Bill Marler’s most recent post got me thinking about summer camp food safety again. 

Marler’s post mentions that kids and parents at a church camp in North
Carolina ate Castleberry’s chili that had been recalled nearly one month
earlier.  While Marler appears to lay the blame on Castleberry’s, I think
camp officials are at least partly responsible.  In my experience summer
camp officials don’t always make good food safety decisions.

I still remember the summer my oldest son worked at a nearby camp.  He
explained all his important duties, one of which was making sure that the
refrigerator temperature logs were filled in with the "correct" temperatures
when the health inspector was due for a visit.

Another example of camp making bad decisions happened earlier this summer
when a norovirus outbreak hit a scout camp in Pensylvannia.  As the
link explains, the first week the camp had "several" norovirus cases in
camp.  They cleaned up and brought in the next weeks campers, and were hit
even harder, with at least 55 ill… so they decided to send all 500 campers
home! 

What the story doesn’t explain (as I learned from a colleague whose son was
one of the 500 sent home the second week) is that parents were not told of
the first outbreak when they dropped their kids off for the second week.
Certainly a bit of honest communication with parents about the outbreak the
first week might have made for fewer irate parents the second week.

Don Schaffner is an Extension Specialist in Food Science at Rutgers
University.  In is spare time he likes to go camping and backpacking with
the Boy Scouts.