UK celebrity chefs focus on animal welfare: at some point they may focus on their own food safety practices

Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall (left, not exactly as pictured), two of Britain’s top celebrity chefs, are launching a campaign get consumers to eat more welfare friendly reared chicken by revealing some of the welfare issues in poultry production.

ThePoultrySite reports that on January 11, Jamie Oliver will host a gala dinner to demonstrate the reality of how chickens live and die.

The program is part the Big Food Fight, a season of programming that aims to raise awareness and encourage debate about food production, animal welfare and healthy eating.

That’s great. I eagerly await the day Jamie and other celebrity chefs pay attention to their own food safety habits. A 2004 paper we published based on 60 hours of detailed viewing of television cooking shows — including Jamie Oliver’s – found that an unsafe food handling practice occurred about every four minutes, and that for every safe food handling practice observed, we observed 13 unsafe practices. The most common errors were inadequate hand washing and cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat foods.

Guess we can’t expect much of U.K. celebrity chefs when the best their own, taxpayer funded food safety group can come up with in terms of advice is cook your holiday bird until it’s piping hot.

Jamie, Hugh, let’s see you stick it in.

This entry was posted in Celebrity, Food Safety Policy, Raw Food and tagged , by Douglas Powell. Bookmark the permalink.

About Douglas Powell

A former professor of food safety and the publisher of barfblog.com, Powell is passionate about food, has five daughters, and is an OK goaltender in pickup hockey. Download Doug’s CV here. Dr. Douglas Powell editor, barfblog.com retired professor, food safety 3/289 Annerley Rd Annerley, Queensland 4103 dpowell29@gmail.com 61478222221 I am based in Brisbane, Australia, 15 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time