Tag Archives: behavior

More on pink and thermometers

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Surveys still suck.

Using I-own-a-thermometer as an indicator of thermometer use is as useful as I-own-a-sink therefore I wash my hands. Or, I own a toilet, so I always hit the bowl. Or … use your imagination.

Researchers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration report in the Journal of Food Protection that the use of a food thermometer is the best way to ensure that meat, poultry, and other foods reach an internal temperature sufficient to destroy foodborne pathogens.

The 1998, 2001, 2006, and 2010 Food Safety Surveys were used to analyze changes in food thermometer ownership and usage for roasts, chicken parts, and hamburgers in the United States.

But surveys still suck.

The paper notes that when E. coli O157:H7 was first associated with ground beef in the 1980s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommended that consumers cook hamburgers until the meat was ‘‘brown or pinkish brown in the center. However, as a result of research that showed that one out of four hamburgers may be brown in the center before reaching a safe internal temperature, the USDA changed its advice to consumers— instead of using color as an indicator of doneness in hamburgers, consumers should use a food thermometer to ensure that a safe temperature has been reached. In May 2000, the USDA launched the Thermy educational campaign to encourage consumers to use a food thermometer when cooking small cuts of meat, such as hamburgers and chicken parts. The USDA also provided guidance to consumers about the safe temperature for various cuts of meat and poultry.

Ho Phang and Christine Bruhn reported earlier in JFP that in video observation of 199 California consumers making hamburgers and salad in their own kitchens, handwashing was poor, only 4% used a thermometer to check if the burger was safely cooked, and there were an average of 43 cross-contamination events per household. They concluded Thermy had not been successful.

We did our own survey with 40 people brought in to cook a chicken meal in a Kansas State kitchen and videotaped their behaviors. Many participants reported owning a food thermometer (73%) and nearly half (42.5%) of participants reported knowing the suggested end temperature for cooking poultry to ensure doneness. When asked the final recommended internal temperature for chicken, the mean response was 214°F with a range of responses from 140°F to 450°F. (The correct answer is 165F)

Of those participants observed measuring the internal temperature of the product, only three used the thermometer correctly. During observation, two individuals who used the thermometers failed to remove protective casings prior to taking internal temperature readings, and therefore used the instruments incorrectly.

Surveys do not measure behaviors: they give an indication of what people think their behavior is, or what the survey person wants to hear, but that isn’t going to get people to use a thermometer (tip-sensitive, digital).

Sick sells; gross ads disgust consumers into action

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Science is only now catching up with the late 1970s wisdom of Herbert “Herb” Ruggles Tarlek, Jr.

During one episode, Herb, the outrageously dressed salesthingy on the awesome television series, WKRP in Cincinnati, proclaims that tasteless sells. That’s why he’s so good at advertising.

USA Today reports a five-year study to be released Tuesday by Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business found that, again and again, advertisements that try to simply "scare" consumers into actions — such as buying protective sunscreens or avoiding dangerous drugs — are far less effective than ads that also "disgust" consumers into taking the action. The best way to elicit disgust: Display totally gross images (see our infosheets).

"If you really want to get people to act, disgust is much more powerful than fear," says Andrea Morales, an associate marketing professor at Arizona State University who oversaw the study to be published in the June issue of the Journal of Marketing Research. "It may seem counterintuitive, but it works."

Perhaps that’s why consumers have seen a recent slew of commercials with high gross-out factors.

A TV spot from the New York City Department of Health featured images of a soft drink turning into gobs of fat as a guy gulps it down. (Department officials say sugar-rich beverage consumption dropped 12% after the campaign.) A recent Febreze TV spot shows blindfolded volunteers sitting in an ultra-filthy room — but fooled into thinking that they smell something pleasant, thanks to the household odor killer. And a commercial for Colgate Total toothpaste shows a mouthful of icky-looking germs.

From 2006 to 2011, Morales and her colleagues oversaw five different studies. In each case, ads with the highest gross-out factor elicited far more cases of viewer willingness to take action than those without.

In one study, 155 undergraduate students viewed an anti-methamphetamine print ad showing a young man whose face is covered with open sores. It scored far more consumer interest than an ad with the same written copy, but which replaced the photo of the pock-marked young man with one of a coffin.

While consumer psychologist Kit Yarrow agrees with the premise — disgust attracts attention — she’s not sure it always works. "Disgust is a hard-wired self-preservation emotion designed to keep us from doing things like eating spoiled food," she says. But, she asks, "Will our protective reaction against assaults of any kind cause us to avoid paying any attention to the ad?"

Disgust: always the other emotion now hot; would you rather talk about poop or make kids die

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James Gorman of the New York Times writes that disgust is having its moment in the light as researchers find that it does more than cause that sick feeling in the stomach. It protects human beings from disease and parasites, and affects almost every aspect of human relations, from romance to politics.

