TV chefs fail at basic hand hygiene

I have just watched famous TV chefs preparing demonstration dishes.  One worked in his kitchen, others in an outside setting.

In both cases, the chefs were handling raw meat with their bare hands and preparing salads and sauces.  At no point did the chefs wash their hands and of course, they were moving between raw meats, fresh vegetables and spices. 

Of most concern to me was the use of a towel.  Chefs often have a towel at their waist; they use it for wiping spills from plates prior to service.  On this occasion, the chef handled the raw meat and repeatedly wiped his hands on the towel.  The sauce was blended from fresh vegetables and was not cooked.  There were no hand washing facilities in the shot and the sauce vegetables were also handled with bare hands.  The potential for food poisoning is significant.

Now, perhaps the chefs really did wash their hands between handling raw meats and salads.  However, these are demonstrations for ordinary viewers.  They should be setting a better example and emphasising the necessity of hand washing.

The news just keeps on getting worse!

After so many years of living with a food microbiologist, my wife has become a valuable food retail spy. Today she told me two more horror stories:

In our local supermarket there is a display stand for unwrapped bakery goods that extends from about chest height down to the floor. The store manager has supplied tongs for customers to use and there are signs asking customers to use the tongs.

Today she arrived at the bakery counter in time to see a mother wrestling the tongs from her toddler. If this were not bad enough, the mother then said to the toddler “I thought you said you were going to eat that”. Grabbing a bun from the child’s other hand, she stuck it back in the cabinet. Now both of them had handled the bun.

Now, I realise that bread buns are not a particularly good growth medium for food poisoning bacteria, but this is unacceptable. Some food borne pathogens have a very low infecting dose. The display cabinet should be arranged so that products and tongs are inaccessible to toddlers. Owners of self-service food displays need to be aware that simply providing tongs does not guarantee the safety of the food they sell. Needless to say, we will not purchase unwrapped goods from that store again.

The second incident was observed on TVNZ’s Good Morning show. Unfortunately, I didn’t see it and have not been able to locate a replay on their website. It appears that The Mad Butcher was on the show and demonstrating the preparation of chicken. After handling the raw chicken, he put his fingers into some spices and tasted a pinch. The bowl of spices was thus contaminated with whatever bacteria were on the raw chicken. A short while later, he put a cooked chicken onto the same chopping board, contaminating it with raw poultry juices.

OK – the Mad Butcher is not a professional chef and neither is Steve Grey, the host for that segment. The poultry industry in New Zealand has had a bad press recently over Campylobacter food poisoning, allegedly transmitted largely via chicken (though in fact we have seen a significant and sustained reduction over the last year in the incidence of the disease in the human population). This sort of example on daytime television, which is probably watched by many young mothers, is perhaps one of the reasons that we see such a high incidence of campylobacteriosis in New Zealand. Young adults are not getting the food safety message and we need to have good kitchen habits shown on our national television channels. We can’t rely on the food suppliers to take total responsibility for control of food poisoning.

This type of poor kitchen practice is not confined to New Zealand; Doug Powell at Kansas State University, who runs the Food Safety Net and writes the Barfblog has castigated some TV chefs in the USA for similar indiscretions (see for example: http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/tags/tv/).