Quarter pounders linked to E. coli, one dead.
Again, only a few weeks later:
Carrots recalled nationally amid E. coli outbreak.
Two high-profile food safety incidents have struck the news in recent months. For some, these incidents represent a fluke – nothing to worry about. For others, it’s a frightening revelation about the food inside their fridge or that they may have just eaten moments before. And for the unfortunate people who find themselves in the center of these situations, it can be an experience that brings them face-to-face with death itself. Understandably, Marksmen may now be thinking about how safe they really are from such situations – and what the odds are of it even happening here.
SAGE, which manages the cafeteria and all the school-served food around campus, has a number of policies in place to prevent this exact possibility. Josh Miller, who manages SAGE’s day-to-day operations on campus, is the primary force ensuring that all necessary precautions are taken.
“We have a number of measures we take so that this kind of thing doesn’t happen,” Miller said. “With the process of getting the food, there’s a lot of different checks to make sure nothing goes wrong at any point.”
SAGE is also known to supply parts of its food from smaller, local farms, making it even more crucial to ensure proper food practices are being employed and that checks are being regularly done.
“We identify the farms that we want to source from and make sure that they are doing everything they need to meet our safety standards,” Miller said.
Once the produce makes its way to campus, it’s on the team working here to ensure that everything looks right.
“Checking boxes for any damage, taking a look at the labels and inspecting the food are some of the things we do when we get product in,” Miller said. “If anything looks wrong, we send it back to the vendor.”
The final step involves the cooking and serving of food, something that SAGE cooks are trained in, whether that’s cooking meat to the necessary temperatures or knowing the right conditions to store specific foods in. And while all these steps might just seem like common sense, they compound to ensure that the chance of any contaminated food making it into students’ hands is almost zero.
“The process isn’t special, but it makes sure that we’re safe every step of the way,” Miller said.
And for the students, it seems as though this effort is paying off.
“I went to a public DISD school, and I think in comparison, the food here is exponentially better,” sophomore Rocky Lancaster said.
Though Lancaster has heard complaints about SAGE’s food from time to time, he finds that the problems often seem almost trivial compared to some of his past experiences.
“You have some 12-year Marksmen who are gonna say something completely different, because they’re so used to this, and they think this is the bare minimum, but it’s not – it’s really above average, it’s really good,” sophomore Rocky Lancaster said, speaking from his experience with public school food. “I would eat 100 Sage lunches over any DISD lunch.”
For him, the quality of the food is a direct result of the special work SAGE workers are doing to prepare fresh food, which heavily involves the process Miller described.
“Most of the DISD stuff starts off completely frozen. All they’re doing is heating it up, and with SAGE, they actually make it,” Lancaster said.
And the extra behind-the-scenes steps SAGE takes to make fresh and safe meals may go unappreciated by most, but the result is that students don’t have anything to worry about.
“What we do means that we have the ultimate confidence in what we’re putting out there for students,” Miller said.
To Miller, despite national headlines being made in the area of food safety, there’s no need for students to have concern in their food as long as standards are followed like in the case of SAGE.
“We have absolutely no worries here,” Miller said. “We’re going to continue moving forward and doing what we know works.”