Cooperative Extension Educators use Meat Models to Promote Food Safety Awareness

June 26, 2015

Rachel Parsons, a Nutrition Educator at Cornell Cooperative Extension Broome shared her favorite food safety education activity below with us for World Health Day 2015.

Many of my participants don’t understand food may have gone bad even though it doesn’t look or smell any different. Bacterial cells are microscopic, so we can’t even see that they are there. At Cooperative Extension we bring awareness to participants by using meat models made out of common materials that closely resemble ground beef.

We use lentils to represent bacteria cells, so that participants can “see” what normally they can’t see. The first model represents our starting point; it is safe to assume there are some bacteria present in with raw meat so the first one starts out with 3 (lentils) “bacteria”. Bacteria cells reproduce quickly and at room temperatures they double every 20 minutes. The scenario I commonly use is grocery shopping, the moment we took that meat package out of the case it starts warming up to room temperature and our “clock” starts. Our next model shows 6 bacteria at 20 minutes. The next model has 12 bacteria at 40 minutes. And then after an hour, there are 24 bacteria.

Throughout a series of lessons I encourage participants to look at labels, compare pricing, and take their time in the store– but that timer keeps running and the bacteria keep multiplying!. After two hours our 3 starting bacteria have multiplied to 192 cells, and it only takes one to make us sick! Our last model shows that after 3 hours there are more than 1000 bacteria cells present. That package might not look or smell any different but that growth is happening and making that food unsafe to eat.

Participants are encouraged to think of other times this bacterial growth can happen (dairy foods left out, cut fruits and vegetables, “doggie bag delay”, thawing at room temperature, picnics, etc.). We also encourage participants to think of ways they can protect their families (purchasing meat and refrigerated products last, bringing a cooler, limit other stops when shopping, safe ways to thaw meat, etc.).

I also share that the two hour limit is reduced to one hour when temperatures are very high, bacterial growth is more rapid at higher temperatures. This use of models really helps participants understand why the two hour rule is so important in food safety. Our participants share that they learned the most from and that it led them to change their behavior.

Denver Loves Food Safety Education

June 26, 2015

Alison Peterson, a Food Program Supervisor for the Denver Department of Environmental Health (DEH) caught up with us to share wonderful activities of the DEH that protect public health through food safety education!

Denver Department of Environmental Health Public Health Inspection Division is passionate about education! DEH is dedicated to protecting the public’s health and safety by educating the food industry. DEH regularly offers basic food safety classes for anyone interested. The target audience is the every-day food employee. Our classes provide a comprehensive overview of day-to-day food safety concepts in a food facility. We do have a heavy focus on the biological hazards of food-borne illness and how crucial hand washing is by conducting GloGerm demonstrations.

DEH has always offered basic food safety classes. Over the past few years, we have really increased our educations efforts. We developed a new Power Point presentation, complete with “real” pictures. We added more classes to the 2015 schedule including Spanish classes! We created a colorful, fun pamphlet to hand out to operators, employees, and anyone interested in attending the class! We created a “food safety instructor team” of any inspectors interested in teaching this class. We met, we discussed, we talked food safety, and we all chuckled when someone mentioned “Oh, I can definitely talk about explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting in front of a group of people!”

Our educational program has improved so much that Basic Food Safety Class attendance has skyrocketed from 10-15 participants per class to almost 50 participants! We now have a team of four instructors (and two of them also speak Spanish)! We have also received numerous requests for off-site classes and at the end of 2014, conducted 10 off-site classes! In 2015, we have already conducted 3 off-site classes too! Our initiative this year is to reach out to as many food handlers as possible. We have partnered with State Food Safety to offer an online food safety class in multiple languages!

We have received great feedback regarding the availability of this educational opportunity. Our instructors created a post-class evaluation as well, where one participant concluded that, “The sharing of “real life” experience. All the pictures and stories really help things hit home!”

Jr. BAC Fighter Nabs Prize in Speech Contest

June 26, 2015

Anna Morris does her part to keep food safe.

Anna is pictured above after giving a speech during the the Food Safety and Preservation category in a speech contest. After answering the judge’s questions with ease, Anna took home second place!

Anna also shared a photo of her local Middle and High School 4-H Group at a meeting on food safety. They played trivia games to test knowledge on proper food handling and then learned all about how to prevent food borne illnesses. Everyone had fun learning valuable food safety lessons!

We’re so proud of BAC Fighters like Anna who do so much for food safety around the world.

A Foodborne Illness Mystery

June 26, 2015

Peter Wong is tackling food safety by writing a mystery about an outbreak of foodborne illness aboard a cruise ship. The book is the latest in the Galactic Academy of Science series, in which middle school students travel through time to learn enough science to solve a mystery in the present. In The Contaminated Case of the Cooking Contest, due to be published by Tumblehome Learning on June 1, 2015,middle school students Mae and Clinton are excited to be aboard a Caribbean cruise that features cooking contests for adults and teens. But when passengers start falling ill, Selectra Volt, their Galactic Academy of Science guide from the future, challenges the two teens to find the cause. Is the outbreak a result of poor food handling, or is someone purposely sabotaging the ship’s food supply?

Mae and Clinton learn about food safety through a series of time-travel visits to scientists, doctors, and inventors of the past and present. They visit Nicholas Appert, who invented canning to feed Napoleon’s army; Clarence Birdseye, who learned how to freeze fish from the Inuit in the Arctic; John Snow, who discovered the cause of a cholera outbreak in Victorian London; Typhoid Mary, who unknowingly caused illness in seven families she cooked for; Ferran Adria, a master of creative cooking; and present-day scientists studying food-borne illness at the CDC in Atlanta and a U.S. Army research facility in Natick, Massachusetts.

Between trips, Mae and Clinton compete in the kids’ cooking contest, help out in the ship infirmary, test food samples for bacteria, gather clues, and follow suspicious characters. As the ship sails through the edge of a hurricane and the ship infirmary fills to overflowing, Clinton and Mae race to gather evidence and sift through a pile of suspects. the book provides a fun way to learn about the organisms that contaminate our food, and how outbreaks can be prevented or stopped.

Seriously? Food poisoning at a food safety meeting!

May 26, 2015

PFSE employee learns the value of her work first-hand

You may have heard the ironic news that attendees at the Food Safety Summit in Baltimore last April reported symptoms of food poisoning. An investigation by the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found the illnesses were likely caused by Clostridium perfringens (C. perfringens), bacteria that appears mostly in meat products and is the result of a failure to hold foods at a high enough temperature.

I was one of the 200+ conference attendees that experienced the food poisoning! It was an experience that I, a BAC Fighter and employee of the Partnership for Food Safety Education, was surprised to have at a food safety meeting (I mean- come on!).

The sleepless and long night of discomfort I experienced did make clear how important it is that everyone play their part in preventing food poisoning, and that a culture that engages everyone in keeping food safe is critical to reducing food poisoning and its severe health impacts.

As Mike Taylor, FDA Deputy Commissioner for Foods and Veterinary Medicine recently stated, “…We’re not talking about lots of stomach aches. We’re talking about life-changing illness in many cases.” For me, the C. Perfringens incidence demonstrated how important it is that young people learn about the risk of food poisoning, and also learn the healthy food handling habits that can be carried into adulthood.

This experience also shows why the work of BAC Fighters [YOU!] is ever more important. Using Fight BAC!® materials to reach youth and families in your communities is critical to establishing life-long healthy behaviors that reduce the risk of food poisoning. And when young people enter the food service workforce, safe food handling practices will be second nature!

Because food safety education isn’t about preventing a few stomach aches. It’s about reducing the risk of potentially life-changing illness.