Food Protection Trends - October 2009 - 633

TABLE 2. Demographic characteristics of participating seventh graders in East Tennessee Characteristic Gender (n = 231) Female Male Race (n = 228) African American Asian/Pacific Caucasian Hispanic Native American Geographic areaa (n = 232) Metropolitan Micropolitan Other # Students (%) 146 (63.2) 78 (34.8) 15 (6.6) 6 (2.6) 170 (74.5) 15 (6.6) 23 (10.1) 138 (59.5) 49 (21.1) 45 (19.4) Geographic area is based on US Census Bureau Standard Metropolitan Areas classification. in one week. There was no significant relationship between the total knowledge or attitudes/behaviors scores of the students or differences between genders for any response to the number of meals or snacks prepared. Students reported eating at a restaurant or fast food with their family 0 to 3 times a week, with no response difference between genders. Students who reported eating out with their family 0 to 3 or 4 to 10 times per week demonstrated significantly greater food-safety knowledge than students who ate out more than 10 times a week, but attitudes/behaviors were not significantly different among levels of eating out. In their study with 178 seventh and eighth grade students, Haapala and Probart (11) also found that the majority of students (52%) prepare meals or snacks, with females and males participating equally in food preparation. Byrd-Bredbenner et al. (5) reported that 84% of college students (mean age 19.9 ± 1.9) prepared at least one meal every week. These results suggest that adolescents are beginning to prepare foods and, while the frequency of food preparation will increase, food-handling experience is limited among young consumers, even at the college level. Knowledge measures The adolescents in this study (n = 231) demonstrated only a fair level of food-safety knowledge, answering on average 48% of the knowledge questions correctly. Richards et al. (21) similarly found that seventh grade students (n = 234) from five schools in Tennessee and North Carolina demonstrated only 51% correct food safety knowledge, while Haapala and Probart (11) found that seventh and eighth grade students (n = 178) had a slightly higher total, with 72% correct knowledge. It should be noted that the instrument in this study was a modified version of the survey used by Richards et al. (21); thus knowledge differences reported by Haapala and Probart (11) could be due to differences in the instrument, not in actual student knowledge. The knowledge of adolescents in the current study on key food safety issues is described in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3. The adolescents demonstrated high levels (63–79%) of knowledge in the importance and frequency of proper hygiene. The majority of participants (83%) overestimated the temperatures needed to safely cook ground beef, but many (67%) incorrectly chose color, over the use of a thermometer, as the best indicator of “doneness” of a hamburger. Awareness of cooling practices for leftover foods was high (88%), but knowledge of proper meat defrosting methods was low with only 26 % correctly answering that thawing in the refrigerator is the safest method. The adolescents’ understanding of preventive cross-contamination practices, like separating foods and using different or clean utensils between foods, was fair with 57–62% correctly answering. Participants’ knowledge of foodborne pathogens was low, with 38% not correctly recognizing E. coli O157:H7 as a pathogen that could cause foodborne illness. Haapala and Probart (11) reported similar results with adolescents demonstrating high levels of knowledge in proper hygiene (85%) and cooling pract-ices (89%). However, their study reported that 63% of adolescents correctly identified a thermometer reading as the safest indicator of doneness of meat. This finding greatly differs from the current study, which found that 67% of adolescents identified color as the best indicator of doneness. The inconsistency in these findings may be due to the fact that the question regarding safest method for determining meat doneness in the Haapala and Probart study was a true/false item, while the survey question in our study offered multiple choice answers. Attitude/Behavior measures Student perceptions of risk of foodborne illness were high, while self efficacy and personal responsibility toward food safety were fairly low (Fig. 4). Less than half of students felt they could affect their risk of foodborne illness by correctly handling foods, identifying higher risk foods, or recognizing common symptoms. Adolescents in the Haapala and Probart (11) study also exhibited high perceptions toward the risk and severity of foodborne illness and low self efficacy. College students were found to have higher (82%) selfefficacy scores (5). With adult consum- OCTOBER 2009 | FOOD PROTECTION TRENDS
Food Protection Trends - October 2009

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