A few years ago an outbreak linked to a Denver homeless shelter made it into the barfblog new and notable category. Forty folks who depended on the emergency food were affected by violent foodborne illness symptoms after eating donated turkey. Fourteen ambulances showed up and took those most affected to area hospitals.

Volunteering as a food handler at a mission, shelter or soup kitchen and having a good heart and intentions doesn’t automatically lead to safe meals. An understanding of risks and having systems how to reduce them may.

Around the same time as the Denver outbreak, colleague, friend and STEC CAP collaborator Christine Bruhn created a set of food safety materials for folks volunteering with food in their communities. Ashley Chaifetz, a former graduate student in the department of public policy at UNC-Chapel Hill took Christine’s content foundation and went out to the food pantry community to assess infrastructure and current food safety practices to tailor materials to the audience.

Martha Waggoner of the Associated Press wrote about Ashley’s work this week,

[A] study by researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill finds that pantry procedures are often informal, although they do a good job in many areas, including provided hand-washing facilities.

“Generally, we found they were doing things pretty well,” said Ben Chapman, senior author of a paper about pantries and food handling published in the Journal of Food Protection. “They were in line with what you see in at commercial entities.”

Safety was likely to be more formal at pantries were associated with a food bank, said Chapman, associate professor of youth, family and consumer sciences at N.C. State.

Chapman and a researcher from UNC-Chapel Hill (Ashley Chaifetz -ben) visited 105 pantries in 12 counties. They then developed protocols for food pantry volunteers, such as a flow chart for when canned food should be tossed.

The researchers learned that some pantries get large cuts of fresh meat that their volunteers must cut, while almost 10 percent were accepting and distributing home-canned items, which can be risky because of the chance of botulism.

“From a hunger standpoint, that’s fantastic,” he said. “Just relying on canned foods and dried foods doesn’t give you a lot of choices … It’s really good for the hunger world, but there’s an increase in safety risks.”

The paper, Evaluating North Carolina Food Pantry Food Safety–Related Operating Procedures, was published online Nov. 1 in the Journal of Food Protection. The work was supported by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative grant 2012-68003-30155 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

From an NC State press release,

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have done an in-depth analysis of food safety at nonprofit food pantries that distribute food directly to people in need. While the work has identified shortcomings at many such pantries, the goal was to identify how food safety experts can help these pantries best meet the needs of their clients.

“We knew that food pantries, in North Carolina and many other states, aren’t regulated the same way that restaurants are, and that pantries are crucial distributors of food to those in need, but we did not have a good understanding of how food safety is practiced at food pantries,” says Ben Chapman, an associate professor of youth, family, and consumer sciences at NC State and senior author of a new paper on the work.

“This is a particularly important issue because research tells us that the people most likely to rely on help from food pantries are also those who have less access to health care to address foodborne illness in the event that they do get sick,” says Ashley Chaifetz, lead author of the paper. Chaifetz completed the research while a doctoral student at UNC-Chapel Hill.

For this study, the researchers examined operating procedures and interviewed managers at 105 food pantries in 12 counties across North Carolina. The researchers found that pantry food safety procedures were often informal.

In many ways, the results were promising.

For example, researchers found that virtually all pantries did a good job of limiting opportunities for cross-contamination and providing adequate handwashing facilities – both of which are incredibly important in reducing food safety risk.

However, the pantry managers lacked full information on storage and handling or did not have available resources to properly store all perishable items. Given the focus on health and poverty, many pantries have increased the amount of fresh produce and perishables they distribute, which require proper handling and refrigeration. But more than 75 percent of pantries didn’t provide volunteers with formal training on how to handle that food safely. Thirty-six percent of pantry managers didn’t have a system in place to obtain information on food safety recalls. Additionally, only 32 of the 105 pantries had a protocol in place on how to determine whether sick volunteers should be allowed to handle food.

“This is not about bashing food pantries, which provide an essential service to their communities on a shoestring budget,” Chapman says. “But we needed to identify areas of concern so that we could find ways to help them protect the communities they serve.

