Partnership for Food Safety Education

FightBAC!

Ventura County Environmental Health Greets Residents with Food Safety Every September

Every year in September the Ventura County (CA) Environmental Health Division sets up a food safety display in the lobby of the County Government Center Building. The lobby is often bustling with county residents.

This year the display featured the English and Spanish versions of the two-minute “Story of Your Dinner” video.

Residents could also pick up pamphlets from the department along with handouts from the Partnership for Food Safety Education, including the Food Safety Tips flyer and activity sheets for school-aged children.  The Four Core Practices – Clean, Separate, Cool, Chill – are an important part of the display every year.

“The Ventura County Environmental Health Division appreciates partnering with PFSE in the education of our county residents,” said Susan Seiler.

The goals of this annual display are public outreach and education about the importance of food safety and following the Four Core Practices at home and at work.

Susan Seiler is an environmental health specialist with the Ventura County Environmental Health Division. She can be reached at (805) 648-9245 or susan.seiler@ventura.org.

 

Mix and Match Your Fight BAC Resources for Custom-made Classes

BAC Fighters know that there are a wide variety of food safety education resources on FightBAC.org. The site features ready-to-go campaigns that require simply a printer for downloadable brochures and flyers, or a projector for ready-made PowerPoint presentations.

Educators may also personalize Fight BAC resources using their creativity to come up with engaging new classes for their community, like Marilen Howard did. Marilen is Director of Nutrition Education & Training at Northeast Valley Health Corporation in California. She is not only familiar with the Fight BAC resources; she knows how to use them to create specially-designed presentations to educate her WIC community.

Marilen’s Keep Your Food Safe WIC classes start with Core Four food safety information, using logos and graphics from the site to create an engaging PowerPoint presentation. Each slide encourages participants to learn about and then share their home food-safety strategies. Presenters evaluate understanding using the answers given during the virtual spin-the-food-safety-wheel game. For the finale, participants watch the Story of Your Dinner video.

 

To keep the children busy while they are waiting for their parents to finish the class, she prints and distributes Fight BAC coloring pages.

Marilen created versions of the presentations in several of the languages spoken in her community.

What were the results of all this food safety creativity? In-person classes provided at 13 WIC sites, combined with self-learning home modules, reached over 12,000 WIC participants in April and May!

Marilen says, “We thank you so much for allowing us to use your free resources. It made our WIC participants’ class experience much better.”

Take a Fresh Look at Frozen Foods this Holiday Season

Dr. Donna Garren,  Senior Vice President of Regulatory and Technical Affairs, Frozen Food Foundation

In honor of the holiday season, the Frozen Food Foundation invites you to take a fresh look at frozen foods and follow the four easy steps in the Story of Your Dinner consumer education campaign.

Frozen. How Fresh Stays Safe.
Freezing is nature’s pause button. Freezing simply pauses just-picked and just-baked foods, keeping them at their peak of freshness and locking in their flavor and nutrients.

Freezing, one of the oldest methods of preserving foods, can keep foods fresh for a longer period of time. Freezing is a natural way to keep foods safe by preventing microorganisms from growing and by slowing down the enzyme activity that causes food to spoil. Modern freezing techniques used by fruit and vegetable growers and makers of prepared meals capture and preserve food at the peak of its freshness and nutrient content.

When preparing the variety of options available to consumers in the frozen food aisle, remember to always read and follow the package cooking instructions to achieve the right temperature to make your foods safe and delicious.

Another important tip to remember this holiday season is if you can’t eat your leftovers quickly, freeze them, because cold temperatures slow the growth of harmful bacteria.

Frozen. How Fresh Stays Nutritious.
Did you know that frozen fruits and vegetables are as rich in nutrients and, in many cases, are packed with even higher nutrient levels than their fresh counterparts?

Two Frozen Food Foundation-commissioned studies conducted by the Universities of Georgia (UGA) and California-Davis (UC Davis) reveal that frozen fruits and vegetables are as rich in nutrients, and often more so, than fresh-stored produce.

Frozen. How Fresh Stays Accessible.
About 40 percent of the food produced in the United States each year is never eaten, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, amounting to about $162 billion lost every year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

All of this wasted food is staggering considering 17.5 million U.S. households are food insecure.

Frozen foods mean less wasted food and access to well-balanced, portion-controlled nutritious meals in every season and community. In fact, research published in the British Food Journal shows that frozen food generates 47 percent less food waste at home than non-frozen food, so families can save money while still eating healthy meals.

We’ve got your back this holiday season with safe, nutritious and easy to prepare frozen foods.Print

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Story of Your Dinner is a Hit in West Virginia!

Elaine Tiller, Nutrition Outreach Instructor with the West Virginia Family Nutritionelaine-tiller-head-shot Program in Princeton knows her way around a food safety class.

Raising Awareness of Home Food Safety Steps
She found the Story of Your Dinner video (storyofyourdinner.org) to be an effective tool for raising awareness of the food safety steps needed at home to keep family meals safe. Elaine offers Eating Smart Being Active classes through West Virginia University Extension. Her program targets adults with limited resources who are parents with children in Head Start. She also teaches a class to vocational high school seniors.

Video Hits the Mark
Elaine used the Story of Your Dinner pre-and post-video viewing evaluations to assess the success of the presentation. Viewers learned they shouldn’t rinse chicken before cooking it. It also reinforced the importance of hand washing before and after handling food—steps Elaine reviews in her classes also.

Other Story of Your Dinner resources were popular with the class participants as well. The placemats were a hit, and the recipes with food safety instructions were approved for use in classes by the staff supervisor, an RD. Elaine intends to use them in future cooking classes.

Thermometers Bring Food Safety Homeelaine-tiller-sink-those-germs
Class participants receive their own instant read food thermometer to use at home, along with a FightBAC temperature chart which Elaine downloads from the website, laminates, and adds a magnet to. This way class participants can hang it right in their kitchen- handy for when using their new food thermometer!

“Sink Those Germs!”
For teaching the kids- Elaine developed the “Sink those Germs” game for health fairs. She uses a “sink” made from a dish pan with an added a spigot and bean bag “germs”. Children are quizzed on when they are supposed to wash their hands and when they answer correctly, they toss those nasty germs (bean bags) into the “sink” and down the drain.

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