fine. So they were, they were dodging their records.

I don’t know why they were doing that. Their pH meter looked disgusting. So, and I mean, they can try clean it, but we need to say, you need to set a new path here. You need a new pH meter. We need to get your records reset from the start. And they also started using a, a sticker system. Um, for the two hour, four hour rather than a color, it actually stamped the [00:13:00] date that it was put out, which is a bit different to most sushi shops, but it’s what they needed to comply.

They were getting lost in colors and things like that. Yes. so they know what they’re meant to do, but they’re dodging it. personally, how did they come across?

Well, can I say that they have told me that they used to be afraid of us, so they didn’t like us being there. And so they came across defensive, uh, worried so. Just try to break that barrier where it wasn’t necessarily a fear of the EHO, but an EHO is someone you can go to for advice and for education and for assistance, which can help you improve your food shop.

Rather than being afraid and hiding and trying to dodgy your records, you can be open if the PH wasn’t right. you at your um, v and. Fix up your records or if you’re not sure where it should be, you can speak to your EHO and we can help you through it. Yes. well, let’s go, [00:14:00] uh, are we talking about migrant or are we talking about someone where language isn’t a barrier?

Language is definitely a barrier and has been with most of our sushi shops, so that’s why it was, um, good to not necessarily have the guidelines. In different languages ’cause it’s not available in a wide range of languages. But when we did need to have information provided in different languages, for example, about sanitization, um, the two hour, four hour, we were able to get those in different languages.

And in fact, with some shops, we laminated them, hand them to them and really walked them through the steps, which isn’t something we would think that we have to do. It’s up to them to comply. After a couple of years with some of these shop owners, we knew that we had to make the extra effort to get, to get compliance.

Yeah. And I, I think what’s really cool here is that you could just turn around and say, it’s their problem. We can just come in with a big stick and force them to fix it. [00:15:00] But you just turn around and said, no, this is a community problem. And so as a community, you need to address it. And so educate, equip and uh.

Now did you have to pull the big stick out at any stage? You know, you, you’re going through this nice process. Did you have to play bad cop? We didn’t through this program we had a year or so ago, and that’s really why we were trying to focus on education quite heavy. Um, can I say since we’ve had one shop that we’ve had to issue an infringement to.

So it, you know, it doesn’t work with everyone and owners change and there’s different issues in different shops. Um, but it’s certainly achieved a high level of compliance than what we had before. Oh. And so, um. So you’ve mentioned pH um, and in fact I love the pH point because, uh, for me, you know, I step into a [00:16:00] sushi place now and I always just ask one question and um, and the answer to that question will determine whether or not I’ll just walk out straight away.

And it’s simply. What is the pH of your rice? And um, and what’s really cool, what I love about that question is, um, there’s one unacceptable answer, but which is. I don’t know. In which case you’re just going, nah, I’m out of here because you are. It’s obviously not on the radar. Um, my favorite sushi place, just around the corner, she said, I don’t know, we write it on over there.

Do you want me to go check? I’m going, sweet. You are monitoring pH and you know what I’m talking about. And you know where to find the answer. And so you go, uh, that’s awesome. Um. What’s the correct answer by the way? 4.6. Okay. and there’s, you know, great pH meters. Actually, here’s a, here’s a good question.

pH meters, uh, they range from I think around about [00:17:00] $50 upwards to hundreds of dollars From a restaurant’s point of view, what should they be having in store? They need to have a, a pH meter. Um, or we don’t tell them what brands or what variety, but perhaps. Even more importantly, they need to keep it clean.

Yes. And they need to be able to calibrate it. So we had ones which are gross and messy and disgusting, and that was a huge problem. So, so just to double down on, hey, we’ve got the perfect vessel for you to inject bacteria into, and now we’ve got the perfect tool for you to be able to take it from here And shove it in there. Okay. Cool. So, so, yeah. It was soil. They didn’t even have, like, they just bought something. They had it and they weren’t even using it. So perhaps they wave something around quick enough. The eh l be right. Yeah. Check. Sure, you’ve got it. Um, but we need to see it in action and make sure it’s actually going to be useful for sushi.

Okay. So it needs to be cleaned and it can’t be wrapped in the original [00:18:00] plastic. okay. So, pH sushi, um. The environment for, um, preparing. So here’s an interesting one because now you’ve got raw fish that’s being cut up and prepared, uh, but you’ve also then got rice, um, and you know, preparation for there.

How much do you see cross contamination on chopping boards and the like? Yeah, I mean, I think that’s, that can occur. It wasn’t the predominant issue that I found. Um, perhaps what we saw more often was. What’s quite typical in food shops with chopping boards that can’t be sanitized. Uh, we used sanitizer test strips during this project and there wasn’t too big of an issue regarding that.

They were sanitizing and it was working. Yeah. Um, but there were plenty of, um, chopping boards that needed to just be replaced. Yes, that’s common. We find that in all of our food shops. Okay. [00:19:00] pH cleanliness, anything else that a restaurant should be doing and just aren’t doing the, the two hour, four hour with sushi shops is just a standout.

I mean, if we know they’re not going to keep it under temperature control, they have to be used in the two hour, four hour precisely. So have good records about how they use was the four hour they’re really using, but they need to, we’ve had places who had stickers and the, the pink kind of looked like the red.

You couldn’t tell which one. And then they’re like, oh, well I used different stickers today. Right. To keep track of how long that food’s been out. Or sometimes I’ll make big batches and put them all the same sticker, even though they were took, you know, 40 minutes. Yes. The whole stack, the two hour, four hour needs to be applied accurately.

Yes. We’re not messing around, we’re not joking. It’s not approximate. It’s not like putting a pink or red sticker on it needs to be [00:20:00] precise as it can be. anything else?

I think that the, the main thing we found with our sushi project is we opened ourselves with the communication. We gave them the opportunity to come to us, like we allow all food shops to, you know, ask questions, but by putting the invitation out there. We did have food shops come and say to say to us and have questions and um, talk about the conversation about how sushi is made or transported.

And that’s wonderful because it’s really led to a high level of compliance and that sushi or any kind of food shops just. Opening up that communication, uh, was, was key. Yes. Okay. So we’ve now got, you know, the perfect weapon sushi. Um, we know what we’re meant to do. Um, and so you’ve got the education resources and everything.

Um, uh, but you also then went one step further and you, uh, or did we put this out that you modified, [00:21:00] um, scores on doors. And so yeah, what were the changes? What did you add? We didn’t modify scores on doors. We modified our F paths. Yes. Our food assessment report. And can I say there’s kind of a component into that, which, um, other councils might face is that we had EHS in our team who’d never inspected sushi before.

They’d never used a pH meter. We didn’t have stand operating procedures for the pH meter, so who knows when it was calibrated or how it was cleaned or, um, so we had these internal processes that we needed to update to make sure that we could, um. We could communicate and update our food shops the best way possible.

And that started with upskilling our eh hos. Yeah, sorry. It started, sorry. Putting Extrap in place and the fpar. So, so just to stop there, that’s a really interesting question just to be asking all our listeners as to, you know, it’s one [00:22:00] thing to be pointing the finger at all these restaurants and saying, Hey, are you doing the right thing?

Um, but then there’s the skill gap. With every single specialty food that comes along, um, you know, are you actually internally, um, uh, equipped? And so it’s just absolutely awesome. One to identify it, and then two, to stand up in public and say, Hey guys, we dropped the ball on this. We needed to start in house and educate ourselves, get the skills necessary so that all of our inspectors stepping out into these places were equipped.

So, um, so yeah, that’s, that’s totally awesome. Okay, so. Uh, so education in-house, I saying with the fpar, we added specific sushi questions, which were missing before. So we’ve asked about whether they’re keeping their records, um, what their pH was, um, whether they, they had skills and knowledge specific to sus.

Questions that really came from the New South Wales Food Authority guidelines for the preparation of sushi. But [00:23:00] it meant when the officer was out there, they’ve got all those cues to ask the right questions specific to su, to sushi. Yes. Uh, off the top of your head, can you remember what they are? Now we’re putting you to the test here.

Let me just

in a clean condition where they can demonstrate the use of the pH meter. Um, and so we test the sushi as well as they, they do, um, on the spot. So whether those results are the same, yes. Um, whether the rice is acidified, the recipes known, um, whether the rice, when the rice is guarded, how long is the rice rice cap for, um, if it’s sort acidified, if it’s refrigerated, um, and temperature control questions.

And whether they’re gonna effective system for the two hour, four hour. Yes. So that’s most of the questions, which is everything that we’ve been talking about. Um, so [00:24:00] from that point of view, you are now stepping in and you’ve now got additional, um, points that they can lose. so anyone who’s not familiar with the scores and doors.

Uh, system, uh, don’t watch my skating videos on it. Um, but basically the way it works is that if you comply with the standards, you’re gonna get five stars. And then as you screw things up, you lose points. And once you hit a threshold, you go down to four stars. And once you go past another threshold, you go down to three stars.

So by adding more questions to it, you are just making it easier for restaurants and cafes to go. Backwards, um, and drop from five star to four to three star. Um, yeah, essentially. So, so first time round you’re going around testing these restaurants. How bad is it? Are they losing points left around and center, or, or what was it like?

we did our education at the, at the start. So we compared those inspection results [00:25:00] to, to results before. The inspection. So there, there were different FPAs. Yes. So it’s not fair to compare. And at that stage we also weren’t using scores on doors. So it wasn’t something, they had a huge awareness. A lot of food shops weren’t even concerned about how many stars they had, but compliance now is better.

