While the Brits are busy congratulating themselves on their Campylobacter reduction campaign, the following video from the UK Food Standards Agency crossed my computer.
How can any agency talk science-based, while ignoring the science in public advice about cooking chicken.
And these elaborate videos ain’t cheap.
Way to be duped, British taxpayers.
“The only way to kill germs is to cook chicken thoroughly, making sure it’s steaming hot in the middle.
I’ll go with the Hip.
I may have first said that about 15 years ago.
Rob Mancini writes that food safety types have always advocated for the use of thermometers to determine if a food product has reached the required temperature to inactivate pathogens.
This leads to less barfing.
Different types of foods require different temperatures to kill pathogens; don’t memorize the numbers, just know where to reference them. Be careful with poultry because Canada requires a higher temperature than the States, 85°C (185°F) and 74°C (165°F) respectively. Consistency is hard to attain….
Canada Beef and the Canadian Partnership for Consumer Food Safety Education have launched a campaign to save Canadians from eating hockey pucks this summer.
“All too often the humble hamburger is cooked beyond tasty recognition,” says Joyce Parslow, a professional home economist with Canada Beef. “A food thermometer is a quick and very effective way of knowing just when your burger is done. There is no more guessing, which means hockey pucks can stay on the ice and burgers can be enjoyed all summer long.”
The two groups are encouraging Canadians to share a photo of themselves
This is my beautiful wife cooking a roasted chicken and using a digital tip sensitive thermometer to ensure the final internal temperature has reached 74°C (165°F).
Temperature guidelines for all foods can be found at befoodsafe.ca.
UK’s Food Standards Agency sure spends a lot of money on stuff the rest of us might go, duh?
Parents have a big influence on their children’s food hygiene habits, according to a survey by the Food Standards Agency. The results show a link between how people currently prepare their food and the behaviors they experienced when they were kids. More than two thirds of UK adults (70%) said their parents insisted on washing hands before meals, with 62% now doing the same themselves.
Just over half (53%) recalled their parents washing chopping boards in between preparing raw and cooked foods – a behaviour that two thirds (66%) had recently repeated.
However, the survey showed that parents don’t always know best when it comes to food safety. Almost half (47%) of adults saw their parents washing raw chicken before cooking it when they were kids, with 46% revealing that they have done the same in recent months. It is this bad food hygiene habit that is the subject of this year’s Food Safety Week, which focuses on the message ‘don’t wash raw chicken’. Washing raw chicken can lead to a potentially dangerous form of food poisoning and almost a third (32%) of people said the reason they wash raw chicken is that their parents or another relative did so when they were growing up.
Bob Martin, food safety expert at the FSA, said: ‘Our survey suggests that mum doesn’t always know best when it comes to food safety.”
Bob, mom always doesn’t do the cooking, but stick to your sexist, taxpayer-funded message if you like.
You may want to add the use of thermometers instead of piping hot, regardless of gender.
I’m so excited by Masterchef Australia I apparently fell asleep on the couch while it was on.
But Amy watched it in bed, and there was a heated discussion about thermometer use.
Nice to see the cooking shows catch up with 15-year-old widely disseminated science.
And better than piping hot.
Sarah Todd, the 27-year-old, from Queensland, was one of the favorites to win this year’s series of the Channel 10 cooking show.
Sarah, a Chadwick model who made headlines when a topless photo shoot of her emerged, stumbled in a cook-off against Colin Sheppard and Tracy Collins.
Even ‘good luck’ batteries ‘for extra energy’ from her three-year-old son Phoenix couldn’t stop Sarah from plating up raw chicken roulade stuffed with apples and mushrooms.
MasterChef Australia judges Matt Preston, George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan refused to taste the dish — and sent Sarah packing.
Should the young kid working in fast-food or retail really be the food safety critical control point, the kid that carries the brand on her shoulders?
A five-year-old boy has sworn off chicken nuggets after he was served a near-raw six-pack from a McDonald’s Drive Thru on the New South Wales south coast on Wednesday night.
Riley Luke’s dinner from the Woonona restaurant looked normal at first but was strangely “soft” when he bit it.
He alerted two of his brothers, who also sampled the pink poultry.
Together they ate about half a nugget before their mother, Tracy Luke, responded to their calls and told them: “Don’t eat that!”
