I cringe when someone says, ‘food safety is simple.’

A review of existing studies by the U.K. Food Standards Agency found that, although people “are often aware of good food hygiene practices, many people are failing to chill foods properly, aren’t following advice on food labels and aren’t sticking to simple hygiene practices that would help them avoid spreading harmful bacteria around their kitchens.”

Yes, individuals are impervious to risk; been known for decades.

And there’s that word, ‘simple’ again.

I especially cringe when someone says, ‘cooking a hamburger is easy with these simple food safety steps.’

Ho Phang and Christine Bruhn report in the current Journal of Food Protection that in video observation of 199 California consumers making hamburgers and salad in their own kitchens, handwashing was poor, only 4% used a thermometer to check if the burger was safely cooked, and there were an average of 43 cross-contamination events per household.

There’s some good data in the paper about what consumers do in their own kitchens, and the results are an additional nail in the self-reported-food-safety-survey coffin: people know what they are supposed to do but don’t do it.

But what the paper doesn’t address is how to influence food safety behaviors. Instead, the University of California at Davis authors fall back on the people-need-to-be-educated model, without out providing data on how that education – I prefer compelling information – should be provided.

The authors state:

• educational materials need to emphasize the important role of the consumer in
preventing foodborne illness and that foodborne illnesses can result from foods prepared in the home.;

• the gap between the awareness of the importance of hand washing and the actual practice of adequate hand washing should be addressed by food safety educators.

• food safety educators should address the lack of reliability of visual cues during cooking (stick it in -- dp);

• food safety educators should emphasize faucet cleaning with soap and water as a way of preventing cross-contamination; and,

• ignorance about food irradiation point to a further need for education.

The authors do correctly note that program to promote the use of thermometers when cooking burgers, initiated by the introduction of Thermy in 2000, has not been successful. So why do more education?

And the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in Jack-in-the-Box hamburgers happened in Jan. 1993, not 1994 as stated in the paper; someone should have caught that.

Burger preparation: what consumers say and do in the home
01.oct.11
Journal of Food Protection®, Volume 74, Number 10, October 2011 , pp. 1708-1716(9)
Phang, Ho S.; Bruhn, Christine M.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/iafp/jfp/2011/00000074/00000010/art00017
Abstract:
Ground beef has been linked to outbreaks of pathogenic bacteria like Escherichia coli O157:H7 and Salmonella. Consumers may be exposed to foodborne illness through unsafe preparation of ground beef. Video footage of 199 volunteers in Northern California preparing hamburgers and salad was analyzed for compliance with U.S. Department of Agriculture recommendations and for violations of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Food Code 2009. A questionnaire about consumer attitudes and knowledge about food safety was administered after each filming session. The majority of volunteers, 78%, cooked their ground beef patties to the Food Code 2009 recommended internal temperature of 155°F (ca. 68°C) or above, and 70% cooked to the U.S. Department of Agriculture consumer end-point guideline of 160°F (ca. 71°C), with 22% declaring the burger done when the temperature was below 155°F. Volunteers checked burger doneness with a meat thermometer in 4% of households. Only 13% knew the recommended internal temperature for ground beef. The average hand washing time observed was 8 s; only 7% of the hand washing events met the recommended guideline of 20 s. Potential cross-contamination was common, with an average of 43 events noted per household. Hands were the most commonly observed vehicle of potential cross-contamination. Analysis of food handling behaviors indicates that consumers with and without food safety training exposed themselves to potential foodborne illness even while under video observation. Behaviors that should be targeted by food safety educators are identified.
 

Willingness-to-pay studies are excellent indicators of what people think they will do in imaginary situations.

Willingness-to-pay studies are terrible indicators of what people will actually do at the grocery store.

Brian Roe, professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics at Ohio State University (isn’t that The OSU?) and Mario Teisl of the University of Maine report in the journal Food Policy, that based on surveys from 3,511 individuals, Americans would be willing to pay about a dollar per person each year, or an estimated $305 million in the aggregate, for a 10 percent reduction in the likelihood that hamburger they buy in the supermarket is contaminated by E. coli.

A monkey just flew out of Wayne Campbell’s butt (see video below from last week’s Saturday Night Live).

