The public health goal of maintaining food safety and minimizing harm poses an interesting dilemma: when does the end justify the means? More specifically, is it justifiable to promote unscientific food safety standards in the name of public safety? Regulators seem to act as if it is.
During a recent outbreak of Escherichia coli linked to contaminated fresh spinach in the United States, public health authorities initially told consumers, retailers, and restaurants to throw out all spinach, often directly stating in public announcements that it could not be made safe by cooking it. This assertion is scientifically incorrect: E. coli is very easy to kill with heat.
Evidently the officials decided that oversimplifying the public message was better than telling the truth. They may have feared that if people cooked contaminated spinach to make it safe to eat, but either didn’t cook it sufficiently or cross-contaminated other food or kitchen surfaces in the process, more fatalities would result. The authorities must have decided that the benefits of avoiding multiple accidental deaths far outweighed the costs of simply tossing out all spinach. In this case they probably were right to make that decision. The cost of some spinach is small compared to the misery and expense of hospitalization.
Oversimplifying for the sake of public safety is a very reasonable thing to do in the midst of an outbreak or other health crisis. It may well have saved lives to lie to the public and announce things that, strictly speaking, are false (for example, that you can’t kill E. coli with heat).
However, outside of a crisis situation, there is a pervasive danger that this philosophy leads to “dumbing down,” oversimplifying, or fabricating food safety information. It is very easy for public health officials to adopt the paternalistic attitude that they can make scientifically incorrect statements with impunity, even in situations in which the balance of risks is nothing like that which occurs during a crisis. Who pushes back against nonsensical rules? The reality is that the only groups that push back are those that have political clout.
Because of this approach, culinary professionals and casual cooks alike have been grossly misled about a wide range of food safety issues and are often subjected to distorted, incomplete, or contradictory rules. When a political interest group exists, it is that group’s opinion, rather than science, that shapes the rules. But when there is no political force to push back, the rules can be overstated and excessive.
Consider the overstated risk of exposure to Trichinella , which has led to ridiculously excessive recommendations for cooking pork. This overkill is just one of many such examples. Cooking standards for chicken, fish, and eggs, as well as rules about raw milk cheeses, all provide examples of inconsistent, excessive, or illogical standards. To a public health official, mandating that pork chops or chicken breasts be dry and overcooked makes sense if it keeps even one person from getting sick. In this calculus, one less case of foodborne illness is worth millions of ruined chops or breasts.
That attitude becomes harder to defend, however, if you accept that overcooking food comes at a cost. A chef’s livelihood may depend on producing the best taste and texture for customers. Home cooks who love food want it to taste the very best that it can. To a person who cares about the quality of food—or who makes a living based on it—excessive food safety standards don’t come cheap.
A balance must be struck between the risk of foodborne illness and the desire for palatable food. In cases such as those of pork and chicken, misleading the public about a rarely occurring scenario (while ignoring other, larger risks) arguably offers little protection and comes at the cost of millions of unnecessarily awful meals.
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9 Comments
Add CommentWell that explains why the time i accidentally cooked my pork roast to the internal temperature of rare/medium rare beef (140 F) it was so good !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFantastic article - thanks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPersonally, I love a rare hamburger (red, not pink). And I'm frustrated by the refusal of most restaraunts to cook it that way. Generally, even if they say they cook to order and will cook it rare, it comes out medium or worse.
I even had a T bone steak recently which I ordered rare come out more like medium. Nothing unusual there, except the cook claimed that the local health inspector was requiring that steaks need to be cooked to 125 internal temperature!
I believe that these over-cautious public health recommendations are also applied to handling pets. This in turn causes some people to consider pets necessarily "dirty". This is untrue for well cared for pets [there should be no other standards really]. Thus many people who own pets are at a disadvantage in many parts of their lives such as finding housing and in court disputes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs the authors point out in the book, it's important to keep in mind that ground meat (or meat tenderized by puncturing) is more susceptible to contamination because external surfaces are mixed into the interior of the food. Any bacteria that get onto the outside of the meat during handling can thus be spread throughout the meat, which doesn't happen in intact muscle meats like well-butchered steaks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is thus riskier to eat ground beef that is rare, and if you don't have complete confidence in the hygiene of the butchering and handling that went into the preparation of the ground meat, the safest course is to cook the meat longer or to a higher temperature.
I plan to grill a steak for dinner tonight. Seared on the outside and running red when cut. If it don't bleed it's burnt! As for pork, pink inside running clear juices on the plate is just fine. I also prefer limp bacon. Runny eggs go great with it. Sushi is also a part of my diet. If Big Brother doesn't like it, he can shove it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBig Brother isn't forcing your hand in your own kitchen. You are free to take your own risks there, this article discuses regulations for food manufacturers and restaurants.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile I agree that many of the regulations are arbitrarily assigned and influenced by factors other than safety, I can't help but think that I'd rather not risk a food-borne illness (especially for someone who's immunocompromised) just for the sake of a slightly more delicious pork chop.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'd rather be overcooking food than risking undercooking (due to faulty thermometers, cooks who don't know any better, etc.) because the food safety guidelines are right on the cusp of safety.
I think the bigger issue is how food manufacturers may be taking advantage of these extreme cooking guidelines to be more slack with their microbial control. If they know it'll be cooked to a 12D level of destruction, what's the incentive to use good manufacturing processes?
I am grateful that this article is here because I too love a rare steak, carpaccio, and sushi, but as wayt pointed out, ground beef is an exception.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGround beef is probably not safe unless you see it ground for yourself by a butcher you trust. Any given pound of commercially-produced ground beef can and does contain pathogens from literally thousands of cows, usually dairy cattle worn out by several years of filthy conditions, rBGH, antibiotics, and chronic low-level infection. To that, add scrap meat from all over the country, and grind. It's a food safety nightmare.
Because of this the meat packing industry has (once again!) started to use ammonia gas to "disinfect" ground beef, a practice exposed by Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which detailed the horrific conditions for humans, animals, and our food in the meatpacking industry of the time. Legislation ensued, and for perhaps 50 years we had reasonable standards for meatpackers. This has since been undone, and now we're back (once again!) to having immigrants paid in dirt perform this work, on lines whose speed has been increased again and again, rendering it impossible for even the most conscientious gutter to ensure that there isn't shit in the meat. We're right back where we were at the start of the 20th Century in terms of labor and animal abuse, and right back where we were in terms of food safety.
I encourage all readers to purchase their meat from smaller, more local vendors -- the reward in taste, nutrition (e.g. grass-fed meat), and safety is more than worth it. If you are reading this article to begin with, you are likely to notice and appreciate the difference!
Readers of this article might be interested in my response to this excerpt posted here: http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/blog/147413/11/03/27/more-modernist-cuisine-and-bad-microbial-food-safety-colbert-careful-clostridiu
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn short, while I agree that some standards today are inconsistent, the authors do make some microbiological errors that would lead to food safety problems.