“Pantries are doing a lot of things right. Our goal was to develop tools to help them do even better, and to help protect underserved groups. We need to know where the gaps are to better support this incredibly important and passionate nonprofit sector.”

The research has already been used to develop a suite of free, online resources for food pantries, which has been used by nonprofits across North Carolina – both those that participated in the research and those that did not.

The paper, “Evaluating North Carolina Food Pantry Food Safety–Related Operating Procedures,” was published online Nov. 1 in the Journal of Food Protection. The work was supported by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative grant 2012-68003-30155 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

For more information contact Ben Chapman (919 515 8099/benjamin_chapman@ncsu.edu).

A few years ago an outbreak linked to a Denver homeless shelter made it into the barfblog new and notable category. Forty folks who depended on the emergency food were affected by violent foodborne illness symptoms after eating donated turkey. Fourteen ambulances showed up and took those most affected to area hospitals.

Volunteering as a food handler at a mission, shelter or soup kitchen and having a good heart and intentions doesn’t automatically lead to safe meals. An understanding of risks and having systems how to reduce them may.

Exposing individuals coping with food security and hunger to risky practices isn’t a good humanitarian approach. Last week KOMO News (Seattle) covered the possible closure of a free meal program for food safety reasons:

Every Thursday, Celeste Wilson whips up some of her best recipes. “They say it tastes very good because it’s Chinese food,” she said with a laugh. “It’s not just soup or salad or sandwich. Something different.”

Wilson is one of dozens of volunteers who makes food at home and then serves it at the Issaquah Community Hall.

As many as 80 people attend the free Thursday lunch as well as volunteer provided dinners, which are served seven days a week to countless people.

The diners come for something they wouldn’t have otherwise – a healthy, home cooked meal. But “home cooked” just got the attention of the Public Health of Seattle-King County, which says meals like these must be prepared in a commercial kitchen by someone with food safety certification.

“We don’t like to think of food in that way of having that potential of being the source that could make us sick. But just because we don’t know that someone has gotten sick, doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t. With food it’s very possible,” said Becky Elias, Manager of Food Protection and Water Recreation Programs at Public Health.

Around the same time as the Denver outbreak, colleague, friend and STEC CAP collaborator Christine Bruhn created a set of food safety materials for folks volunteering with food in their communities. Ashley Chaifetz, a former graduate student in the department of public policy at UNC-Chapel Hill took Christine’s content foundation and went out to the food pantry community to assess infrastructure and current food safety practices to tailor materials to the audience.

The assessment work was published in the November issue of the Journal of Food Protection:

Evaluating North Carolina Food Pantry Food Safety–Related Operating Procedures

Ashley Chaifetz, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Benjamin Chapman, North Carolina State University

Journal of Food Protection

Vol. 78, No. 11, 2015, Pages 2033–2042

DOI: 10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-15-084

Abstract: Almost one in seven American households were food insecure in 2012, experiencing difficulty in providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources. Food pantries assist a food-insecure population through emergency food provision, but there is a paucity of information on the food safety–related operating procedures that pantries use. Food pantries operate in a variable regulatory landscape; in some jurisdictions, they are treated equivalent to restaurants, while in others, they operate outside of inspection regimes. By using a mixed methods approach to catalog the standard operating procedures related to food in 105 food pantries from 12 North Carolina counties, we evaluated their potential impact on food safety. Data collected through interviews with pantry managers were supplemented with observed food safety practices scored against a modified version of the North Carolina Food Establishment Inspection Report. Pantries partnered with organized food bank networks were compared with those that operated independently. In this exploratory research, additional comparisons were examined for pantries in metropolitan areas versus nonmetropolitan areas and pantries with managers who had received food safety training versus managers who had not. The results provide a snapshot of how North Carolina food pantries operate and document risk mitigation strategies for foodborne illness for the vulnerable populations they serve. Data analysis reveals gaps in food safety knowledge and practice, indicating that pantries would benefit from more effective food safety training, especially focusing on formalizing risk management strategies. In addition, new tools, procedures, or policy interventions might improve information actualization by food pantry personnel.