foodsafety.gov

Cross posted from the foodsafety.gov blog:

Let’s face it, in November, a turkey will most likely find its way onto your menu. Planning ahead can help ensure that your special meal is successful, safe, and stress-free. If you have questions, the USDA’s Meat and Poultry Hotline offers planning tips and shares their top turkey questions and answers.

If you’ve had food poisoning, you know it’s not something you want to experience again. But for “at-risk” individuals, it can be life threatening. People with cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, HIV/AIDS, or an organ transplant—as well as healthy older adults and pregnant women—who have weakened immune systems are at increased risk for foodborne illness.

The safety of the food these groups eat is just as important as the medicines that help them regain or maintain their health. To help at-risk persons avoid food poisoning, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have collaborated to publish a series of five updated food safety booklets designed specifically to educate older adults, transplant recipients, and people with HIV/AIDS, cancer or diabetes.

It’s always nice to get a few extra hands in the kitchen, especially around the holidays. That was the idea behind Food Safety Inspection Service’s (FSIS) Thanksgiving Twitter Q&A with food safety experts from FSIS, FDA and celebrity chef Ingrid Hoffman.

Yesterday, the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline joined celebrity chef Ingrid Hoffmann and FDA’s Howard Seltzer to answer Thanksgiving food safety questions via Twitter. With @FoodSafetygov selecting questions from the audience, the panel of experts was able to answer 22 questions in an hour using the handle @USDAFoodSafety. Now that the chat is over, people are still sharing the tips with their friends and followers, helping get these important messages into as many kitchens as possible before Thursday.

The Thanksgiving questions and answers covered in the chat are listed below. Take a look—you might have been wondering some of these yourself. If you need to know something that is not listed here, call the Meat and Poultry Hotline weekdays at 1-888-MPHotline (1-888-674-6854) from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays, and from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day.

Special holiday series – Blog 1 of 5

As we look forward to spending the holidays with friends and family and making meals and memories together, we all want to put good food on the table and do it safely.  We especially want to keep the threat of food poisoning at bay.  Over the next few days, we will share some delicious low-cost holiday recipes with some simple food safety tips to help you prepare healthy and safe holiday meals. The first recipe below talks about preparing and cooking a turkey safely. Recipes to follow will include Grandma’s Stuffing, Baked Apples and Sweet Potatoes, Green Bean Sauté, and Crunchy Pumpkin Pie.

Best wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season!

Cross posted from FoodSafety.gov:

More than 15 million school-aged children are home alone after school. That means they’ll be making their own afterschool snacks, without anyone supervising their creative concoctions. Will your kids be eating on their own during the week? If so, you might want to go over these guidelines with them—before they run straight to the refrigerator and snack mindlessly in front of the TV, with their feet on the table and the family dog in their lap.

Cross posted from the FoodSafety.gov blog:

We look forward all year to our summer vacations. Whether you’re camping, hitting the beach, boating, or relaxing in a mountain cabin or beach house, you’ll probably be packing food.

Plan Ahead
When planning meals for a vacation, think about buying shelf-stable foods, such as canned foods, to stay safe. If you are packing perishable foods (meat, poultry, eggs, and salads) for eating on the road or to cook at your vacation spot, plan to keep everything on ice in your cooler. Have plenty of ice or frozen gel-packs on hand before starting to pack food. Consider packing drinks in a separate cooler so the food cooler is not opened frequently. Read last week’s blog to learn more tips on packing a cooler.

Here in Washington, D.C., and probably where you live too, it is hot! This week’s Check Your Steps blog focuses on a timely food safety step—Chill. You may feel like this guy, but in reality we don’t recommend keeping your food cold with fans, no matter how many you can find.

Bacteria grow rapidly between 40 °F and 140 °F, and when it’s above 90 °F outside, cold food heats to those temperatures much faster. Portable coolers can be your best friend during outdoor summer activities or grocery shopping, but pack them correctly to keep food at 40 °F or below so it doesn’t spoil or make you sick.

For the past two Tuesdays as part of the Food Safe Families campaign, I’ve blogged about two basic food safety steps that are important but easy to implement in your food prep routine—cook and clean. Today, I’m going to focus on preventing a sneaky food safety hazard that can happen at many points between purchasing and eating food: cross-contamination.

Cross-contamination occurs when juices from uncooked foods come in contact with safely cooked foods, or with other raw foods that don’t need to be cooked, like fruits and vegetables. The juices from some raw foods, like meats and seafood, can contain harmful bacteria that could make you and your family sick.

America has one of the safest and most abundant food supplies in the world. But even in this country, too many people get sick from the food they eat.

This year, one in six Americans will get food poisoning – that’s 48 million people. 128,000 will end up in the hospital. And 3,000 will die. These aren’t just statistics. These are real people, real families, impacted by the food they put on the table.