All 300 study participants were then invited to test kitchens equipped with video cameras that filmed meal preparation. Participants were asked to cook chicken thighs and prepare a salad. After preparing the chicken thighs, but before putting the chicken in the oven, participants were called out of the kitchen to conduct a short interview. Participants were then sent back into the kitchen to cook the chicken thighs, prepare the salad, and clean the kitchen as they would at home.
What the study participants didn’t know was that the chicken thighs were inoculated with a harmless strain of bacteria, which the researchers would be able to detect. This allowed researchers to swab surfaces in the kitchen to see whether any cross-contamination occurred during the food preparation and cooking process.
When study participants left the kitchen to conduct the interview, researchers swabbed the kitchen to identify any potential contamination. This process was repeated after each participant had completed cooking the meal and cleaned the kitchen. The prepared salad was also tested for possible contamination.
Ninety-three percent of the participants who received the intervention did not wash the chicken, as compared to 39% of the participants who did not receive the intervention.
However, the researchers were surprised to see that people who did wash the chicken and people who didn’t wash the chicken had similar levels of contamination from the raw chicken in their prepared salads.
So what gives?
“We think the salad contamination stems from people doing a poor job of washing their hands after handling the raw chicken, and/or doing a poor job of sanitizing the sink and surrounding surfaces before rinsing or handling the salad,” Shumaker says.
“Regardless of whether people washed their chicken, the kitchen sinks became contaminated by the raw chicken, while there was relatively little contamination of nearby counters,” Shumaker says. “This was a little surprising, since the conventional wisdom had been that the risk associated with washing chicken was because water would splash off of the chicken and contaminate surrounding surfaces. Instead, the sink itself was becoming contaminated, even when the chicken wasn’t being washed.
“Washing the chicken is still not a good idea, but this study demonstrates the need to focus on preventing contamination of sinks and emphasizing the importance of hand-washing and cleaning and sanitizing surfaces.”
The paper, “Observational Study of the Impact of a Food Safety Intervention on Consumer Poultry Washing,” is published in the Journal of Food Protection. The paper was co-authored by Margaret Kirchner, a former graduate student at NC State; Lisa Shelley, a research scholar at NC State; Rebecca Goulter, a research associate at NC State; Lydia Goodson, a former research technician at NC State; Sheryl Cates, of RTI International; Christopher Bernstein, of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and Aaron Lavallee, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).
Source : ncsu.edu