TV cooking shows rife with health-endangering food-handling errors: study

SHERYL UBELACKER 
Canadian Press 

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

TORONTO (CP) - A chef on a television cooking show drops an ingredient on the floor, but wipes it off and uses it in a recipe anyway. Another TV cook rolls out some rice-flour dough and hangs it on the kitchen tap, telling viewers it's the best place to let it dry. Rare occurrences? Not on your life, say researchers at an Ontario university who analysed cooking shows for food-preparation no-nos that pose a threat to health. 

In fact, the study by scientists at the University of Guelph found that for every instance of handling food correctly on popular TV cooking programs, there were 13 food-safety errors, with an average of seven such mistakes made during a typical 30-minute show. 

"Primarily, it was poor hand-washing, and we know that insufficient or inadequate hand-washing is a key contributor to contracting and spreading food-borne illness, both in the home and elsewhere," said Douglas Powell, scientific director of the Food Safety Network at the University of Guelph. 

Food-borne micro-organisms include salmonella, campylobacter and E. coli - "all the greatest food-safety hits," Powell said in an interview from Guelph. 

The study, published in the latest issue of Food Protection Trends, said other common food-handling errors on TV cooking programs included contamination between raw and ready-to-eat food, failure to wash fresh fruits and vegetables, and inadequate washing of cooking utensils and cutting boards. 

"Cross-contamination was bad," said Powell, a co-author of the study. "People need to realize that any raw commodity, whether it's meat or even vegetables or fruit that are grown in the ground, the exterior of these things are going to contain potentially dangerous micro-organisms." 

"So if you cut something on a cutting board, you need to clean it before you put in stuff that's going to be eaten without further cooking." 

As another example, Powell said researchers often observed people handling raw meat, then picking up a bottle of wine and pouring it for guests without first washing their hands.

"Well, if they do that, whatever's on the raw meat was transferred by their hand and is now on the bottle of wine. So even if they wash their hands in future, they pick up that bottle of wine again and they've recontaminated their hands." 

Some uncooked beef can carry E.coli bacteria or salmonella, which is also found in raw poultry and eggs; both can cause serious illness. 

The researchers analysed television food and cooking programs aired during two one-week periods - one in June 2002 and the second in June 2003, mostly on Food Network Canada. Overall, they studied 116 30-minute segments. About 30 per cent of the shows were produced in Canada; the rest originated in the United States and United Kingdom. 

A total of 916 poor food-handling incidents were observed on the programs, none of which was identified in the study. 

While many were commonly made mistakes, a few were doozies, agreed lead investigator Lisa Mathiasen, a research assistant with the university's Food Safety Network. 

One chef used his knife as a fly swatter, she said. "They were actually chopping vegetables and the fly was buzzing around their head and they looked up, swatted the fly with the knife and went back to chopping the vegetables." 

Some chefs used their kitchen taps to hang food during preparation, a place Mathiasen said would be teeming with microbes. 

And while researchers observed only a few examples of chefs using ingredients that had landed on the floor, she said telling viewers they could "just dust it off" is erroneous advice. "There are lots of different micro-organisms on the floor, from your feet or if you have pets, plus physical contamination like hairs and that sort of thing." 

But Eileen Morrison, a spokeswoman for Food Network Canada, said the channel's programs - from in-studio instructional cooking shows to food travel and adventure, and behind-the-scenes access to the food industry - are meant "to inform and inspire viewers in an entertaining way." 

"While we acknowledge that it is of the utmost importance to practise food safety when cooking and handling food, culinary demonstrations on television, by their very nature, require chefs to make some adjustments to their normal cooking procedures," said Morrison, adding that Food Canada Network chefs and hosts "are concerned about proper hygiene" and "in many cases address the topic" of safe food handling during their programs. 

The researchers acknowledged that much food preparation is done behind the scenes, but they fear risky food-handling on-camera could lead viewers to believe that such behaviours are OK because they're being done by well-known chefs. 

In fact, a 1998 Canadian Food Inspection Agency study found 22 per cent of Canadians learn about the proper way to cook, store and handle food from television and radio. 

"It's the basics - the sanitation, basic hand-washing, keeping things clean - which seem kind of boring and unglamorous, but that's what makes people sick over and over and over," Powell said. "And in this country, the best estimate is that one in four will get sick from the food and water they eat each year."