Many Television Chefs are Cooking up Foodborne Illnesses

By Francine L. Shaw, President
Food Safety Training Solutions, Inc.

Recently, a popular on-air personality did a segment remotely from a restaurant.  While participating in this cooking segment in a restaurant kitchen, he didn’t wash his hands before handling the food, didn’t check the internal temperature of the burger he was cooking, sampled the burger while still wearing food prep gloves – and the list of his mistakes goes on and on.Part of my morning routine is watching a national morning television show or cooking show while I’m getting ready for work.  Often, the on-air personalities make blatant food safety errors on national TV – which make their viewers think it’s OK to model similar behavior in their own kitchens.

While I recognize that there’s limited air-time for each televised segment, it’s frustrating (and dangerous) to see on-air personalities make such obvious errors with regard to food safety protocols.  When viewers see highly-respected TV personalities and chefs skip hand washing, fail to use meat thermometers, cross-contaminate (e.g., using the same board to prep raw meat and ready-to-eat foods like vegetables), or cook with their long hair and dangly earrings hanging over the food, they think it’s OK for them to do the same.  Keep in mind: each of these mistakes on its own could cause a foodborne illness incident or outbreak.  Combining multiple errors while prepping one meal increases the risk factors exponentially.

As a food safety expert – and as someone with a robust history of food service and hospitality experience myself – I encourage the media to do a better job promoting the importance of food safety.  And I also remind TV viewers to not make these same mistakes in their own kitchens.

Foodborne illness is a widespread and serious problem that sickens 48 million people in the U.S. each year and contributes to 5,000 hospitalizations, and 3,000 deaths annually.  I travel around the country educating people about the importance of food safety protocols, but then they tune into cooking shows/segments and see TV personalities making the very same mistakes that I tell them to avoid.

Foodborne illness is 100% preventable.  Whether you’re running a restaurant, cooking dinner for your family at home, or demonstrating a new recipe on a television show, there are certain things you should do every day – for every meal – to prevent foodborne illness:

• Wash your freaking hands. This is the single most important thing for people to do to prevent the spread of dangerous bacteria.  Wash your hands with soap and hot water – not hand sanitizer – and scrub in between your fingers and under your fingernails.  Dry your hands with a clean, single-use towel.

• Avoid cross-contamination. Raw proteins – poultry, meats, seafood, and eggs – contain bacteria, so be sure to wash and sanitize anything that’s come in contact with these raw foods – your hands, cutting boards, knives, plates, etc.  Don’t use the same cutting board or knife to chop ready-to-eat foods (like veggies for a salad) after prepping raw chicken on that board.  And don’t place cooked meats on the same plate you used to hold the raw meats.

• Cook foods to the proper temperature. Use a food thermometer every time you cook meats/proteins to ensure they’ve been cooked to the proper temp.  Undercooked foods can harbor unsafe levels of bacteria and can make diners sick – and can even kill them.  Many cooking show hosts and TV chefs use “touch” methods or look for a certain color in their meats to determine doneness, but neither of these approaches ensures that the meats are cooked to safe temperatures.  Years ago, a huge foodborne illness outbreak at a Jack in the Box restaurant was traced back to undercooked burgers. People died from this mistake.  Avoid this error in your kitchen!

• Keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold. Not only should you cook foods to proper temperatures, but you should serve them correctly, too.  If you have a buffet at your restaurant (or at a party at home), keep hot foods hot using warmers or slow cookers, and serve cold foods (like shrimp cocktail) on ice so they remain chilled.  Don’t allow any foods to sit out for more than two hours – or one hour if your party is outside on a warm day.

• Properly clean and sanitize all equipment. Often, on television, chefs use a cloth towel to wipe off cutting boards or knives. Wiping equipment with a cloth towel won’t remove bacteria from the surface – only properly cleaning and sanitizing can do that.  In fact, if you wipe contaminated equipment with a towel, the towel would then be covered in bacteria that can be spread to hands, foods, and other equipment. It’s essential to regularly rinse, wash and sanitize all surfaces and equipment – especially after prepping raw proteins.

• Practice safety over fashion. On TV, chefs always look “camera-ready,” with cute outfits, stylish jewelry and fancy hairdos and fingernails.  In reality, restaurant and home chefs should tie their hair back so strands don’t drop into the food, contaminating it.  Also, rings, bracelets, and watches can trap dirt, food, and bacteria – and possibly fall into the food accidentally – and shouldn’t be worn while preparing or serving food.  Fingernails should be kept short and clean, and fake fingernails (which can harbor bacteria and fall into the food) should never be worn in the kitchen.

Cooking shows and segments are certainly entertaining and can inspire new ideas, recipes, and techniques.  While it’s OK to watch and enjoy these shows, be aware that they often don’t reflect proper food safety protocols that would keep your guests – and your family – safe and healthy.  Follow proper food safety practices every day, with every meal, no matter what you see chefs doing on TV.  While TV chefs can be fun to watch, they most certainly are not good role models when it comes to food safety.  Hopefully, that will change in the future.  If these popular television chefs modeled proper food safety practices, perhaps more restaurant and home chefs would learn to do the same.