In several new books and a steady stream of research papers, scientists are exploring the evolution of disgust and its role in attitudes toward food, sexuality and other people.

Paul Rozin, a psychologist who is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer of modern disgust research, began researching it with a few collaborators in the 1980s, when disgust was far from the mainstream.

“It was always the other emotion,” he said. “Now it’s hot.”

Speaking last week from a conference on disgust in Germany, Valerie Curtis, a self-described “disgustologist” from the London School of Public Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, described her favorite emotion as “incredibly important.”

She continued: “It’s in our everyday life. It determines our hygiene behaviors. It determines how close we get to people. It determines who we’re going to kiss, who we’re going to mate with, who we’re going to sit next to. It determines the people that we shun, and that is something that we do a lot of.”

It begins early, she said: “Kids in the playground accuse other kids of having cooties. And it works, and people feel shame when disgust is turned on them.”

Dr. Curtis is involved in efforts in Africa, India and England to explore what she calls “the power of trying to gross people out.” One slogan that appeared to be effective in England in getting people to wash their hands before leaving a bathroom was “Don’t bring the toilet with you.”

Whatever the fine points of disgust, its power to affect behavior is unquestioned, and that power ought to be put to good use, Dr. Curtis said. So, in one of her projects, she has worked with an Indian public relations agency to come up with a disgust-based campaign to encourage hand washing among mothers in small villages, which could save countless children’s lives lost to diarrhea and other diseases.

The result, now being tested, is a skit involving two characters, one a supermom and the other a disgusting, dirty man. The man makes sweets using mud and worms, stops in the middle of the performance to rush off because he has diarrhea, never washes his hands and does everything possible to be revolting.

Supermom is scrupulously clean. Her children don’t get sick, the skit makes clear. In fact, her baby grows up to be a doctor. She washes her hands all the time.

The prominence of diarrhea in the skit is no accident. One thing about studying disgust, Dr. Curtis said, is that it makes you realize how important it is to talk about the very things that disgust us, because they often present dangers to public health.

“We need to talk about” excrement, she said, using a punchier single-syllable word for maximum effect — a word she is unapologetic about using, as befits a disgustologist.

“Which is worse?” Dr. Curtis asked. To talk about it, “or to make kids die.

Shock and shame.

We’ve been using disgust for a long time. It is called barfblog.

Like watching South Park: why feeling disgust can be good (or fart jokes)

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Feelings of disgust help humans avoid, or at the very least recognize, the things that cause disgust like sick people, dirty water, vomit, body fluids and all the other stuff that makes us react "Yuck."

BBC News reports that in a paper published in Philosophical Transactions for the Royal Society B, Dr Val Curtis, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, argues that avoidance behavior is essential to prevent the spread of all the major current and recent infectious diseases which present a threat to humans.

Washing hands and food can prevent diseases like cholera and hepatitis A, avoiding sex with others who are infected helps prevent the spread of HIV, while keeping a distance from people with influenza or measles is a sensible move to reduce the risk of infection.

"The idea of contacting or consuming infectious substances such as saliva, feces or vomit, or of intimate contact with those known to be carrying infection is deeply uncomfortable to even contemplate," writes Dr Curtis.

"Self-limitation of such behaviour is so automatic and intuitive that it is often ignored as the front-line in our defense against disease.

Something as simple as handwashing with soap could save over a million lives a year globally, the paper says, just by stopping the transmission of disease.

Disgust is often used to get this message across in public health campaigns.

Stephen Fry, who has declared himself celibate in the past, is quoted in Dr Curtis’s paper describing how disgust played a part in his decision to abstain from sex.

"I would be greatly in the debt of the man who could tell me what would ever be appealing about those damp, dark, foul-smelling and revoltingly tufted areas of the body that constitute the main dishes in the banquet of love.

"Once under the influence of drugs supplied by one’s own body, there is no limit to the indignities, indecencies and bestialities to which the most usually rational and graceful of us will sink."

Why disgust matters
12.dec.11
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol. 366, no. 1583, 3478-3490
Valerie Curtis
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1583/3478
Abstract
The new synthesis about disgust is that it is a system that evolved to motivate infectious disease avoidance. There are vital practical and intellectual reasons why we need to understand disgust better. Practically, disgust can be harnessed to combat the behavioural causes of infectious and chronic disease such as diarrhoeal disease, pandemic flu and smoking. Disgust is also a source of much human suffering; it plays an underappreciated role in anxieties and phobias such as obsessive compulsive disorder, social phobia and post-traumatic stress syndromes; it is a hidden cost of many occupations such as caring for the sick and dealing with wastes, and self-directed disgust afflicts the lives of many, such as the obese and fistula patients. Disgust is used and abused in society, being both a force for social cohesion and a cause of prejudice and stigmatization of out-groups. This paper argues that a better understanding of disgust, using the new synthesis, offers practical lessons that can enhance human flourishing. Disgust also provides a model system for the study of emotion, one of the most important issues facing the brain and behavioural sciences today.