We’ve seen that. Um, so it has led to a greater letter of compliance. Without getting into too much details about what, how many stars on the FA, but like I said, we’ve had restaurants that have been fine three, four times full prohibition order, and now they’re five stars. Yes. So that kind of result is, and.

It’s fantastic. It hasn’t happened like that across the board, but the, the lift has been upwards. Yes. Um, and so in terms of, I, I, I think it’s a really fascinating concept of you. If you’re a standard restaurant, here’s the standard FAR, um, but wait a minute, because you are putting your hand up and saying, Hey, we wanna do [00:26:00] this.

Here’s. An additional, um, set of requirements. Um, and so it would be really interesting do you think, you know, new South Wales would be bold enough to turn around and start going, okay, here’s optional ones for any place that prepares sushi or, you know, any of the other sort of high risk foods. I don’t know if the impact is great enough.

Than that. And considering that all places that make sushi receive the same F pass, so they’re all rated the same. So I dunno if it would have that greater impact. Um, but you’ve identified, you know, just things like testing pH and um, uh, and some of the other things like cross contamination. You’d argue that, you know, cross contamination rule applies to thermometers, um, pH meters.

Um. The unsure, I can think off the top of my head, but anything that’s used for, um, testing and measuring needs to be cleaned in between. Um, and so really [00:27:00] that should just be, um, in the FAR standard anyway, uh, on top of cross-contamination in your, your, your mixers or your, your, um, knives or whatever the case may be.

So, so there’s some that maybe should have been there in the first place, um, but then pH. Yes.

so this now we’re two years down the line since you first did it. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. And so we’re another summer in. Um, have you been back to social media? Uh, are you noticing a difference in, uh, what’s happening? We have noticed a difference and that. Is a upwards tick. It is better. Those food shops in the may have been able to hold that high level of compliance.

Of course, we’ve got a couple of outliers, like we do all those chops that have changed hands. But there’s also that, um, one point I haven’t mentioned before is that when [00:28:00] we started the project, we did a search on everyone who was selling sushi in ag. Local government area. There were lots of places which didn’t sell sushi during the day.

So when we did our normal inspections, we didn’t even know they were selling sushi. Yes, we’ve searched or gone on menu log, all those kind of things. We found that cooking without sushi, so it’s also led to us to. Dig deeper into the food they’re actually preparing rather than what we just see or what they just own up to during the day.

So we actually have more sushi premises than we actually realized because we didn’t know. Some of them, they weren’t owning up to, or they didn’t have it on display during our inspections, so we were never checking their records. Yes, now we are. So that’s another. From this project really nutted down and found out all those places that are selling sushi.

Yes. So it’s, yeah. Unless it’s there in front of you, you can’t really tell. Um, but you need to ask the question. And if you don’t ask the question, um, then it’s never gonna be [00:29:00] on the radar in the first place. Yes.

Every food shop we go to. But some of them honestly caught us by surprise. We had a cafe that was selling sushi at nighttime. They were full on sushi, Japanese inspired at nighttime. We hadn’t picked that up in our inspection, but it’s also because they hadn’t given us any clues. There was nothing in the fridge that had, you know, informed us of that.

So it wasn’t until we dug a bit deeper. And started talking and this education campaign specifically about sushi, that we became aware of it. So when you say there’s nothing, you know, you open the fridge and so you’re basically saying they’re not preparing the rice during the day. Um, you are not seeing all the, I dunno, whatever the classic signs are was.

So they’d be preparing it at the end of the day, or bringing it in or preparing it offsite and bringing it in. I mean, there was no huge amount of places that were doing it, but they were there. [00:30:00] And I think that’s also where there’s opportunity for things to go wrong because they’re not necessarily making a huge amount of sushi.

They might not have the expertise or they might just think it might complement the menu well. So I think that’s, I important to find out those shops and make sure they are, um, compliant with the, the guidelines. Okay. Okay. Uh, a tangent, uh, markets, sushi in markets. Um. Ticking time bomb? think so. I mean, I haven’t seen any, and we would, if we saw them, we would be on inspecting them the same as every, um, sushi shop.

But that would be a be a concern. Yeah, we would wanna be inspecting that. Uh, and then I feel like just asking sushi in supermarkets, but we will just leave that one alone. okay. That’s fine. Because in some stores there is a higher level of [00:31:00] regulation over that, so I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing.

