N.Y. Times sucks at food safety: stick a piece of metal in a burger and lick it, rather than a thermometer, to tell if it's done?
In the continuing saga of bad food safety advice in the N.Y. Times – and the elevation of food pornography over food safety – the Times today ran a piece about the perfect burger.
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In interviews with dozens of so-called chefs around the U.S., not one mentioned the use of a tip-sensitive digital thermometer to ensure a final, safe temperature of 160F, or that color is an exceedingly lousy indicator of doneness or food safety (that's Ben, right, exactly as shown, grillin' up some Canada Day burgers)
The story does say, “testing for doneness is always a challenge for the home cook. Seamus Mullen, the chef and an owner of the Boqueria restaurants in the Flatiron district and SoHo, uses a wire cake tester. (Any thin, straight piece of metal will work as well.)
“We stick it in the middle through the side. If it’s barely warm to the lips, it’s rare. If it’s like bath water, it’s medium rare. The temperature will never lie. It takes the guesswork out of everything.”
Rather than putting E. coli O157:H7 on your precious testing lips, stick a thermometer in. You’re already sticking a piece of metal in so why not a thermometer?
Ben has just added to the Mark Bittman history of spewing out food safety nonsense that I have been tracking for at least two years.
The Times also published the whopper by Nina Planck, who at the height of the fall 2006 E. coli O157:H7 spinach outbreak, wrote in the Times that E. coli O157:H7 "is not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. … It's the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates the groundwater and spreads the bacteria to produce, like spinach, growing on neighboring farms."
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This falsehood is routinely repeated, most recently in the entertaining but factually-challenged movie, Food Inc.
The natural reservoirs for E. coli O157:H7 and other verotoxigenic E. coli is the intestines of all ruminants, including cattle -- grass or grain-fed -- sheep, goats, deer and the like. The final report of the fall 2006 spinach outbreak identifies nearby grass-fed beef cattle as the likely source of the E. coli O157:H7 that sickened 200 and killed 4.
In my own unique version of how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people, I called Bittman and celebrity food porn doofus Jamie Oliver idiots for their advice on how to cook chicken and their ability to cross-contaminate an entire kitchen within seconds.
N.Y. Times, you are furthering your descent to irrelevancy.
What's the best way to wash hands?
According to CanWest News, Canadian government officials, based on internal documents, can't agree on how long to scrub.
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Correspondence between senior Ontario and federal bureaucrats obtained under an access to information request reveal disparities in hand washing advice, as discovered by an Ontario health official who surveyed government health websites looking for advice.
The inconsistencies prompted her to muse, "maybe we should have a National consensus meeting on how to wash your hands."
No need to file pondersome information requests. A google search reveals all kinds of differing advice on how best to wash hands. We’ve come up with our own, but are constantly revising as more information becomes available.
The steps in proper handwashing, as concluded from the preponderance of available evidence, are:
• wet hands with water;
• use enough soap to build a good lather;
• scrub hands vigorously, creating friction and reaching all areas of the fingers and hands for at least 10 seconds to loosen pathogens on the fingers and hands;
• rinse hands with thorough amounts of water while continuing to rub hands; and,
• dry hands with paper towel.
Water temperature is not a critical factor -- water hot enough to kill dangerous bacteria and viruses would scald hands -- so use whatever is comfortable.
The friction from rubbing hands with paper towels helps remove additional bacteria and viruses.
Next time you visit a bathroom that is missing soap, water or paper towels, let someone in charge know. And next time you see someone skip out on the suds in the bathroom, look at them and say, “Dude, wash your hands!”
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It's tragic to be hip if the science sucks -- turkey advice
The U.K. Food Standards Agency is so tragically hip they’ve gone viral.
Except they call it ‘viral,’ encasing the word in what speakers would call “air quotes” or what Jon Stewart of the Daily Show recently called “dick fingers.” I call it bad writing.
The Agency has launched a new 'viral' marketing campaign, which raises awareness to the dangers of eating week-old turkey and gives tips to protect people in the UK from festive food poisoning. …
The new 60-second video aims to raise awareness of bad food hygiene and give some key advice on the safe handling of Christmas leftovers. The shocking but amusing film features a family that hasn’t been following the Agency’s advice on food hygiene. Diarrhoea might be the Christmas gift that keeps on giving, but do you really want to give it to your family?
The Agency advises leftovers should be:
* cooled as quickly as possible (within one to two hours) and kept in the fridge
* reheated only once, until piping hot
* eaten within two days
Who said the film was shocking? Or funny? And what does piping hot mean?
The Australians, who are just entering the hot summer weather, are more reasonable and recommend cooking to 75C (167F).
The origin of poultry cooking recommendations has been pondered many times on barfblog.com.
Currently, Health Canada suggests consumers cook turkey until the temperature of the thickest part of the breast or thigh is at least 85C (185F), though no one knows why.
A few decades ago, the USDA was also recommending that thigh meat reached 180-185F and breast meat reached 170F.
When asked why a couple years back, a manager of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Meat and Poultry Hotline said, "I've looked all over and I really have no idea. I think it happened sometime back in the 1980s, but I don't know what it was based on."
One of my research assistants, Casey Jacob, dug up a New York Times article from 1990 in which an assistant supervisor of the Hotline admitted that a turkey cooked until the breast meat is 160F and the dark meat is 170F was "microbiologically safe," but that the agency recommended the higher temps just to be on the safe side.
The agency now recommends that consumers cook poultry to an internal temp of 165F.
Casey tells that tale here:
“When USDA microbiologists finally got around to conducting validation studies in 2000, they figured out that a 7 log reduction in Salmonella could be achieved instantly at 158F and beyond.
“In 2006, NACMCF decided (through scientific studies, of course, not random number generation as may have been used previously) that foodborne pathogens and viruses, such as Salmonella, Campylobacter, and the avian influenza virus, were destroyed when poultry was cooked to an internal temperature of 165F.
“And thus the scientifically validated American recommendation of 165F was born.”
Here are the refs. Enjoy your Christmas dinner.
National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods. 2006. Response to the questions posed by the Food Safety and Inspection Service regarding consumer guidelines for the safe cooking of poultry products. Adopted March 24, 2006. Arlington, VA.
United States Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service. 2005. Time-temperature tables for cooking ready-to-eat poultry products. Available at:
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/rdad/FSISNotices/RTE_Poultry_Tables.pdf. Accessed November 23, 2008.
Amy and I will be having lamb.
And this is the real deal, Kingston, Ontario’s very own, Tragically Hip.
