11
Most of the guests at a Cambridge, Ont., Christmas party this month arrived bearing baked goods and holiday cheer.
Brenda Watson brought her digital meat thermometer, a gadget she used to assess whether the treats prepared at the holiday potluck were thoroughly cooked.
As the executive director of the Canadian Partnership for Consumer Food Safety Education, Ms. Watson does not regard her behaviour as extreme, or even unusual, but a necessary step in the constant battle against food-borne illness.
“I can't afford to get food poisoning,” she said last week. “I wash my hands and brush my teeth because I know that's the right thing to do. And using a meat thermometer is just part of a healthy lifestyle.”
More people are following the lead of Ms. Watson and other food-safety experts, engaging in heightened surveillance of the food they eat, how it is prepared and where it has been stored.
Today's food-safety connoisseurs do not count calories, but the number of days leftovers have been in the fridge, the temperature of a steak's core, and the number of hands they imagine may have handled a piece of fruit en route to their dinner plate.
And they are aided by a range of new gadgets that allow them to treat their kitchens like culinary laboratories under bacteria lockdowns.
A product called Vacu-Seal sucks the air out of plastic bags, sealing leftovers airtight so they can be frozen for future use. A gizmo called the SensorfreshQ Freshness Meter promises to measure the bacterial population of a piece of food, giving its user a reading of “fresh!,” “still fresh! (eat soon),” or “freshness not assured.”
And a small circular timer called DaysAgo tracks how long food has been in your refrigerator or cupboard. Attached with magnets, suction cups and elastic bands, the timer is started when a product has been opened for the first time, its digital screen recording how many hours and days it has been since the food was first used. Sold in packs of two for $10 (U.S.), DaysAgo was named by Good Housekeeping as one of the best household products of 2007.
Kathleen Whitehurst, one of the creators of DaysAgo, believes the product has taken off because people have become more conscientious about what they are eating and associate fresh food with healthy food.
“It's got to do with health and that more people are buying organic food, things that do spoil quicker,” she said. “They're not buying stuff that has a lot of preservatives in it.”
But is it really dangerous to eat things that have been in the refrigerator for a few days?
Once a food product is opened, it is usually good for just two days, according to Ms. Watson, whose organization posts recommended storage periods on its website canfightbac.org. She encourages consumers to keep their refrigerators set below 4 C to slow the growth of bacteria, and freeze any food they will not eat right away.
“It's all about managing risk, managing the things they can control, and that's one thing that they have some control over,” she said.
Ms. Watson believes a degree of neurosis is necessary to prevent food-borne illness, which can cause nausea, stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhea, and in the case of listeria and E. coli, can even produce kidney failure and death. She also challenges the idea that common sense is enough for people to know when something has gone off.
“You can't tell if it's spoiled, you can't see bacteria and you can't smell it,” she said. “We tell people, if in doubt, throw it out. Don't take the risk.”
Ms. Whitehurst worries that this kind of advice, coupled with her product's monitoring of people's leftovers, could encourage wasteful behaviour, but says DaysAgo is not meant as an arbiter of food safety.
“It's just for people to make their own judgments,” she said. “I'm not suggesting that people get so consumed by it that they have 50 DaysAgos in their refrigerator.”
Douglas Powell, the Canadian-born scientific director of the International Food Safety Network at Kansas State University, said many people confuse the issues of food safety and food freshness.
“There are lots of things that are yucky but that won't kill you,” he said. “And there are lots of things that will kill you and you can't tell.”
In an effort to protect themselves, Dr. Powell said, some people make choices that have little to with preventing illness – such as buying organic produce – while neglecting behaviours that can truly protect them, such as the use of food thermometers and the proper storage of food.
“It's not simple, otherwise 11 to 13 million Canadians wouldn't be getting sick every year, which they are right now,” he said of food safety. “But the biggest risk is not eating anything. You can't be neurotic about it.”
