Keep picnics from spoiling: Follow food-safety rules when eating outdoors
June 7, 2006
The Cincinatti Enquirer
Polly Campbell
Summer means cookouts, picnics and all kinds of reasons to eat outdoors. Sorry to spoil the party, but summer also means a jump in the incidence of food-borne illness. Think back to your last cookout. Perhaps it looked like this:
It's a perfect summer day and burgers are on the menu. The hostess makes the hamburger patties inside, then takes them on a platter to the grill, where the host is lighting the briquettes. He cooks them to a juicy medium and piles them back on the platter. They go on the picnic table with the salads and deviled eggs. As guests drop in, they help themselves, and the kids eat when they're through playing softball. The griller conscientiously puts the rest of the uncooked burgers into the drinks cooler.
Oh, dear. These hosts violated all of the four most important rules of safe food handling: Clean, separate, cook, chill.
The Web site www.FightBac.org (run by the Partnership for Food Safety Education, an industry-government group) details what each of these general rules mean. In this case:
The burgers should have been kept in the refrigerator until the last moment. (And let's hope whoever made them washed his or her hands thoroughly before and after handling them. Remember, ground meat is the most problematic meat, as it can have bacteria throughout, unlike steak.)
The burgers should be cooked to 160 degrees, or well-done (use a thermometer), and absolutely should not go back on the same platter where they were when raw.
Food should not sit out for more than two hours. Warm weather encourages fast growth of bacteria, so make that an hour if the temperature is 90 degrees or higher.
Raw meat shouldn't go in a cooler with other food, even drinks, and food shouldn't go in a drink cooler that gets opened and closed a lot.
Furthermore, all such rules should be followed even more fastidiously when kids are around: Children between 1 and 10 are affected more, and more seriously, by E. coli and Salmonella than other age groups.
