The UK Food Standards Agency’s latest public attitudes tracker shows that the main food safety issue people continue to be concerned about is food hygiene when eating out. Other issues include food poisoning and the use of additives in food.

The Agency’s Food Hygiene Rating Scheme in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the Food Hygiene Information scheme in Scotland, aim to reduce these concerns by encouraging businesses to improve hygiene standards and reduce the incidence of foodborne illness. The schemes help consumers choose where to eat out or shop for food by giving them information about the hygiene standards in restaurants, cafés, takeaways, hotels and food shops.

In this latest tracker survey, three new questions were asked to measure people’s awareness of food hygiene schemes. The results show that 19% of respondents had seen or heard about this type of scheme. When prompted, 21% of respondents reported that they had seen or heard about the ‘Food Hygiene Rating scheme’, 12% had seen or heard about ‘Scores on the Doors’ and 10% had seen or heard about the ‘Food Hygiene Information Scheme’.

This latest wave of research was undertaken in November 2011, with a total number of 2,076 respondents interviewed via the TNS consumer face-to-face omnibus survey.

That fancy-pants restaurant in Rotherwick, Hook, Hampshire, recently voted as Britain ‘most perfect town,’ was fined for poisoning guests with chicken liver parfait at a 2010 Christmas party.

Guests at the prestigious Tylney Hall Hotel complained to Hart's Environmental Health Department in January last year, triggering off a lengthy investigation and resulting in the hotel being prosecuted.

In Aldershot Magistrates' Court the hotel pleaded guilty to five breaches of food hygiene legislation:

• Two instances of placing unsafe food on the market - namely chicken liver parfait.
• Failing to comply with the requirement to implement and maintain procedures in relation to an identified critical control point, namely cooking.
• Offering for sale cheese after the date shown in its 'use by' date
• Failing to ensure that food handlers were supervised, instructed and trained in food hygiene matters commensurate with their work activity.
• Admitting failing to follow their own exacting standards.

The hotel owners, Tylney Hall Hotel Ltd, which had no previous convictions, was ordered to pay £35,900 in fines and a further £4,000 in costs.

They were told the fines would have been well in excess of £50,000 had they not been given a 33 per cent discount for pleading guilty.

Things have gone from bad to worse for British celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson, who was arrested after shoplifting cheese and wine at a Tesco grocery store.

The Courier Mail reports that Worrall Thompson, 60, was arrested in front of astonished customers after five shoplifting episodes in just 16 days.

Suspicious staff filmed the chef on a secret camera in the store's self-service checkout area, where shoppers scan barcodes on their purchases and pay using machines.

The recession-hit star is said to have put some items under the scanner but sneaked others into bags without paying for them. Guards stopped him from leaving the supermarket and checked his bags after he was filmed last Friday - then called police.

Sources said the stolen goods were "relatively low value" but included cheeses and bottles of wine.

Worrall Thompson tasted success as he launched a string of top eateries - and soared to TV fame in the 1990s. But the recession hit his restaurant business, and he recently moved out of his $2.5 million mansion.

Worrall Thompson has shown up in barfblog.com before. He was a signatory to a open letter calling on the British public to ask where their food comes from (free from the grocery store?), he published a recipe in Healthy & Organic Living that included a toxic plant as an ingredient, and has run afoul of public health types for using paving stones as a kitchen counter at a public BBQ.

The death of a Jewish grandmother who contracted salmonella from bean sprouts should force national changes to food labelling to prevent further deaths, a coroner has ruled.

A four-day inquest into the death of René Kwartz, from north Manchester, concluded that the 82- year-old was infected by salmonella, in bean sprouts served at a Jewish wedding in August 2010. It had been alleged that the wedding's caterer, Shefa Mehadrin, had neglected food safety standards.

But on Dec. 8, 2011, the inquest's jury unanimously returned a verdict of death by natural causes.

During evidence from Bury Council's environmental health investigators, it emerged that no fault was found with the caterer, but that serving instructions on the bean sprout packages used at the wedding, were misleading.

Manchester Coroner Nigel Meadows said he would push the government and the Food Standards Agency to review cooking guidelines on bean sprout packaging. The agencies must report on what action will be taken within 56 days.

Concluding the inquest, Mr Meadows said: "It seems that clarity on the cooking of this product could be easily achieved.

A table of sprout-related outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/sprouts-associated-outbreaks.