Michéle Samarya-Timm, a Health Educator for the Franklin Township Health Department in New Jersey, writes,  Thanksgiving, and its hours of food prep, certainly creates a reason to appreciate sound food safety advice.  After all, 3 hours seated at the dinner table should never be followed by 3 days seated on a porcelain throne. 

Over the past few days, I’ve seen lots of advice to ensure a perfectly cooked (and foodsafe) thanksgiving turkey, but what if you’ve applied the cooking process a little too thoroughly?   

Amending a list I found several years ago, here’s an updated version of Reasons to Be Thankful for Burning the Bird:

1.    The useless pop-up timer was rendered useless.
2.    Your tip sensitive digital thermometer will read at least 165F.
3.    Salmonella won't be a concern.
4.    Another valid reason for cooking stuffing outside the bird.
5.    No one will overeat.
6.    Post dinner sleepiness won’t be due to the tryptophan in turkey.
7.    Uninvited guests will think twice next year.
8.    Pets won't pester you for scraps.
9.    The smoke alarm was due for a test.
10.    Ash residue is a great motivation for handwashing.
11.    Carving the bird will provide a good cardiovascular workout.
12.    After dinner, the guys can take the bird to the yard and play football.
13.    The less turkey Uncle George eats, the less likely he will be to walk around with his pants unbuttoned.
14.    You'll get to the desserts quicker.
15.    No arguments about throwing out turkey leftovers.
16.    Next year you’ll pay closer attention to Doug Powell’s Canadian Thanksgiving food prep video.

Enjoy your holidays.  And wash your hands!

Being a food safety nerd, I’ve had a lot of fun developing food safety infosheets over the past 5 years. The idea behind the infosheets is to take stories, add some humour/shock/kitch and generate dialogue around food safety.

The turkey food safety infosheet is generating a lot of interest. I’m no Sarah Palin, but most responses have been from over-eager gotcha folks who are pointing out what appears to them to be serious food safety errors (especially around thawing, stuffing and cooling leftovers). Some have been nice; others, not so much.

Our focus in building the food safety infosheets is to provide practices based on the best available science. And sometimes what the FDA Food Code, USDA FSIS consumer education and published peer-reviewed articles say around food safety practices differ.

Go figure.

We base the food safety infosheets  on the best available science, not jurisdictional regulation. It’s our way of being consistent because recommendations changes so much from location to location (Canada and the U.S. recommend two different temperatures for endpoint temp for poultry: 165F in the U.S., and 180F in Canada -- both countries apparently looking at the same data).

People seem to get especially antsy when we disagree with the regulators. Everything we put in "what you can do" section of the food safety infosheets has to have references to back it up (which sometimes the regulatory recommendations do not).

Here are the references for the 3 recommendations folks have mentioned the most (thawing, cooking stuffing to 150F and cooling leftovers)

Thawing on the counter:

Lacroix BJ, Li KW, Powell DA. 2003. Consumer food handling recommendations: is thawing of turkey a food safety issue? Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research, 64(2): 59-61. (this whole paper can be found at the bottom of this post)

Lee M. 1993. Methods and risks of defrosting turkeys. Environmental Health Review (Winter):96-100.

OP Snyder, 1999. Thawing at ambient temperature on the counter. Hospitality Institute of Technology and Management, St. Paul, MN USA.

Stuffing:

The 150F recommendation is based on a 6-7 log reduction of salmonella in stuffing at 140F for 12.7 min (pathogen destruction is time/temperature, and it will take that long to take the stuffing from 140-150. Pete Snyder's Turkey HACCP document explains it well (second paragraph on page 2).

From the doc:

As expected, no salmonellae or staphylococci was recovered.  They were killed above 130°F as the turkey was cooking.  Actually, if the stuffing had been sampled at 140 to 150°F, they would have found that these organisms would be dead, considering that 140°F for 12.7 minutes gives a  7D reduction of Salmonella in beef.

Cooling:

Turkey should be refrigerated within 2 -- and continuously cooled reaching 41F within 15 hours.  Pete Snyder also has a referenced cooling paper that explains this well.

from the doc:

In 1992, this author received an agreement from Ray Beaulieu and Jeffery Rhodehamel at the FDA that there was indeed no scientific basis for the FDA retail food cooling regimes, and that it was appropriate to do a study. With the help of Dr. Vijay K. Juneja, USDA ARS ERRC, a study was conducted using hamburger as the food item and C. perfringens as the target organism (Juneja, 1994). Clostridium perfringens was selected, because, of the three spores, C.perfringens has the shortest lag and fastest generation time.