Francine L. Shaw is President of Food Safety Training Solutions, Inc., which offers a robust roster of services, including food safety training, food safety inspections, norovirus policies for employees, norovirus clean-up procedures, curriculum development, responsible alcohol service training, and more. The Food Safety Training Solutions team has more than 100 combined years of industry experience in restaurants, casinos, and convenience stores. The company has helped numerous clients, including Paradies Lagardère, McDonald’s, Subway, Marriott, Domino’s, Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts of America, Dairy Queen, and Omni Hotel and Resorts, prevent foodborne illnesses. Additionally, they work with restaurants of all sizes, schools, medical facilities, convenience stores, hotels, and casinos.  Francine has been featured as a food safety expert in numerous media outlets, including the Dr. Oz Show, the Huffington Post, Food Safety News, and Food Management Magazine.

Power Outages and Food Safety

Photo Credit: LodgingMagazine.com

Published February 10 on LodgingMagazine.com

Power outages are bound to happen, as no one is immune to the havoc that nature can create from time to time, so it’s important to prepare for this eventuality so you know what to do when the power goes off. It’s important to remember that loss of power can happen at any time of day or night, putting your food at risk. The best way to make certain that your food stays safe is to have a plan in place prior to the outage.

Preparation
Create a plan to keep food safe if the power goes out and make certain your entire team knows where to find it.

Always keep refrigerator and freezer thermometers in the refrigeration equipment and maintain temperature logs. Maintaining this information will enable you to ensure that the refrigeration is working properly before the power outage. Maintain refrigeration temperatures at or below 39⁰F and the freezer at or below 0⁰F.

• Know where you can get dry or block ice.
• Keep extra coolers on hand.
• Keep a few extra days of ready-to-eat foods on hand in the dry stock area. These foods will not require any cooking or refrigeration.
• Freeze refrigerated items that you may not need immediately and group food items together (poultry with poultry, whole muscle meat with whole muscle meat, ground meat with ground meat, etc.) in the freezer. In the event they begin to thaw during a power outage, the juices won’t cause cross-contamination.
• Purchase insulated refrigeration blankets for mobile refrigeration or any open-air units.

During the Outage
Cold temperatures will slow the growth of harmful bacteria, so it is critical to keep foods at safe temperatures to reduce the risk of foodborne illness or even death.

• Keep refrigerator and freezer doors closed as much as possible. Opening and closing the door allows cold air to escape which means the food will spoil much more rapidly. The refrigerator will keep food cold for approximately four hours, and a full freezer will keep the temperature for approximately 48 hours (24 hours if it is half full) if unopened.
• Use ice (dry or block, ice cubes, and frozen containers of water/gel packs) to keep your refrigerator and freezer as cold as possible.
• Cover mobile refrigeration units with insulated refrigeration blankets, and keep covered throughout the power outage. Cover open-air units with the appropriately insulated blankets as well.
• Use backup generators, if available, to keep refrigerators and freezers running – and to protect the safety of your refrigerated and frozen foods – during a power outage.

When Power is Restored
Before serving any food after a power outage, check the temperatures inside your cold units.

• If the freezer thermometer reads 41⁰F or below, food is safe and may be refrozen. If you did not have a thermometer in the freezer, check every package to determine its safety; you can’t rely on appearance or odor. If the food still contains ice crystals or is 41⁰F or below, it is safe to refreeze or cook. The quality of the item may be affected but it will be safe if you follow these guidelines.
• If the power was out for no more than four hours, refrigerated food should be safe as long as the doors were kept closed. However, it is still imperative that you take the temperature of the product to make such a determination. Cold food must be 41⁰F or below. Check your temperature log to see what the temperature was prior to the power being disrupted. Discard any perishable food (such as meat, poultry, seafood, milk, eggs, or leftovers) that has been above 41⁰F for two hours or more. If you are uncertain, the product must be discarded. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
• Be aware that perishable foods that are not kept sufficiently refrigerated or frozen may cause foodborne illness and/or death if consumed, even after they are thoroughly cooked.

Golden Rule: When in Doubt, Throw it Out
As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. When it comes to food safety, you can never be too prepared or too cautious. Plan ahead, train your team, purchase the necessary supplies and know where they are stored. This type of preparedness can save you thousands of dollars in product, wages, insurance dollars, and potential litigation fees. Plus, most importantly, it will go a long way in keeping your guests safe.

About the Author
Francine L. Shaw is President of Food Safety Training Solutions, Inc., which offers a robust roster of services, including food safety training, food safety inspections, norovirus policies for employees, norovirus clean-up procedures, curriculum development, responsible alcohol service training, and more.

Seven-layer dip to die for? Keep your Super Bowl buffet safe

BY FRANCINE L. SHAW | FEBRUARY 1, 2017

The holidays have come and gone, and many of us have started the countdown to kickoff Sunday at NRG Stadium in Houston. Like so many Americans, I get pretty excited about the Super Bowl – especially if my home team, Pittsburgh, is playing.

