Enhancing Food-Safety Education through Shared Teaching Resources

Use of the Conceptual Change Teaching Method to Address Food Safety Among Native American and Hispanic Food Preparers

Bird The purpose of this column is to highlight innovative publications and websites in food science education. If you know of a website or a recent publication that you believe other readers would like to know about, please submit the full text of the article or the URL for the website and an annotation of not more than 125 words. We welcome your resources and comments on this column. Material should be submitted to: Jim Bird, Science & Engineering Center, Fogler Library, Univ. of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, or e-mail to Jim.Bird@umit.maine.edu. If e-mailing, please put “JFSE submission” in the subject line. College English (National Council of Teachers of English). 2008. Special topic: Food. 70(4):345–436. This issue of College English is devoted to food writing. Papers include: “Consuming prose: The delectable rhetoric of food writing”, “Food memoirs: What they are, why they are popular, and why they belong in the literature classroom”, and “Books that cook: Teaching food and food literature in the English classroom”. For a very brief description of each article in this special topic issue go to http://www.indiana.edu/~cedialog/?cat=10 Koch P, Barton AC, Contento I, and Crabtree M. 2008. Farm to table and beyond: Helping students make sense of the global food system. Sci Scope 31(9):36–9. The authors describe an activity, part of the Farm to Table & Beyond curriculum, where grade 5 to 6 students diagram the production and processing of food. This activity, utilizing observation and discussion, helps students put the food system into a biological and environmental context. Topics explored in the curriculum include food preservation, environmental effects of food systems, and transportation issues related to food. McDonald J. 2008. Enhancing food-safety education through shared teaching resources. J Vet Med Educ 35(2):207–11. The author describes an innovative project, Design to Dissemination (D2D), developed for veterinary teaching faculty to provide them with food safety resources. The information (called “learning objects”) is presented in various formats including text, animation, audio, powerpoint, and video. The project has three objectives (from p. 208–209): “To provide institutions, faculty, and students with high-quality, clinically relevant, interactive educational materials….; To provide easy access to the materials….; To help faculty use learning objects effectively to build or enhance a course.” A logon is required to fully utilize the site's capabilities but users can create an account. To view this ongoing project, go to the following website: Veterinary Food Safety Education Learning Object Repository http://webcls.utmb.edu/d2d Segner S and Scholthof K-BG. 2007. Environmental microbiology: Bacteria & fungi on the foods we eat. The Am Biol Teach 69(3):149–57. Utilizing fruits and vegetables, a laboratory exercise was developed for the undergraduate course “Pathogens, the Environment, and Society” at Texas A&M Univ. Students concentrated on the identity of cosmopolitan bacteria and fungi on both washed and unwashed fruits and vegetables. Detailed laboratory protocols are presented. The author presents a number of internet resources useful in lab and lecture preparation. Sorgo A, Hajdinjak Z, and Briski D. 2008. The journey of a sandwich: computer-based laboratory experiments about the human digestive system in high school biology teaching. Adv Physiol Educ 32(1):92–9. Based on results from a questionnaire, the authors found that high school students were most successful when hands-on, computer-based experiments were used to teach human digestion. Topics taught included jaw chewing force, dissolution speed, enzymatic breakdown of food, bacteriocidal activity of hydrochloric acid, and importance of the intestine lining's surface. These experiments will be upgraded in the future, based on student input. The authors plan to design experiments to teach other systems. Dairy Science and Food Technology http://www.dairyscience.info (accessed 11/17/2008) This website contains information on the industrial uses of lactic acid bacteria and their bacteriophages, antimicrobial systems in milk, and factors influencing the quality and yield of cheese. There are also sections on starter cultures, probiotics, modeling in food technology, and a summary of information on modified atmosphere packaging. The articles on general food technology include labeling, nutritional claims, wine making and thermal processing. There are calculators and models, such as one for predicting the grade value of Cheddar cheese, theoretical yield of cheese, and a calculator using linear programming for calculating ice cream mixes. The site is aimed at students and practitioners in dairy science and technology, and there are discussion area, extensive links, and literature citations. There are also significant sections aimed at helping students write papers and theses including a Harvard-style reference generator. (Contributed by Dr. Michael Mullan, Head of Higher Education Branch, Greenmount Campus, College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise, Antrim BT41 4PU, Northern Ireland. michael.mullan@dardni.gov.uk)

In order to evaluate the current effectiveness of nutrition and food safety education on the college taekwondo students in China, we analysed the difference of food knowledge, attitudes and practices among the Chinese college taek- wondo students on the basis of local fraction algorithm who had or had not have food nutrition and safety education, in order to examine the necessarily of the provision of food nutrition and safety education in the college. Two groups of stu- dents were formed with 150 samples in one group respectively. One group of students, named FNSE group, had food nu- trition and safety education, while the other, named non-FNSE group, had not. The differences of two group students' knowledge, attitudes and practices of food were compared using the data collected by questionnaires. The results revealed that students in FNSE group had greater knowledge than students in the other one with a significant difference (P =0.013<0.05). Regarding food attitude, food nutrition and safety education do not cause any difference between two groups. FNSE group performs better than non-FNSE group on the nutritional and dietary practice. Since food nutrition and safety education can improve college taekwondo students' food knowledge and influence their dietary behavior, this study empirically supports the implementation of food nutrition and safety education in colleges, and suggests the educa- tion should be tailored for college taekwondo students.