The mother of four said the Woonona store manager told her, “Oh, sorry … we’ve had another one complain about that” when she returned later that night and asked for a refund.
She said she was later contacted by an area manager, who told her the error probably lay with “a young kid” working at the restaurant and asked her to remove a photo of the uncooked food she had posted on a Facebook page called Name, Shame and Praise Illawarra.
She refused.
“I’m livid. My son’s epileptic too – he could have possibly died from this,” Mrs Luke said.
“I said I won’t [remove the photo] until something’s done.
“I just don’t want this to happen to someone else.”
Neither Riley nor his brothers took ill in the following days.
Mrs Luke has since complained to McDonald’s head office.
A McDonald’s spokeswoman told the Illawarra Mercury the company was investigating.
Lydia Buchtmann, spokeswoman for the Food Safety Information Council, said chicken needed to be cooked all the way through, until it was 75 degrees in the centre, to kill the bacteria.
“People shouldn’t consume chicken if it appears uncooked,” she said.
Whether it’s called a fundraiser, a BBQ, or, in Australia, a sausage sizzle, what is the best way to balance the wishes of well-meaning volunteers with the realities of microbial food safety?
With five daughters, I’ve been to hundreds of these things over the years and seen some terrible food safety practices, even at swanky corporate events. Whenever I can, I volunteer to help with the cooking and pre-planning. But I’m not going to have much impact, one sausage sizzle at a time. And if I mention anything, other parents get defensive and think I’m an asshole (they may be right).
Michigan’s Lansing State Journal has some decent recommendations, writing that curtailing concessions likely means reducing revenue that boosters raise to help defray costs of equipment, uniforms and, in some cases, pay-to-participate fees for needy students. Yet, how could anyone support looking the other way if food isn’t being handled and prepared safely?
Ingham County officials acknowledged in a recent LSJ report that they had been lenient in enforcing safe food handling requirements at school athletic concessions.
Yet while improving enforcement, they observed such unsafe practices as not tracking the freshness date on raw ground beef. They found well-meaning boosters were cooking food such as chili at home and bringing it to athletic venues for sale. They found food being prepared in locations with no hand-washing equipment, even though portable sinks exist for just such circumstances.
Cracking down on volunteers who are trying to support student activities may seem harsh, but basic food safety measures such as hand-washing rules and keeping both raw and cooked foods at safe temperatures simply must be followed. For the sake of public health, these things can’t be optional.
Booster groups are volunteer efforts, but don’t face more demanding responsibilities. County officials began requiring licensing on May 1. Those who aren’t licensed can use pre-packaged items. That’s reasonable.
Booster concessions are an effective source of revenue. In some districts, $20,000 or more worth of food and drinks are sold each year.
In Australia, Food Safety Standards include requirements for the handling, storage, transport and display of food. The Standards are in the process of being adopted by each State and Territory and, when adopted, will specify requirements that are consistent across Australia for the first time. A copy of the Food Safety Standards is available from the FSANZ website at www.foodstandards.gov.au and may also be available from local council or health authority.
This definition of a food business includes all food activities involved in fundraising, including preparation of the food before it is sold. The definition of sale covers fundraising activities. Food has been sold even if you just ask for a donation.
Good intentions and safety can co-exist.
A Friday evening dinner of red throat emperor fillets, salad and sweet potato wedges. All baked because I ran out of gas for the grill. Fish temped to 130F.
Delicious, and safe.
Ellen Thomas, a PhD student in food science at North Carolina State University who enjoys running, baking, and playing the violin, writes:
I’ve ordered a crazy number of burgers over the past year. This isn’t because I constantly crave red meat, I’m just interested in what restaurant servers say about eating undercooked burgers.
An E. coli O157:H7 outbreak, which sickened 11 people in 4 different states, has been linked to undercooked burgers at restaurants. Over 1.8 million pounds of ground beef have been recalled.
The FDA Food Code, adopted in some form by most states, says that it is the duty of the restaurant to disclose risk information around consuming undercooked hamburgers and remind people when they order. Sometimes this is included on the menu, sometimes the servers engage patrons. However, there is no data about whether this actually occurs.
To capture this data, I’ve trained a legion of secret shoppers to order burgers cooked medium rare, and record the risk information provided on menus and by servers.
