Partnership for Food Safety Education

FightBAC!

Lisa’s Table Is All About Safe Dinners

Meet Lisa

Lisa Treiber is a dedicated BAC Fighter who is passionate about keeping her community safe. She is an Extension Agent at Michigan State University, and she regularly uses Fight BAC resources in her curriculum.

Lisa values raising awareness around safe food handling practices. Throughout the semester she teaches courses that remind students how to stay healthy. She also shares The Story of Your Dinner resources — particularly around the holiday season. She has done this for many years and has noticed that her community responds positively to it.

Lisa’s Table Spreads Awareness for the Holidays

This past holiday season, Lisa dedicated a table to food safety in the atrium of the Midland County Building Department. She blew up food safety tips from The Story of Your Dinner and made them into laminated tiles. The tiles were arranged to be easily read by anyone who passes through the building. Lisa is thankful for the clear messages on each tile like “Suds up for 20 seconds” and “Keep your refrigerator at 40°F or below.”

Lisa went a step further and printed off recipes with food safety steps and left them on the table. She worked hard to emphasize the importance of food safety during the holiday season, and it was well received by her peers and community. She was pleasantly surprised to see over 50 recipes had been taken from the table by the diverse population that walks through the building.

Years of Community Engagement at the Table

This isn’t the first year Lisa has created a table display. A couple years ago, she increased community engagement by holding a drawing for those who stopped at the table. Over 75 people entered and the winner received a fridge thermometer to ensure their fridge was at a food-safe temperature. The county health department sanitarian workers who approved the display said that it was “wonderful”.

Lisa feels that with the number of those who have responded each year, she is getting her message across and doing her part in spreading awareness to her community. She appreciates that the resources from the Partnership for Food Safety Education are diverse and can be easily tweaked to be used throughout the entire year.

Lisa Treiber is an Extension Agent at Michigan State University. She can be reached at treiber@msu.edu.

You can make sure families have the safe food handling information that they need to reduce their risk of food poisoning with a personal contribution today. Click here to make a gift.

Bernadette Cooks Up Food Safety Skills with Her Students

New Hampshire Teacher of the Year Bernadette Olsen teaches food and consumer science (FACS) at the David R. Cawley Middle School in Hookset, N.H. There she helps to grow students’ independent problem-solving skills in food safety and other topics.

She teaches a number of classes to the middle schoolers including the 6th grade Family and Consumer Science Exploratory Class, in which students practice safe and sanitary skills as they complete food lab cooking projects.

In her 7th grade Foods and Nutrition Class, students evaluate scientific information, learn to identify and use reliable resources, and develop skills and techniques to create nutritious, food-safe meals.

Eighth grade students study the effects of various factors on the local and world food supply, and gain an understanding of ingredient functions in the production of commercial food products. Students once again practice food-safe skills in class.

We met Bernadette this summer at the 2017 American Association of Food and Consumer Science national conference, where she was the AAFCS representative for New Hampshire.

In this video that we shot at the AAFCS expo, Bernadette tells us how she uses the Partnership’s  Story of Your Dinner with her weekly special needs class, Buddies Cooking with Peers.

Betty’s Deviance Inspires Community Food Safety

Betty Yaohua Feng, is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis. She presented two sessions related to Positive Deviance at CFSEC2017.

Her research investigates the effectiveness of positive deviance interventions on changing consumers’ safe food handling attitudes and behaviors.

For those unfamiliar with the theory, Positive Deviance is based on the observation that, in every community, there are certain individuals whose uncommon practices (in this case- correct food safety behaviors) enable them to find better solutions to problems than their neighbors or colleagues, despite having access to the same resources.

The goals are to identifying best practices on how to reach these individuals and then to work with these “Positive Deviants” to promote food safety in a community or group.

Betty shares a story from her research:

A few years ago, I piloted the Positive Deviance approach in classes with several different groups of people with diabetes.  The classes covered the importance of food safety in diabetes. “Doreen,” one of the group members, was a 62-year-old woman with Type-2 Diabetes. She had never heard that having diabetes put you at higher risk for food borne illness. This was important news to her.

She attended all of the three group sessions offered.  Doreen shared that before she came to the classes, she never realized that she should wash the apples she brought home from the supermarket before eating them. She was surprised to learn that. Doreen said, “They are so shiny and I only buy from big chains, so I assumed they were clean and ready to eat. I didn’t know they needed to be washed.”

Before and after the series, we gave food safety knowledge pre- and post- tests, and Doreen did very well with the post-test. Before the last session, she asked if I would like to go to her church and present food safety information to her friends and family and community members. This was very encouraging to me, as an educator. It is unlikely that before she attended the classes she would have invited a food safety expert to present information to her local congregation.

Doreen’s positive deviance was influencing her community!

Michelle Finds Birds and Bread Boost Hand-Washing

Michelle Paillou, Environmental Supervisor/Training Coordinator for the St. Louis (MO) County Health Department, is a community education specialist. Her food safety outreach ranges from operators who need a refresher at the “food school” she created, to school age kids and adults.

For grade schoolers to high school students, her presentation revolves around the familiar St. Louis Cardinals and all the food safety steps that have to be taken by the stadium food vendors before it opens.  Michelle says, “Since most of the kids know about baseball, it’s a great way to tie in public health.”

For the youngest students, Michelle talks to the kids about how to wash your hands and why it’s important. In her class, she uses three pieces of bread and asks the kids to touch one of them with unwashed hands, touch another one with washed hands, and one slice is untouched.

She next shows them the “time-lapsed” results, using “pre-treated” bread slices: the slice that was not handled and the one handled with clean hands remain uncontaminated and OK to eat. While the slice handled with dirty hands is covered with bacterial growth and looks, as the kids say, “disgusting”.

Michelle has found that this is a great visual and really makes an impact. She sometime receives notes from students after the class, thanking her for teaching them about handwashing.   Michelle tells us that she leaves them, “Singing the Happy Birthday song and washing their hands!”

 

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Joanna’s Hands-On Food Safety Education

Food safety is a key concept learned in classes taught by Joanna Fedor, Family and Consumer Science Teacher at Northridge High School in Greeley, Colorado. Joanna moves her students from little or no knowledge of  hand hygiene basics to a working knowledge of the why’s and how’s of food safety.

She uses interactive activities such as Glo-Germ for hand washing education and the free, science-based curricular materials at fightbac.org for teaching the basic four skills of clean, separate, cook and chill.

In addition, Joanna works with students on the culinary teams to prepare for competitions. These student chefs run food safety circles around most TV chefs!

Joanna and her students explain: