Back in my college daze, I took a medical school class on the investigation and identification of food and water-borne illnesses, in addition to my basic coursework on food microbiology.<\/p>\n
“Food and water-borne illness” is just a nice way of writing “food poisoning,” doncha know. And while studying it wasn’t as nasty as experiencing it, suffice it to say, learning about often violent – and even deadly – illness wasn’t pleasant. I learned my lessons well, however… I have yet to succumb to a bout of food poisoning in the 2+ decades since I finished grad school.<\/p>\n
Given my background, I was happy to learn that the powers-that-be are devoting more energy – and money – to food safety.\u00a0 In addition to\u00a0doling out much-needed $$$ for research on ways to prevent\/control microbial contamination<\/a>, the US government is creating ads for consumers\u00a0to highlight safe food preparation\u00a0practices<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Clean, separate, cook and chill. Those four words are the main message of the government’s new ad campaign to raise consumer awareness of safe cooking techniques.<\/p>\n Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack and Department of Health and Human Services’ Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Tuesday announced the launch of “Food Safe Families,” a multimedia initiative that will use videos, print ads and a website to teach people about the risks of food poisoning and how they can reduce those risks by handling food properly at home.<\/p>\n The campaign is a collaborative effort between the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in cooperation with the Ad Council.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That’s the good news. There are a lot of folks out there who don’t know the basics about food sanitation and hygiene. The not-so-good news is the ads themselves… they’re just plain weird.<\/p>\n [youtube:http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Sb29Zexh_Vo]<\/p>\n [youtube:http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=PEbt_r4pKRA]<\/p>\n [youtube:http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8yeVdiATCGY]<\/p>\n [youtube:http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Mr2ySNl85vg]<\/p>\n They’re supposed to be “lighthearted,” and I guess they kinda are, but they don’t really make their points very well, IMHO. How effective they are remains to be seen, but I’m not real hopeful.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in my college daze, I took a medical school class on the investigation and identification of food and water-borne illnesses, in addition to my basic coursework on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14,17,19,28],"tags":[696,697],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5025"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}