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LSU, Kiffin center stage in debate on college athlete pay Bill reshaping NIL tabled following bipartisan backlash BY MARK BALLARD Staff writer STAFF FILE PHOTO By LESLIE WESTBROOK
State health officials want to make sure that restaurants and food retailers can’t reuse oyster shells, such as in oyster Rockefeller, to serve meat that comes from a different oyster.
Bisque definition vexes state health officials Food safety rules about oysters, crawfish at question
BY ALYSE PFEIL Staff writer
State health officials want to set stricter rules for reusing shells in certain seafood dishes, which they say can risk exposure to a deadly flesh-eating bacteria that’s seen a resurgence this year. But along the way, they have run into a stumbling block and a very Louisiana dilemma: What counts as a bisque? The state’s restaurant safety code for decades has said that “Mollusk and crustacean shells may not be used more than once as serving containers.” Oysters are mollusks, and crawfish are crustaceans. Now, the Louisiana Department of Health wants to make clear that restaurants and food retailers can’t ever reuse oyster shells to serve meat that comes from a different oyster. “We had reports of folks taking shucked shells and using those as serving containers,” said Dr. Pete Croughan, deputy secretary at the Health Department, speaking Tuesday to members of the Senate health committee. “You can still eat raw oysters and chargrilled oysters, as long as they’re used on the same shell that they came from,” he said. The stricter rule raised a conundrum for regulators, however: What about soups that call for stuffed seafood shells, like crawfish bisque?
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State health officials said they wanted to ensure stuffed crawfish heads sometimes used in bisque recipes aren’t implicated by the shell-reuse prohibition, and they carved out an exemption specifically for crawfish bisque.
“We do need legal specificity, of course, around the bisque. But the goal is not to empower us to go find folks that are bisquelike and then try to cite them for it.” DR. PETE CROUGHAN, Louisiana Department of Health deputy secretary Health officials said they wanted to ensure stuffed crawfish heads sometimes used in bisque recipes aren’t implicated by the shell-reuse prohibition, and they carved out an exemption specifically for crawfish bisque. Crawfish bisque doesn’t present a food safety risk, because the cooking heat will kill any bacteria, health
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officials said. But some lawmakers raised concerns that the exemption wasn’t broad enough. “What if I put crawfish heads in my gumbo, which isn’t a bisque, but it’s hot enough to kill the pathogens?” asked health committee chair
It’s a moment that can spark dread among even the most scrupulously law-abiding Louisiana fishermen. As you return to the dock after a fine day on the water, solemnly serious men or women in state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries T-shirts approach. The initial, slightly paranoid thought for many anglers: Yikes, did I mismeasure a speckled trout and accidentally keep one slightly under the 13-inch limit? But no reason to worry in this case. The Wildlife
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Business ......................1E Deaths .........................2B Opinion ........................6B Classified ..................... 2F Living............................1D Nation-World ................2A Commentary ................7B Metro ...........................1B Sports ..........................1C
101ST yEAR, NO. 160
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WASHINGTON — As the top Democrat in the U.S. House took the podium Thursday to speak out against a bill to regulate college athletics, he set his sights squarely on LSU, its new football coach — and two of the school’s alumni who are among the most powerful Jeffries people on Capitol Hill. “Why would Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise think it was a good idea to bring the Lane Kiffin Protection Act to the floor of the House of Representatives?” said House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat. Jeffries posited that it might have been to please big donors to Johnson the state’s flagship university. “Legislation that would do nothing to benefit college athletes and everything to benefit coaches like Lane Kiffin, who got out of town, abandoned his players in the middle of a playoff run to go get a $100 million contract from LSU
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