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Consumer Forum

Food Safety Comments

Your article "Can Your Kitchen Pass the Food Safety Test?" [in the October 1995 FDA Consumer] is well written and should be very useful in schools and other training. Just a couple of comments: I agree that the home refrigerator should be at 40 F, but doubt that many of them are actually that cold on the average. I had a very similar question to Question #2 on a TV call-in show recently. The idea of cooling to room temperature, then refrigerating dates back to the use of ice boxes for refrigeration. With the limited amount of ice, in the long run it was better to cool the food to room temperature to conserve ice.

In your comment on Question 6 you mentioned pasteurized eggs but probably should have clarified by stating that whole shell eggs are not pasteurized, just the commercial liquid egg products used in commercial products. There is some experimental work attempting to pasteurize whole shell eggs, but to my knowledge it has not been successful.

Thanks again for a good article.

Richard H. Forsythe
President
Arkansas Research Management
Fayetteville, Ark.