Now, I’m not going to profess tremendous knowledge about football, but I do know food. I love food — and the food at Super Bowl parties is to die for — well, let’s hope not.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest food consumption day of the year in the U.S., ranking behind only Thanksgiving. After all, what’s the big game without nachos, chili, dip and chicken wings?

Menus nationwide vary widely: guacamole, crab dip, blue cheese dip, hummus, raw veggies, meat trays, chicken wings, nachos, chili, meatballs, and shrimp. But all of these game favorites have a common denominator. They’re all time temperature control foods (TCS), meaning they must be kept at the proper temperature to remain safe to consume. In other words, you can’t keep these items out on a buffet table all day without using warming units to keep hot foods hot or bowls of ice to keep cold foods, like shrimp cocktail, cold.

Here are a few tips to keep you and your guests safe and healthy on game day.

Keep it clean
Wash your hands with soap and warm water of at least 100 degrees for a minimum of 20 seconds before preparing, eating or handling food — especially after passing the bacteria-ridden remote control, after using the bathroom and touching pets.

Wash cutting boards, dishes, utensils, and countertops with hot, soapy water after preparing each food item.

Rinse all produce under running water. Fruits and vegetables with firm skins should be rubbed by hand or scrubbed with a clean vegetable brush while rinsing.

Make sure chicken wings and any other poultry dishes reach a minimum internal temperature of 165 degrees F and ground beef dishes reach 160 degrees F.

Hot stuff
Use a food thermometer to test your tidbits, like chicken wings and ground beef dishes, and any other meat or microwaved dishes on your menu.

Separate for safety
Divide cooked food into shallow containers and store in a refrigerator or freezer until the party begins. This encourages rapid, even cooling.

Hold hot foods at 140 degrees F or warmer. Use chafing dishes, slow cookers and warming trays to keep food hot on the buffet table.

Maintain cold foods, like salsa and guacamole, at 40 degrees F or colder. Use small service trays or nest serving dishes in bowls of ice, replacing ice often.

Track the time
Follow recommended microwave cooking and standing times. Realize that cold spots — areas that are not completely cooked—can harbor bacteria.

Always follow directions for the “standing time,” the extra minutes that food should stand in the microwave with the door closed to complete the cooking process. Then check the internal temperature with a food thermometer.

Toss any perishable foods that have been out at room temperature for two hours or more.

Avoid cross-contamination
Recognize that cross-contamination is a common factor in the cause of foodborne illness. If you place raw chicken on a board and then chop vegetables on that same board, you risk cross-contamination, spreading bacteria from the raw poultry onto the vegetables. Proper cooking of the contaminated food in most cases will reduce or eliminate the chances of a foodborne illness from it, but vegetables served raw after chopping will retain bacteria from the surface of an unwashed cutting board straight to your guest's mouths.

Offer guests serving utensils and small plates to discourage them from eating directly from the bowls with dips and salsa.

If your guests have food allergies or sensitivities
Create a separate workspace or area in your kitchen to prepare allergen-free food. Make certain you clean and sanitize all work surfaces and equipment.

Avoid cross-contact, which occurs when an allergen is inadvertently transferred from a food containing an allergen to a food that does not contain the allergen — such as chopping peanuts on a board and then chopping vegetables on that same board. The vegetables have come into contact with the peanuts, which could trigger an allergic reaction in a guest with peanut allergies if they eat those veggies. Cooking does not reduce or eliminate the allergen cross-contamination.

Don’t use the same oil for french fries that you use for breaded products, fish or foods containing nuts.

Beware of hidden ingredients. Did you know that dips and dressings can contain nut oils or other hidden allergens? Barbecue sauce commonly contains nuts, wheat, and soy. And, Worcestershire sauce can contain anchovies. Always read the labels, and then read again before serving to an allergic person. When in doubt, do without! Desserts, especially ice cream are high risk for nut allergies. Commercial brands of ice cream are typically made on “shared” equipment.

Serve allergen-free foods on different-shaped or different-colored plates so they can be easily identified by guests.

Many hand lotions contain common allergens such as tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, and soy; therefore they should not be kept in the kitchen or worn while preparing food.

Ensure safer leftovers
Discard any perishable foods on the buffet for two hours or more.

Divide leftovers into smaller portions or pieces, place in shallow containers and refrigerate.

Don’t wait too long to consume your leftovers. Refrigerate them for three to four days tops. Freeze the leftovers if you won’t be eating them sooner.

Nice try, no sale
Another important item at a Super Bowl party is, of course, the beer.  While many people will enjoy a cold beer or two during the game, realize that alcohol won’t kill any dangerous bacteria that your guests may ingest. People frequently ask me about this. The answer is simply “no.”

Have fun at your Super Bowl party with your family and friends, enjoying the game — and the snacks. I’ll be attending a Super Bowl party for the camaraderie, the food, and the commercials — and to make sure everyone stays safe and healthy.