For this final week, please spend some time reflecting on the past 7 weeks of class. Go through some of the lessons or readings, re-read some of the discussi

Week 2: Basic Food Safety, Myths and Labels

Overview:

Welcome to Week 2.

This week, we are going to get into the detailed procedures related to procuring, storing, producing, and serving food safely. The reading is focused on a food safety manual produced by the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Please read through this manual carefully, knowing that this will not be the only time you should access this resource. It is a very comprehensive resource that you would be smart to safe for future reference, even after this class is over. The lessons this week will reinforce many of the main points from the manual, but they will also address some commonly held myths about food safety, explore some foodborne illness outbreaks, and cover some interesting information about cross contamination.

Course Objective(s):

CO1: Demonstrate the impact of a foodborne illness outbreak 

CO2: Examine how cultural practices and economic circumstances affect the safety of the food supply

CO3: Demonstrate strategies for purchasing, storing, preparing, and serving safe food

Basic Food Safety in the Home, Food Safety Myths, and Foodborne Illness Outbreaks

This week and next, we will be going over the “basics” of food safety. Some of what we cover may be review to you, and some might be new information. You will likely need to read this week’s reading more than once in order to retain the majority of the information, but don’t worry, you can bookmark the handbook and refer to it as often as you need. This week, we are going to focus on handling food at home, showing how cross contamination can spread throughout your home kitchen and relating that to foodborne outbreaks that can spread across states and even to other countries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P05aTHtntI

Week 3: Purchasing, Storage, Preparation, Serving Safe Food – Food Allergies

Overview:

Welcome to Week 3.

This week, we will continue to focus on safe food in your home, emphasizing purchasing, storage, some additional preparation techniques, and serving food safely. We will explore what exactly the dates on the packages mean and how long we can keep that jar of mustard in the back of the refrigerator. We will also explore food allergies and the responsibilities that rest both on the person with the allergy and the people handling food for that person.

Course Objective(s):

CO1: Demonstrate the impact of a foodborne illness outbreak 

CO3: Demonstrate strategies for purchasing, storing, preparing, and serving safe food 

Purchasing, Storage, Preparation, Serving Safe Food and Food Allergies

Introduction

Welcome to week 3! This week, we will continue to emphasize food safety throughout the entire flow of food, which for the home cook, typically begins at the store. Even though you have learned that there can be contamination anywhere from farm to fork, we will focus this week on food safety after it has arrived at your grocery store and go from there.

First Things First

Generally speaking, reputable grocery stores in the United States provide safe food and their employees should be trained in safe food handling. Shopping at a reputable grocery store is an important decision to make, and when you have options, make sure the decision you are making includes safety considerations.

The first thing to consider during your trip to the grocery store begins actually before you leave home to head out on your shopping trip. What is the weather like today? Do you have any more errands to run? How long does it take you to get home from your grocery store? Are you using reusable grocery bags, and where have you been storing them?

If you live in a very warm climate or if it is a hot sunny day and you live more than just a few minutes away from the store, you might want to consider putting a cooler with ice in the back of your car for transporting your cold groceries home. You know how hot it can get in your car on a hot day? Well, it takes some time for the car to cool down, especially if you are storing your groceries in the trunk or hatchback and that can put cold foods into the temperature danger zone quite quickly, and it can cause your frozen foods to begin to thaw out, making them susceptible to pathogen growth. There are some very good insulated bags on the market that can help keep your cold foods cold, but make sure they are clean.

Reusable Bags

Have you ever considered the cleanliness of your reusable grocery bags, whether they are insulated or not? You may use reusable grocery bags to help the environment, but be sure you are not putting your health at risk. Please take a moment to watch this video produced by Loma Linda University Health about reducing the amount of bacteria in reusable grocery bags.

Did you catch the part where he referenced shopping with dirty underwear? It is important to separate your ready-to-eat foods from things like raw meats and, of course, keep your cold foods with other cold foods and away from that hot rotisserie chicken you could not resist picking up. If you pack all your frozen foods together, they will have a better chance of staying frozen on the way home.

https://youtu.be/LgDXPK-dxWg?si=qzVwKSl7PAFR0SuX

Week 4: Food Safety Beyond the Home Kitchen

Overview:

Welcome to Week 4.

For the remainder of the course, we will be taking the basics of food safety that you learned about the first few weeks and using that knowledge to think about food safety on a global scale. After all, not many of us produce, procure, or prepare all of the food that we consume. We do rely on other people and organizations when we eat. This week, we will virtually venture out of our homes and focus on food safety in our society, learning about how to remain safe from food borne illness when we are outside our homes. We will focus on some practical red flags to watch for when you are at a restaurant, buffet, festival or anywhere consuming food or drinks.

Course Objective(s):

CO2: Examine how cultural practices and economic circumstances affect the safety of the food supply

CO3: Demonstrate strategies for purchasing, storing, preparing, and serving safe food

CO4: Identify food safety barriers in a global, interconnected environment, including the impact of tampering and bioterrorism

We Only Know What We Know

Last week the readings, lessons, and supplemental materials focused on some of the ways that culture, demographics, and religion can play a role in how different people prepare food. Here’s a fun story about how tradition can influence food preparation that is often used in psychology lessons.

There was a young woman who was recently married and was preparing a pot roast for dinner that night while one of her friends was visiting. After cutting up the vegetables and potatoes, she cut off both ends of the roast before she put it into her pot to cook. Her friend asked her why she did that.

She replied with a shrug and said, “that is how my mom always did it”. So, she decided to call her mom and ask her why she always cut the ends off of the pot roast before she cooked it. Her mom really did not have an answer except for that was how her mother always made pot roast. So the young woman decided to call her grandmother.