Okay, so, um, where I am, there’s two supermarkets and one of them makes it fresh in store. Uh, and the other one, uh, has it, uh, made off site and brought in. Um, and so I know when it’s being made. And then I also know. When it’s still there, but arguably it’s under temperature control, much better than it is in a, um, in a small place.

Um, and so it’s just really just interesting seeing it, um, uh, sitting there. Um, and so, so you go the safer bet of saying Yes, go for the supermarket. Um, yes. Okay. I’m okay with it. Yeah, I’m okay with it. I think the temperature control. Is better. We don’t see the sushi trains. We don’t see, I don’t wanna get anyone into, into trouble, but I don’t see the dodging of records that I’ve seen at smaller s stores.

I think they’re record keeping. Perhaps it’s, it’s required by [00:32:00] corporate. I see their record keeping as being better. Yes. Okay. Um, I’ll reassess. I still just like going to the local joint. Um, there’s nothing, there’s nothing like the, the one where they’re, um, flame grilling the, um, the, the chin on top and you get it warm and, and crispy.

Um, and that’s just magical. Um, I should just put an ad in for them and be done with it. Um,

kids just across the board, no matter where they’re shopping, get sushi morning or lunch. Because you know, then it’s, you would expect then for it to be freshly prepared and hasn’t been sitting out temperature control for four plus hours. Yes. Uh, and then any parents who are listening to the podcast, sushi in a lunchbox, make sure it’s cold, make sure you’ve bought it fresh and it hasn’t been sitting at room temperature.

Uh, and don’t buy it on special and then just leave it for a [00:33:00] couple days and then bun it in the lunchbox. Um, yeah, schools, you know, uh, it’s changed so much, you know, uh, back when I was a child, you know, we used to have, uh, sandwiches or whatever, and I’m in Wagga, and so middle of the day, um, there were some sandwiches I just pulled out and they were green.

Like, you know, life was having a ball. Uh, in the lunchbox back then, but you know, now having had, uh, my own kids and I know, you know, put the ice back in the bag and so things have improved. Um, but then at the same time, uh, we’d go to the school and the school bags are then hanging outside in the sun and you’re going, well, that’s just making it more interesting.

Found this lunch, which I bought for all three of my kids, and you put your whole lunchbox is an ice pack and you put it in the freezer. Then you get it out when it’s ready to go into the school bag. So you pack it full, put it in the school bag. It’s a little bit heavier ’cause the whole thing is like an ice pack.

But they bought the food home and it’s still being [00:34:00] like four degrees. And I’m like so impressed that my kids will not be using any other kind of lunchbox. Yes. There you go. Another plug for some other product. But, um, yeah. Okay. So, um, so just to summarize, sushi, the ultimate food poisoning, um, uh, entity. Uh, one day we’ll actually do an episode on, you know, which one actually is.

But for today, we’ll, we’ll make the claim that sushi is the ultimate. Um, it can be done safely, pH control, um, uh, cross-contamination, most importantly time and temperature. Just make sure that. Um, you know, it’s kept cool, minimized time, whatever, so we know how to do it right. Restaurants, cafes, you discovered lack of education or education, but dodging up results.

Um, and, uh, a huge range of, of minor. Problems that culminated in. Yeah, you just don’t wanna be eating sushi, especially [00:35:00] at the end of the day. But a, a dedicated program of education, encouragement, um, but then verifying stuff, internal training, and um, and just focused on making su sure that sushi is safe to eat.

Um, and you saw the results, um, and you’re seeing the results. Um, so. Congratulations. That’s absolutely awesome. Um, I’d love to hear comments, you know, trying to engage the, um, the community here. Uh. What are you finding in your local community in terms of sushi? Are you up to scratch? Can you be doing it better?

Um, and we’ll go controversial. What is the most dangerous food that you think’s out there? Uh, is there a good contender against sushi? Um, uh, arguably eggs were, but we’ve done so much to change eggs and I’d love to see that what you’ve done will now change what we do with sushi. Um, and. Basically bring us up [00:36:00] into the, you know, 21st century.

I think we’ve covered everything. Any last minute tips for eh hos regarding sushi? I would be just be speak to your staff about their skills. If someone’s not sure about something, encourage them to open up and upskill, upskill, upskill. We can always refresh our skills and talking, communicating, networking is the best way to do that.

Awesome. Thank you, Kylie. Um, we had a lot of effort trying to get this happening. Lots of technical stuff, and so Kylie and all my previous guests and all my future guests really, really appreciate the perseverance and just, and, uh, uh, and the effort to try and get the, um, permission in the first place and all of that.

So thank you Kylie, for persevering, and this is an awesome episode. I love it. Uh, so thanks a lot and I’ll, um, yeah, have you back one day. Thank you. Thanks so much.