Hamburger was selected as the media, because C. perfringens is found in hamburger, and hamburger has often been involved in C. perfringens outbreaks. Various cooling times were evaluated in order to determine the safe cooling time. One cooling time chosen arbitrarily was 15 hours to go from 130 to 45ºF, with a 38ºF temperature of coolant, in this case, air in the refrigerator. The 15-hour cooling time showed about 3 multiplications of C. perfringens. The USDA has accepted this cooling time as safe (Federal Register, January 6, 1999), because it now accepts cooling when there are 3 or less multiplications of C.perfringens.

As I replied to one interested subscriber, here are our references, show us yours.
 

I’ve gotten more done around the house in the past two weeks than I have in the past two years. Must be the nesting hormones. Amy figures she’s had enough. Baby’s due in a few days, but Amy would rather have it out now.  My youngest daughter, Courtlynn, arrives on Thanksgiving for five days, and we hope the baby arrives then as well.

But, there’s still work to be done, and every year, it’s the same issue. We say it’s OK for people to do what they are already doing – thawing turkey on the counter – and people freak out. After all, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and their extension types insist it is never OK to thaw turkey at room temperature.

We have lots of evidence and have written about it in peer-reviewed journals. But why doesn’t USDA or FDA, with all their resources, tell people why it’s not OK to thaw poultry at room temperature instead of repeating -- as my friend Marty once quipped -- like a fascist calling out country line dancing instructions, that it is never OK to thaw at room temperature?

Show us the data.

Pete Snyder at the Hospitality Institute of Technology and Management in St. Paul, Minnesota, has a summary available demonstrating the safety of thawing poultry at room temperature at http://www.hi-tm.com/Documents/Thaw-counter.html.

My group wrote a review note on the topic a few years ago, and it is included in its entirety at http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/2007/10/articles/food-safety-communication/how-to-thaw-poultry-ignore-government/

However you thaw your turkey, use a digital, tip-sensitive thermometer to ensure it has reached an internal temperature of 165F. The laws of physics are apparently different north of the 49th parallel and poultry is required to reach 180F. No one knows why the Canadian government has different advice. And they’re not telling anyone.
 

In Canada, Thanksgiving is in October. It's kind of cool because the weather can be nice (26C this year -- and we've had snow all day today) and it's not too long after Labour Day (an October holiday is fun).  This year, Thanksgiving was extra exciting because of Jack, the newest addition to the family (right, being compared, size-wise, to a half-eaten turkey).

For the past few years we've held thanksgiving at our house, and with the aid of Tyler Florence and a tip-sensitive digital thermometer things have been peachy. It's my favourite Candian holiday. But, being a huge NFL and college football fan I also like U.S. Thanksgiving. Four days of football on television during the day is awesome.

One thing about U.S. Thanksgiving has always been a bit weird to me:  the presidential pardon of the White House turkey. I read today that the 2008 turkeys are from Ellsworth, Iowa. The 20-week-old turkey weighs about 45 pounds. Their names are chosen by public vote from a list: Popcorn & Cranberry; Yam & Jam, Dawn & Early Light; Roost & Run; Pumpkin and Pecan; and Apple & Cider. It's all a bit creepy.

To get you in the holiday mood, the newest food safety infosheet focuses on the safey thawing, preparation and cooking of a holiday turkey. Thanx to Pete Snyder for his excellent information at Hospitality Institute of Technology and Management.

Click here to download the infosheet.

Australian food guru or food idiot Margaret Fulton joined other celebrity chefs in comparing genetically engineered canola to Hitler in launching the Greenpeace True Food Guide Canola Edition 2009 in Sydney.

"They're going to control the world. We thought Hitler was a bad fella ... these guys could show him a thing or two - and they're creeping up on us quietly without guns or anything like that, but the poison is there."

Individual genetically engineered crops should go through safety assessments, which they do in most countries, and consumers should be able to choose what they like. Instead of Hitler comparisons, maybe the Greenpeace-backed chefs of Australia should focus on not making their customers barf, and not showing up in the name and shame directory of wayward restaurants.
 

About six years ago I was flying from Toronto to Ottawa and after a particularly turbulent morning ride, I was looking a little green. Although the plane was preparing to land, the steward said, ‘you gotta go, you gotta go,’ so I experienced landing while kneeling at the airplane’s plastic throne.

No one figured I was contagious.

Not so in Los Angeles this morning.

United Airlines flight 890 arriving from Japan informed ground crews shortly before touching down at 8:30 a.m. that a 28-year-old man aboard the aircraft of more than 300 passengers was sick and might have some sort of virus.

Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Cecil Manresa said,

Los Angeles city paramedics and personnel from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention boarded the Boeing 747 after it landed. It took about 20 minutes to determine that the passenger was not contagious, Manresa said.

"He had some kind of stomach ailment or food poising issue, and it was not a virus [or] an infectious disease," he said.

Manresa said that city paramedics, and not the CDC, generally respond when airline passengers complain of illness. But the unidentified man must have told the airplane's crew something to make them think that his condition was more severe, he said.

All I said was, leave me alone.

Hugh ‘Groundhog Day’ Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, wrote in a column for the BBC earlier this week,

“The kitchen has the potential to be most dangerous room in the house. Making it safe is easy. When handling raw meat mutter the mantra ‘turd to tongue’ or - if you have squeamish tendencies – ‘manure to mouth.’”

The good Dr. Pennington was talking about how Campylobacter is the most common cause of foodborne illness and that it “is an embarrassing fact that Campy is a natural bug of birds.”

It’s not easy. Food safety isn’t simple. That’s why up to 30 per cent of everyone gets sick from the food and water they consume each year. And as Jorgen Schlundt, director of food safety at the World Health Organization said the other day,

??????“The notion that you can deal with it at the end of the food chain is clearly wrong.”??????

Amy the French professor is originally from Minnesota. She thought the 1996 movie, Fargo, was a linguistics masterpiece, what with its ‘Yah, you betchas’ and ‘you don’t says’ and demonstration of the ‘Minnesota nice’ conversational style.

Fargo seems like a distant memory, now that Sarah Palin has appropriated all the best lines.

Former VP candidate and current Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was in Wasilla today to do the traditional pardoning a local turkey ahead of Thanksgiving. Minutes later, a farm worker began slaughtering another turkey just a few feet behind her ... plainly visible in the background of the video (below).

Governor Palin was told by the photographer what was going on behind her and allowed the interview to continue.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) could sign Governor Palin up as an undercover slaughterhouse worker. As the N.Y. Times reported Wednesday, PETA is asking for prosecution of workers at the Aviagen Turkeys plant in Lewisburg, W.Va., in a complaint filed with the local sheriff’s office under state laws regarding cruelty to animals. …

The Aviagen video can be seen at www.peta.org. The scenes show stomach-turning brutality. Workers are seen smashing birds into loading cages like basketballs, stomping heads and breaking necks, apparently for fun, even pretending to rape one. …

Bernard E. Rollin, a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University, said the workers’ actions were “totally unacceptable” and suggested that they be removed from working with animals and prosecuted.

If there’s one result from the Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak this summer it’s this: public health types sure are reluctant to finger fresh produce in outbreaks of foodborne illness.

On Tuesday, a spokesman for the bureaucrats club know as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency confirmed they are looking to U.S. suppliers of E. coli-infected romaine lettuce that has been linked to 153 illnesses across southern Ontario, “but he had few other details.”

On Monday, something called the Produce Safety Project, an Initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts at Georgetown University concluded in a report that weaknesses in food safety policy, organization and communications were all displayed during this summer's outbreak of Salmonella Saintpaul.

The report, "Breakdown: Lessons to Be Learned from the 2008 Salmonella Saintpaul Outbreak," represents an in-depth review of the public record of last summer's Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak that caused illnesses in more than 1,400 people across the country.  For a full copy of the report and the executive summary click here: http://www.producesafetyproject.org/reports?id=0001

Highlights and recommendations from the report include:

The need for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to use its existing statutory authorities to establish mandatory and enforceable safety standards for fresh produce.  While FDA officials said the outbreak showed the need for these standards, they said Congress needs to pass legislation to grant it explicit authority to do so.  However, the report notes that FDA has already used existing authorities to put in place preventive safety standards for seafood in 1995 and for juice in 2001.

The need for organizational reforms throughout the public health system for a more coordinated outbreak response. The report raises questions about how timely and effectively data was shared between public health agencies and if it contributed to a delayed identification of jalapeno and serrano peppers as a vehicle for Salmonella Saintpaul.

The need to have established and unified risk communication plans in place before an outbreak. The report documents "dueling" public health messages from various agencies announcing the outbreak, and questions why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its presentation of data numerous times in the middle of the outbreak.

I haven’t read the report in detail but will get to it.  And while everyone is pointing fingers, recall that epidemiology is a messy thing, but it can prevent people from barfing. Self-censorship could be worse.

Both CFIA and FDA need to establish clear and transparent protocols on when to go public in outbreaks of foodborne illness. No one will be happy, but it will provide a basis for discussion and a way to move forward; once it’s written down, it can be improved.