She asked her grandmother why she always cut the ends off her pot roast before she cooked it, she wondered if it was something she did to make it juicer or was it something to do with contamination, or some other reason. Her grandmother told her granddaughter that when she first married her grandfather, they lived in a tiny apartment with a very small oven. She only had very small pans that she received as wedding gifts. She cut the ends of the pot roast because otherwise, it did not fit into the pan.

We only know what we know, right? And we won’t learn anything new if we continue to just do as we observe without asking questions or considering why we have always done something the same way.

There are other lessons to that story that are often used in psychology and leadership courses – persistence, inquiry, and other lessons. In this case the lesson should be that just because it is the way we have always done it and we haven’t gotten sick yet, that does not necessarily make it right.

People do things differently. Sometimes that is influenced by their culture, religion, the way their parents taught them, formal training, or maybe it’s just because the roast didn’t fit into the pot. We are not always going to be able to prepare our own meals and there is a certain level of trust involved with dining outside of the home. However, there are some red flags that you can watch for when you are eating food from a restaurant, buffet, potluck, street vendor, or other source.

Restaurant Dining

If you spend any time searching the internet or watching television, you probably have come across some incredible and unbelievable horror stories about terrible restaurant conditions. As with anything, please don’t believe everything that you see on the internet. Or, if you read a story and it sounds unbelievable, please take a few moments to determine whether or not that story is actually true before hitting forward or post.

For example, a girl never had roach eggs incubating in her salivary glands after eating a pregnant roach that was in her taco, and no, that burger chain never used human meat or worms as filler in their burgers. Are there some terrible, unconscionable people out there working in food service? Sure, there are some immoral and horrible people in any industry. But usually those that are that terrible will also be not so smart and they will post videos of their baths in the sinks at fast food restaurants, or laughing at what they “added” to the pizza toppings.

Tampering with food is a felony.

Purposely contaminating food can be a criminal act, and for the most part those that work in food service take their jobs seriously, so don’t think that sneezeburgers are a common thing.

Week 5: History of Food Safety – Cultural & Demographical Influences on Food Safety

Overview:

Welcome to Week 5.

This week, we get a little less detailed on the science and less focused on the specifics of food safety and take a step back to look at the history of food safety and how culture and demographics affect food safety. Food safety has evolved, just as most advances in medicine. We now know a lot more about different food borne pathogens and why certain practices can cause harm.

Course Objective(s):

CO2: Examine how cultural practices and economic circumstances affect the safety of the food supply

CO4: Identify food safety barriers in a global, interconnected environment, including the impact of tampering and bioterrorism

History of Food Safety & Cultural Demographical Influences on Food Safety

Introduction

Food safety, preparation, and preservation have been an important aspect of life since the beginning of time. It has really been only about one hundred fifty years that refrigerators in the home were commonplace. Even in ancient times, it was recognized that it was important to store food safely and prepare food properly. This week, our discussion focuses on personal experiences with different cultures and gatherings or social events you have attended that included food. Different cultures have very different ways of doing things, and food preparation is no exception.

Early Modern Food Safety

From Ancient Egyptians developing a cool, dry silo to store their grain to ancient Rome realizing the importance of fresh fruit and learning how to preserve food by salting it, learning about food safety has been an evolving process. It is a safe bet that people have always gotten sick from foodborne pathogens. However, they likely did not necessarily know why they were sick, or how to prevent it from happening.

Around the 1800s, scientists began to realize that there were things that we could not see (they're called microorganisms today) that could cause harm, things like parasites and bacteria were beginning to be understood, and ways to prevent them from causing harm were being studied.

You are likely familiar with the word pasteurization, this came about during that time. Scientists of those days truly put themselves at risk. In fact, the connection between food and illness was actually discovered when a scientist named Barber and a colleague purposely drank spoiled milk, and he and his colleague experienced the same symptoms as a result – this could be the first documented foodborne illness outbreak even though they became sick on purpose.

We are going to fast forward through the history a bit here, recognizing that the work of many scientists studying microbiology, the advent of the microscope, and the industrialization of the United States has led to advances in understanding how food can be unsafe. Think back to the four main safety measures of clean, separate, cook, and chill; these four main ideas are a result of many years of scientific studies that ad Advent and Evolution of Refrigeration

Let's focus a bit on "chill". One of the biggest advancements in food safety came with modern refrigeration. People learned fairly early on that on hot days, their meat turned rancid more quickly than it may have in the winter. Today we may take for granted that we will have access to a refrigerator and freezer, and maybe even more than one in our home. It really has not been that long ago that our modern refrigerators were actually called iceboxes, and they literally were a big metal insulated box filled with ice that was delivered by the ice man. It was around the 1930's that powered refrigerators became more commonplace. Remember however, many of the things that we take for granted are luxuries or non-existent in other under-developed regions of the world.

During the development and industrialization of the U.S., the focus began to shift from farming, hunting, or raising all the family's food for themselves to being able to purchase food from markets or other farmers. This was the beginning of the retail food processing market. But, how could shop owners keep the food that the farmers brought to them on the shelves longer? Preserving foods has also come a long way.

“By the end of the 1800s, many American households stored their perishable food in an insulated "icebox" that was usually made of wood and lined with tin or zinc. A large block of ice was stored inside to keep these early refrigerators chilly. By this point, cold had become the clear choice among food preservation methods, proving less labor-intensive and more effective at preventing spoilage. Other techniques, like salting, drying, and canning, erased any appearance of freshness and required more time to prepare. Iceboxes also presented a new way to save prepared foods—or leftovers—that previously might not have lasted beyond one meal.” (Grahn, 2015)

Caption: Ice boxes were used to keep food and beverages cold well into the 1930s in the United States.

vanced the understanding of how food can contribute to illness.

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