Should cookbooks have food safety warnings?
March 30, 2017 by Darcie
Cookbooks are valuable tools for anyone who loves food. They provide both inspiration and instruction, although a group of experts is taking issues with the latter. The group says most cookbooks don’t adequately emphasize food safety, increasing the risk of food poisoning.
Researchers at North Carolina University looked at 29 popular cookbooks to see if they addressed safe cooking temperatures for animal products. Lead researcher Dr.Ben Chapman, told The Daily Mail that the group “wanted to see if cookbooks were providing any food-safety information related to cooking meat, poultry, seafood or eggs, and whether they were telling people to cook in a way that could affect the risk of contracting foodborne illness”.
They found that of the recipes that included animal products like meat or eggs, only 8 per cent of all recipes mentioned a specific temperature, and not all the temperatures listed conformed to food safety standards. The study also found that the vast majority of recipes used time as an indicator of doneness, which is often unreliable due to variations in oven and stovetop temperatures and other factors.
The article did not mention which cookbooks were
examined. Many commenters on the article wondered if cookbook
authors were responsible for such matters, asking questions like
“Whatever happened to common sense and self responsibility”?
Do you think cookbooks should always provide safe cooking
temperatures, or is that information that home cooks should get
from another source?
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