I see that Heston Blumenthal has spoken out about the HPA report on the Fat Duck food poisoning outbreak (you can read the full text of his letter to affected customers here). When the report came out earlier this month I was struck by the very heated discussion on WoM, and especially by the confusion in many comments about the principles of food safety. This is an important subject, with around 92,000 reported cases of food poisoning every year, and many more cases that go unreported. Not all of those cases originate in professional kitchens, which is why every home cook should bone up on the basics.
And any chowderhead can learn the basics with ease. I know this because I am just such a chowderhead: the holder of a Basic Food Hygiene certificate after passing a one-day course run by J Sainsbury for its employees.
The lessons emphasised two things above all. One: avoiding contamination of food through contact with unwashed hands, improperly cleaned surfaces and utensils, or other foods. Two: the ATT principle. ATT means Air, Temperature and Time. Deprive pathogenic micro-organisms of one of these essentials and they will not multiply to danger levels.
In the home kitchen there's a food safety principle that my course didn't cover: cooking temperatures. Every pathogenic bacterium seems to have a killing formula: "heat to x°C and hold at that temperature for y minutes." In the domestic kitchen this is usually expressed in simpler terms, eg an internal temperature for meat or hard-boiled for eggs.
The devil's in the details, to be sure. Risk can never be eliminated completely. In general terms, however, strict adherence to the basics in these three areas will greatly reduce the risk of food poisoning. The Food Standards Agency gives sound and sensible advice online.
Lapses in a professional kitchen are a matter of public health and legal requirement. In your kitchen, they're a matter of personal choice. And I have never met or heard of a home cook who follows all the rules, all the way, all the time. Apart from those unhappy people afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Some rules are just obvious and must never be broken. Don't cut up raw beef and then use the same chopping board (without washing) to chop garlic for a vinaigrette. Don't leave the cheddar sitting out overnight in July. Don't serve barbecued chicken in the dish where it was marinated (I have seen university-educated people break every single one of these no-brainer rules).
But then there are the grey areas, the things you know you shouldn't do but which you do anyway. I regularly break the rules in ways that would make a microbiologist's flesh crawl. My infractions would get a restaurant fined faster than you can say campylobacter.
But I take these risks when they affect only me and mine, not members of the public. This is my right. When I cook anywhere other than home, or for young children and the elderly or infirm, I follow the rules religiously.
What's your take on food safety? Do you think we worry about it too much, frightened by so-called interfering nanny-state officialdom into fearing the food in our kitchens? Or am I an idiot to be risking my friends' and family's health? There's plenty of room for disagreement. I'd like to know which side of the fence you sit on.