Better understanding the brain for better hygiene

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My friend in France sent me this story from Process Alimentaire and my best friend translated it.

Stephane Desaulty, a PhD student at CLLE-LTC University of Toulouse 2 is undertaking a thesis in cognitive psychology to increase the efficiency of good hygiene training in catering. It is reinforced by scientific expertise in food safety from the School of Industrial Biology (EBI).

Silliker is funding the research. For the consulting, auditing and analysis firm, part of Mérieux Nutrisciences this thesis is an opportunity "to identify new avenues for training."

The base for this research is in "fuzzy trace” theory. According to its inventors, experiences are simultaneously stored in our memory in two forms: first traces representing the details of events and also traces representing their general meaning. As such, this theory demonstrates that as expertise increases, the mental representation of risk does not become more complex. Quite the contrary, when making a decision the trained people would not rely on details, as would the novices, but rather on simple mental representations.

The thesis will focus on analyzing the memory representations in reasoning and decision making in a professional context as well as on analyzing possible differences between "experts" and novices. The goal? To identify the strengths and weaknesses of training programs. In the short term, this research should measure the suitability of proposed training and develop new learning tools.
 

Enhancing food safety culture to reduce rates of foodborne illness

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Snappy title, eh? But not bad for a peer-reviewed journal article in Food Control that was published on-line today ahead of print publication.

Almost two decades ago, E. coli O157:H7 killed four and sickened hundreds who ate hamburgers at the Jack-in-the-Box fast-food chain in the U.S. and propelled microbial food safety to the forefront of the public agenda. However, it remains a challenge to compel food producers, processors, distributors, retailers, foodservice outlets and home meal preparers to adopt scientifically validated safe food handling behaviors, especially in the absence of an outbreak.

Readers of barfblog.com will be familiar with the details surrounding the three case studies of failures in food safety culture documented in the paper: E. coli O157:H7 linked to John Tudor & Son in Wales in 2005; listeria linked to cold-cuts produced by Maple Leaf Foods of Canada in 2008; and salmonella linked to Peanut Corporation of America in 2009.

But anyone can be a critic, so we offer suggestions to enhance food safety culture, such as food safety storytelling through infosheets (Chapman, et al., 2010). And we end with my usual plea to actively promote food safety efforts, coupling a strong food safety culture with marketing to the world.

We conclude:

Creating a culture of food safety requires application of the best science with the best management and communication systems. It requires commitment by an organization’s leaders, middle managers and food handlers. It also must be supported and demonstrated by sharing information within the organization and with customers. The food safety failures of John Tudor & Sons, Maple Leaf Foods, Inc. and PCA are illustrative of an emerging recognition that the culture of food safety within an organization is a significant risk factor in foodborne illness (Griffith et al., 2010a; Yiannis, 2009).

Individuals focusing on food safety risks within an organization with a good food safety culture:

• know the risks associated with the foods they handle and how those should be managed;
• dedicate resources to evaluating supplier practices;
• stay up-to-date on emerging food safety issues;
• foster a value system within the organization that focuses on avoiding illnesses;
• communicate compelling and relevant messages regarding risk reduction activities and empower others to put them into practice;
• promote effective food safety systems before an incident occurs; and,
• do not blame customers (including commercial buyers and end consumers) when illnesses are linked to their products.

The best food producers, processors, retailers and restaurants should go above and beyond minimal government and auditor standards and sell food safety solutions directly to the public. The best organizations will use their own people to demand ingredients from the best suppliers; use a mixture of encouragement and enforcement to foster a food safety culture; and use technology to be transparent – whether it’s live webcams in the facility or real-time test results on the website – to help restore the shattered trust with the buying public.

I’ll add more as the paper becomes available, and if Chapman has anything witty to add (that takes time).

Enhancing food safety culture to reduce rates of foodborne illness

Douglas A. Powella, Casey J. Jacoba and Benjamin J. Chapmanb,
a Department of Diagnostic Medicine/Pathobiology, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506, USA
b Department of 4-H Youth Development and Family and Consumer Sciences North Carolina State University, Campus Box 7606, Raleigh, NC 27695-7606, USA
Received 2 August 2010;
revised 29 November 2010;
accepted 7 December 2010.
Available online 24 December 2010.

Abstract
A culture of food safety is built on a set of shared values that operators and their staff follow to produce and provide food in the safest manner. Maintaining a food safety culture means that operators and staff know the risks associated with the products or meals they produce, know why managing the risks is important, and effectively manage those risks in a demonstrable way. In an organization with a good food safety culture, individuals are expected to enact practices that represent the shared value system and point out where others may fail. By using a variety of tools, consequences and incentives, businesses can demonstrate to their staff and customers that they are aware of current food safety issues, that they can learn from others’ mistakes, and that food safety is important within the organization. The three case studies presented in this paper demonstrate that creating a culture of food safety requires application of the best science with the best management and communication systems, including compelling, rapid, relevant, reliable and repeated food safety messages using multiple media.

