Science in the Triangle

With scorching temps spoiling picnics faster than you can say “salmonella,” food safety is in the air.

A few recent reminders that we are frail, vulnerable beings in a world dominated by microbes both good and evil: Listeria-laced pre-packaged spinach was found in an Elizabeth City store; a boil-water advisory was issued in Smithfield after a test showed coliform contamination (thankfully, a false alarm—there was no E. coli); and a flight to Charlotte turned around after someone inexplicably brought spoiled meat on board and maggots fell from the overhead bin.

Last month, NC State University researcher Dr. Ben Chapman and colleagues published some alarming findings about unsafe food handling in commercial kitchens. The team placed cameras unobtrusively around eight kitchens for seven weeks and then analyzed the footage. They counted an average of one cross-contamination event per food handler per hour. A cross-contamination event puts raw or contaminated foods in contact with ready-to eat items, like cutting a piece of raw chicken and then using the same knife to cut a sandwich in half before serving.

Eww.

With practices like that, it’s no wonder that the majority of food poisoning outbreaks are attributed to meals prepared outside the home. But until this study, practices in commercial kitchens were understood mostly from self-reporting and periodic inspections, leading to a rosier view of what goes on in them than what the videos revealed.

The research team suggests ways food-preparation kitchens can improve their track record by posting food safety infosheets around the kitchen, installing more hand sanitizer dispensers, reducing time-pressure on cooks during peak hours, and making cultural changes in the way food safety training and enforcement is done. But kitchen culture is hard to change, and measures like encouraging workers to stay home when they’re ill aren’t particularly popular with managers who fear abuse of paid sick days, as Chapman observed in a recent post on the strangely addictive food safety blog Barfblog.

Bad behavior by professional chefs doesn’t let us home cooks off the hook, either. My grandmother has used nothing stronger than vinegar to clean everything from chicken leaks to the cat’s flea medicine off the kitchen counter for years, and though I love her to pieces, that’s really not okay. As the CDC preaches, we still need to clean, separate, cook, and chill our food, and keep washing our hands.

More than one in four Americans gets ill each year because of some foodborne illness, says the CDC, landing around 300,000 in the hospital and resulting in 5,000 deaths annually.

And it peaks right now—in the dog (or should that be “contaminated hot dog”) days of summer.

One reason is that bacteria are more active and multiply faster when it’s warm. Another is that people tend to let down their defenses when grilling, camping, or spending a day at the beach, washing their hands, food and utensils less frequently than they would at home in the kitchen.

Now’s the time to be even more vigilant. If you want to remind yourself of all those food safety rules that your grandmother probably didn’t teach you (if she’s like mine), foodsafety.gov has a bunch of resources, including a smart phone app for recall notices.

Of course, food and water contamination doesn’t just come from unsafe practices in home and commercial kitchens. Often, the baddies get into our food somewhere along the vast, complicated supply chain. For more on the broader issues contributing to foodborne illness, stay tuned for the Sigma Xi annual meeting in November, themed “Food Safety and Security: Science and Policy.”

I suspect whoever caters that event will take a little extra care in the kitchen.

Anne Frances Johnson is a freelance science writer and grad student at UNC. www.annefjohnson.com.