Protecting Animal and Human Health and the Nation’s Food Supply through Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory Testing

This study assessed the perceptions of Kentucky consumers regarding the safety of the nation's food supply. Data were collected through a telephone survey of 728 respondents. Overall, most consumers were very or somewhat confident in the nation's food supply. Significant differences were noted among consumers based on age, gender and household income. The most likely locations for food safety problems were identified as food processing plants, followed by restaurants. Respondents that were most confident in the nation's food supply believed food poisoning occurred less frequently than those who were not confident in the food supply. Those consumers who were very confident and somewhat confident in the food supply had a significantly different perception of health risks in food from germs, pesticide residues and preservatives than those who had no confidence in the food supply. Respondents with someone in the household working in the foodservice industry were not significantly different in their confidence of the nation's food supply, or in their opinion of where food safety problems occur, than those who did not. Implications for the foodservice and hospitality industry are discussed.

Preventive Strategy Against Infectious Diarrhea—A Holistic Approach

DR. R. E. SHADE'S evening discourse at the British Association, delivered on September 3, came well within the category of scientific contributions bearing upon social welfare, for it demonstrated the physical possibility of greatly increasing the nation's home-grown food supply, and incidentally of improving soil fertility and of helping to put the much-suffering farmer upon his financial feet. A conspicuous feature of recent agricultural progress has been the recognition of grass as a crop, and how by good management and the use of scientific methods of grass conservation, the productivity of pastures can be immensely increased. 'Early researches on grass as a food for stock were largely confined to hay, and though this form of 'bottled sunshine' is unlikely ever to disappear, the nutrients in grass can be best conserved either as ensilage or as artificially dried grass. No system of cultivating grassland can be adequate unless it takes cognizance of the reaction between the pasture herbage and the grazing animal, for by controlling the time and intensity of grazing or cutting, by judicious manuring, and by timely cultivations, a succession of palatable and nutritious herbage can be maintained throughout the grazing season, and this season can be extended at both ends, that is, in spring and in autumn. The re-discovery by Prof. T. B. Wood and Dr. H. E. Woodman of the high feeding value of leafy, young grass, and the breeding of leafy and highly nutritious strains of indigenous grasses by Prof. R. G. Stapledon and his co-workers at Aberystwyth, have opened up a vista of great possibilities for home agriculture and national food supply.

The objective of this study was to explore age-specific reasons why food safety education might be important for high school students (in Ontario, Canada), from a variety of expert perspectives. In May 2014, semi-structured key informant interviews (n = 20) were conducted with food safety and youth education experts. A thematic analysis of verbatim transcripts of the interviews was conducted. Participants identified three major reasons why food safety is important for high school students: (i) they have current and personal needs for food safety information, (ii) high school is an ideal time and place to instill life-long good habits, and (iii) they are part of the foodborne illness risk landscape. Food safety education was deemed important for high school students, who were seen as a unique and captive audience in need of safe food handling skills, now and in the future, for a variety of reasons: potential employment advantages, improved food literacy, combating their sense of “invincibility,” and helping instill essential life skills that they may not get elsewhere. These results confirm the importance of food safety education for high school students and highlight the need to determine age-appropriate interventions and methods to engage high school students and improve their safe food handling practices.

Position of the American Dietetic Association: Food and Water Safety

Food safety shake-up needed in the USA

The aim of this study was to assess food safety education using school book covers and videos to Public Elementary School PES students in Cimahi City, West Java, Indonesia to order to improve knowledge, attitude, and practice of street food safety. We used quasy experiment with pretest−posttest control group design. We selected the intervention group from four public elementary schools in South Cimahi City where food poisoning had occurred, and the control group from four public elementary schools in North Cimahi City by simple random sampling. Samples consisted of 224 students; 112 as control and 112 as intervention group. This study was conducted for six months, in which the food safety education regarding street food safety used diffferent book covers for ten subject note books and videos. The book covers which consisted of materials on bacteriological and chemical food safety were explained once a week within 50−60 minutes duration. The videos regarding street food safety were given for 3 (three) times within 6 months. Before food safety education, there was no significant difference in knowledge, attitude, and practice (p&gt;0.05) between the control and intervention groups. After six month food safety education, knowledge, attitude, and practice significantly improved (p&lt;0.05) in intervention group compared to control group. Within intervention group, knowledge was improved from 5.4% (pre intervention) to 91.1% (post intervention), attitude from 69.6% (pre intervention) to 97.3% (post intervention), and practice from 21.4% (pre intervention) to 59.8% (post intervention). This study provides evidence that food safety education using book covers and videos to the elementary students for six months improved their knowledge, attitude, and practice of street food safety.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the key requirements of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), recently passed by the US Congress to safeguard the nation's food supply, and to ascertain the role of quality professionals in the management of food safety and quality systems for food facilities.Design/methodology/approachSince genesis of the Act emanates mainly from the recent upsurge in food disease outbreaks in North America, key lessons learnt from the 2008 Listeriosis outbreak in Canada were reviewed. Thereafter, a case study of developing a food safety and quality management system for a “very low risk facility” – i.e. a third party warehouse – was considered. Finally, potential connections between the sections of the FSMA and roles of various quality practitioners were discussed.FindingsRecent study at the third party logistics warehouse revealed developing and implementing pre‐requisite programs (PRPs), i.e. mainly operational and physical controls, had a positive impact on the food safety and quality management system (FSQMS). Hence, quality practitioners may focus on PRPs to enhance compliance to FSMA requirements.Practical implicationsFood production, processing, packaging and/or distribution companies that export their products to the USA, as well as enterprises requiring preventive controls to ensure food safety and quality, can greatly benefit from the services of quality practitioners. Other key inputs the practitioners provide to the FSQMS include costs reduction, value addition, defects prevention, process control, maintenance and improvement.Originality/valueThe paper closely studies quality practitioners’ perspectives towards meeting or even exceeding the new food safety regulatory expectations in food‐related institutions.

Evaluating your obligations for employee training according to the Food Safety Modernization Act

Food Science Education Publications and Websites

Food safety education attitude and practice among health professionals in China, Peru, and the U.S.