Keywords: behavior change; foodborne illness; marketing; organizational culture; risk communication
 

Food safety stories can improve safety of restaurant meals

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Contact: Dr. Doug Powell, dpowell@ksu.edu
785-317-0560
barfblog.com
bites.ksu.edu

Posting graphical, concise food safety stories in the back kitchens of restaurants can help reduce dangerous food safety practices and create a workplace culture that values safe food.

It’s the first time that a communication intervention such as food safety information sheets have been validated to work using direct video observation in eight commercial restaurant kitchens.

“The food safety messages we’ve looked at are as effective as those ‘Employees must wash hands’ signs in bathrooms.,” said Dr. Douglas Powell, an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University and one of the co-authors on a new paper in the Journal of Food Protection. “They just don’t work.”

Powell and then graduate student, Ben Chapman, now an assistant professor of food safety at North Carolina State University, came up with the idea for food safety infosheets to promote discussion and improve food safety behaviors while playing hockey at the University of Guelph in 2003.

“Chapman and I were playing hockey a lot,” says Powell, “and there was a bar and restaurant that overlooked the one ice surface where we often engaged in after-hockey food safety meetings with our industry, provincial and federal government colleagues. We had all this food safety information, and the manager of the bar around 2003 was into food safety, so we thought, if daily sports pages are posted above urinals and on the doors of washroom stalls, why not engaging food safety information?”

As part of his PhD research, Chapman partnered with a food service company in Canada and placed small video cameras in unobtrusive spots around eight food-service kitchens that volunteered to participate in the study. There were as many as eight cameras in each kitchen, which recorded directly to computer files and later reviewed by Chapman and others.

The work built on other direct food safety observational studies conducted at Kansas State University and published in the British Food Journal in 2009.

Food safety inforsheets, highlighting the importance of handwashing or preventing cross-contamination, for example, were then introduced into the kitchens, and video was again collected. The researchers found that cross-contamination events decreased by 20 per cent, and handwashing attempts increased by 7 per cent.

Since September 2006 over 150 food safety infosheets have been produced and are available to anyone at www.foodsafetyinfosheets.com. The website has had a recent redesign, adding a search function, automatic email alerts and RSS feeds.

Katie Filion, who coded much of the video as an undergraduate student researcher, has moved from Canada and is now completing a Master’s degree with Powell at Kansas State University. She has just returned from a year of research with the New Zealand Food Safety Authority helping to design a national restaurant inspection disclosure system.

Dr. Tanya MacLurin, who collaborated on the research, was born on a farm/ranch in Kansas and received all her degrees from Kansas State University before joining the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of Guelph in 1991, where she subsequently collaborated with Powell.

The study, “Assessment of food safety practices of food service food handlers : testing a communication intervention” was authored by Dr. Ben Chapman of North Carolina State University, Dr. Douglas Powell and Katie Filion of Kansas State University, and Tiffany Eversley and Tanya MacLaurin of the University of Guelph in Canada. The study is published in the June issue of the Journal of Food Protection.

“Assessment of Food Safety Practices of Food Service Food Handlers: Testing a Communication Intervention”
Authors: Benjamin J. Chapman, North Carolina State University; Douglas A. Powell, Katie Fillion, Kansas State University; Tiffany Eversley, Tanya MacLaurin, University of Guelph
Published: June 2010, Journal of Food Protection

Abstract: Globally, foodborne illness affects an estimated 30% of individuals annually. Meals prepared outside of the home are a risk factor for acquiring foodborne illness and have been implicated in up to 70% of traced outbreaks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called on food safety communicators to design new methods and messages aimed at increasing food safety risk-reduction practices from farm to fork. Food safety infosheets, a novel communication tool designed to appeal to food handlers and compel behavior change, were evaluated. Food safety infosheets were provided weekly to food handlers in working foodservice operations for 7 weeks. It was hypothesized that through the posting of food safety infosheets in highly visible locations, such as kitchen work areas and hand washing stations, that safe food handling behaviors of foodservice staff could be positively influenced. Using video observation, food handlers (n ~ 47) in eight foodservice operations were observed for a total of 348 h (pre- and postintervention combined). After the food safety infosheets were introduced, food handlers demonstrated a significant increase (6.7%, P , 0.05, 95% confidence interval) in mean hand washing attempts, and a significant reduction in indirect cross-contamination events (19.6%, P , 0.05, 95% confidence interval). Results of the research demonstrate that posting food safety infosheets is an effective intervention tool that positively influences the food safety behaviors of food handlers.