Tag Archives: consumer

OMG! US govt-types still Clueless, blaming consumers for foodborne illness

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Alicia Silverstone got famous in the 1995 movie, Clueless. It wasn’t particularly good or witty, and even dopey me got the whole Jane Austen thing, but it did have one memorable line, when Alicia’s Cher went into the bathroom and saw another student with bad 1980s Motley Crue big hair, and proclaim, ‘OMG, is it 1985?’ or something like that.

Reading the pronouncements of various U.S. food safety government-types, I want to shriek, ‘OMG, is it 1994?’ Are you still blaming consumers for getting sick?

Michael Taylor, who’s now food safety guru at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, declared in 1994 when he worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the government will no longer blame consumers when they get sick from nasty bacteria like E. coli O157:H7 in food. Apparently that memo hasn’t made it around Obama-change appointees.

Dr. David Goldman, assistant administrator of the Office of Public Health Science, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said last week,

"Consumers can always protect themselves if they follow our four safe-handling guidelines: clean, separate, cook and chill. This provides some extra measure of safety."

Not for contaminated produce, pet food, pizza or pot pies.

Earlier, Jerold Mande, USDA’s deputy undersecretary for food safety told the food safety education-palooza,

“I want to be clear. At FSIS we are focused every day on preventing contaminated food from ever leaving the establishments we regulate, and we have more work to do to make our food safe. But we must also recognize that most contamination occurs after food products leave federally regulated establishments. Even if FSIS and FDA succeed in reducing illnesses from our establishments to zero, there will still be millions of foodborne illnesses and hundreds of deaths each year unless we succeed in changing the behavior of food preparers.”

Except Mande’s own USDA reported today that incoming raw poultry is the primary source of Listeria monocytogenes contamination in commercial chicken cooking plants, based on a 21-month study conducted by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists and their collaborators at the University of Georgia.

Clueless.

People handle food any way they want

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Some form of direct observation is the only way to do meaningful food safety behavior research, and the phrase, consumer food safety education, should be banned.

Or at least try something new – the stuff that is out there just doesn’t work.

That’s what I take from a preliminary summary of research led by Christine Bruhn, director of the Center for Consumer Research at the University of California, Davis, and Ho Phang, prepared by Meatingplace.

Sure, those are a couple of my primary messages, so it’s easy to agree with someone who agrees with me, but nice to hear it confirmed.

Bruhn and colleagues videotaped 200 volunteers in their homes while they prepared burgers and salad. She observed their methods of defrosting the meat — frozen, preformed burgers — their refrigerators’ temperature, whether or not they put themselves at risk for cross-contamination and how they determined whether the meat was done.

Of those in the study:

* Twenty-five percent said they prefer their burgers pink.
* Eighty-three percent said they used visual clues, rather than a meat thermometer, to determine the doneness of their burgers.
* About half owned a meat thermometer, but almost all of those participants said they used it on larger cuts of meat, not burgers.
* Seventy-five percent said they were unlikely to use a meat thermometer on burgers.

Even though participants knew they were being videotaped, many did not follow recommended guidelines when preparing their burgers:

* Although 90 percent of consumers were observed washing their hands prior to food preparation, the average hand-washing time was just seven seconds, and only 31 percent dried their hands with a clean towel (either a paper towel or a cloth towel that had not been used previously).

* Potential cross-contamination — defined by the study as "an event in which pathogens could be transferred from one surface to another as a result of contact with a potential source of contamination" — occurred in 74 percent of the households.

* While a bar graph showing the temperature distribution of the finished burgers demonstrated that many were at or near the recommended 160 degrees F, a few of the burgers’ temperatures were recorded to be much lower — as low as 112 degrees F. (Study coordinators observing consumer behavior made sure all burgers were cooked to 160 F before volunteers consumed them.)

Even after the exercise, only 23 percent of participants said they would use a meat thermometer on burgers in the future.

Bruhn said,

"Consumer education is not sufficient. Take the extra step. It protects the public, and it protects you."