Last night on Bravo’s Top Chef, Micah got eliminated for her bad-tasting but healthy meatloaf. Last week, Micah caught my attention as she used a meat thermometer in the barbeque elimination challenge. She came in the top three for her perfectly grilled lamb chops.

This is the same show that has had openly sick (or at least nauseated) chefs cooking anyway because they didn’t want to be kicked out of the competition (they wouldn’t get work in Michigan, where the state has proposed that someone with vomiting, diarrhea or a sore throat with fever could not return until 24 hours after the symptoms are gone).

And last night when the oven wasn’t working and Cheftestant Sara M’s chicken didn’t get done, she handpicked and served the pieces that looked cooked… no meat thermometer in sight, at least to the viewers.

Although Micah’s gone now, hats off to her.  Often depressed and crying, missing her daughter, Micah still had the presence of mind to stick in the meat thermometer to check the internal temperature of her barbecued meat. Whether she did it for accuracy or safety, Micah’s choice to use a thermometer stood out. How often do you see one on a TV cooking show? Perhaps the climate on the reality cooking circuit will change.

In 2004, Doug’s laboratory reported that, based on 60 hours of detailed viewing of television cooking shows, an unsafe food handling practice occurred about every four minutes, and that for every safe food handling practice observed, they observed 13 unsafe practices. The most common errors were inadequate hand washing and cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat foods.

Hey, reality cooking show producers: serve up another helping of food safety.