It’s been an enlightening process.
A lot of servers talk about color, some talk about temperature, others talk about the firmness of the burger.
There have been numerous situations where a server simply says, “the cook just knows what they’re doing.” A lot of servers assure the secret shoppers that eating a medium rare burger is perfectly safe.
And some responses have been shocking like the server who volunteered, “You’ll be fine eating it medium rare- my sister ate a burger that was raw in the middle when she was pregnant and she was just fine.”
Unfortunately, misinformation about cooking burgers is widespread. When interviewed by 22News following the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak, Joe Igner, owner of Local Burger in Northampton, Massachusetts, said that he “never had a problem with E. coli” because “it’s recommended to cook ground beef at least 4 minutes and up to 7 minutes on each side.” Nowhere did Igner mention thermometer use. He also stated, “We don’t get it from a processing plant and that’s a big difference because when they process, they process beef and turkey and if they don’t change the blades, that’s when somebody’s going to get sick.”
This is simply not true. Contamination can occur at any point when processing, handling, and preparing raw ground beef, including in a restaurant kitchen, even if it is ground in house.
Sydney Lupkin of ABC writes, So how do you know if your hamburger’s safe? It’s not as simple as you think.
“With ground beef, color is not a reliable indicator of doneness,” said Marianne Graveley, a specialist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s meat and poultry hotline.
Meat that’s still pink may be well-done, Graveley said, and meat that’s brown may need more heat.
“We used to have different campaign: It’s done when it’s brown in middle,” she said. “Now we say to use a meat thermometer. It’s the only way to know that it’s safe.”
USDA recommends that hamburgers be cooked to at least 160 degrees internally. But it’s no secret that few of us take the temperature of our patties, and many of us prefer them rare.
“We would never recommend that,” Graveley said. “The risk of food poisoning is too great. People have gotten very sick from very small amount of food. We just don’t think it’s worth the risk.”
The server response that sticks with me the most is, “I’m just a server- I don’t know what the cooks do.” This may seem like a reasonable statement; servers are usually tending to numerous tables in a very high-paced environment and only pass through the kitchen to pick up dishes.
When digging into the current outbreak, it’s curious to think whether illnesses have occurred had risks been effectively communicated to consumers. What I’m trying to figure out is how much do servers play a role in advising consumers of their food choices?
Ordering all of these burgers shows me that there are gaps between what happens in a kitchen and what a server tells restaurant patrons. As the server is typically the liaison between the kitchen and the consumer, these gaps mark crucial points where risk information could occur and it is not happening.
The Michigan Department of Community Health and Agriculture & Rural Development, along with several local health departments, are investigating a cluster of recent illnesses due to E.coli.
At least 5 illnesses have been confirmed and three people have been hospitalized.
Early information suggests undercooked ground beef eaten at several different restaurants in multiple locations is most likely the source. The state is working with the health departments and the USDA to determine the source of the ground beef and how widely it was distributed.
“E. coli O157 illnesses can be very serious or life-threatening, especially for young children, older adults, and people who are immunocompromised,” said Dr. Matthew Davis, Chief Medical Executive at the MDCH. “Whether you cook at home or order in a restaurant, ground meats, including ground beef, should always be cooked thoroughly to the proper temperature.”
Canadian Tire is best known to university students of my advanced age as the source of Canadian Tire money, which could be used to buy beer on campus back in the day, or maybe that was just meal cards, or maybe both.
I’m getting too old to remember.
As Canada’s largest retailer, it is said that 90 per cent of all Canadians live within a 15-minute drive of a Canadian Tire store; that nine-out-of-10 adult Canadians shop at one at least twice a year; and that 40 per cent of Canadians shop at Canadian Tire every week
There are 490 stores across Canada, the majority of which operate in distinct categories of automotive parts, automotive service, tools and hardware, sporting goods, housewares, and seasonal.
They also sell a lot of barbecues; not a lot of thermometers.
New levels of doneness demand a new simple hand test. Check out the changes we’re proposing to see if your steak’s Mauve, Routine or Swell.
It’s probably all a witty play on the finger test to determine if meat is cooked, but it would be better if a thermometer was involved. Chapman jail broke his and made a UK version.