By comparison, a 2008 U.S. Department of Agriculture analysis estimated the value of eradicating a specific type of E. coli contamination from all food sources would result in a benefit valued at $446 million.

In the questionnaire, they set up six hypothetical scenarios around the purchase of either a package of hotdogs or a pound of hamburger. They set prices for the packages – both "status quo" foods and those treated with either ethylene gas processing or electron beam irradiation to reduce contaminants – and then laid out a variety of probabilities that the treated or untreated food packages contained contamination with either E. coli or listeria, another pathogen that can cause food-borne (sic) illness.

They followed by asking respondents to choose one of three actions: buy the food treated with the pathogen-reducing technology, buy their usual brand, or stop buying this product altogether.

The results showed that consumers will reach a limit to how much they want to pay to reduce their chances of getting sick. If the treated product cost only 10 cents more than an untreated package, about 60 percent of respondents said they'd buy the improved product. But when that higher price reached $1.60 more per package, less than a third would opt for the treated product.

The structure of the survey also allowed researchers to see the influence of human behavior and opinions on likely illness outcomes.

"If the food industry were forced to put technology in place that lowered the presence of E. coli and that ramped up prices to the extent where everybody had to pay about a dollar more out of pocket each year for hamburger, we're saying that, according to this model, that would be about an equal tradeoff for the U.S. population. And if the technology costs only about 10 cents per person instead, that would seem like a good deal to most people," he said.

"If regulators could become more comfortable with this measurement process, agencies might change the way they conduct their cost-benefit analysis. And that would be an interest of ours, to see if our work and others' work in this area will eventually change the way people attack these questions."

So it’s more about changing the way estimates are done. Estimates are lousy surrogates. I’m all for marketing food safety – at retail, food service, markets, everywhere. Brag about test results, use big signs, smart phone readers, just be able to back it up.
 

In the latest ridiculously expensive survey of Canadians, 77 per cent of Canadians said they were either "very" or "somewhat" concerned with the safety of the food they eat, up from 66 per cent in 2007,

The Ipsos Reid poll conducted for Postmedia News found 87 per cent agree that they trust food that comes from Canada more than food that comes from abroad, with 85 per cent of respondents saying they make an effort to buy locally-grown and produced food.

So, Canadians trust Maple Leaf and their listeria-laden cold cuts more than stuff from other places?

Debbie Field, executive director of the Toronto-based food advocacy group FoodShare, said,

"Even though it seems silly and a bit utopian to imagine small producers being safer, what people like me believe is that it's true. You'll always have some problem, you'll always have contamination, you'll always have some airborne illness. But if it's kept local, its impact is much smaller.”

The only way to verify such claims is to assess

A new study from the University of Aberdeen finds that two thirds of visitors to the U.K. countryside have never heard of E. coli O157.

Does that matter? Does someone need to know specifically about E. coli O157 or do they need to know to wash their hands after playing with road apples or cow patties.

In the study by researchers from the Universities of Aberdeen and Bangor two thirds of rural residents and country visitors who had heard of E. coli O157 said they acted to reduce their risk of the potentially deadly infection.

However, most described how they reduced risk by cooking meat properly, and very few gave examples of reducing risk around farm animals and in the countryside.

Over 2000 tourists, residents and famers from north Wales and the Grampian region — which has one of the world's highest rates of the infection — took part in the survey.

Dr Colette Jones from the University of Aberdeen’s School of Geosciences said:

“‘In light of last year’s E. coli O157 outbreak on the open farm in Surrey it is important to recognise that rural visitors are not as well informed as they might be. They read the signs about washing hands but may not take it seriously enough if they are not fully aware of the danger. In this project we are aiming to determine the level of understanding of the infection among farmers, locals and visitors to rural areas, and thereby identify how cases of E. coli O157 could be better prevented.”

So those ‘Employees must wash hands’ signs may not work?

Jon Stewart figured that out in 2002.

“If you think the 10 commandments being posted in a school is going to change behavior of children, then you think “Employees Must Wash Hands” is keeping the piss out of your happy meals. It's not.”

And in honor of Road Apples, here’s the rarely played Tragically Hip song, Born in the Water, from the 1991 recording about Katie’s hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, which at one point decided it would be a good idea to ban French.