Food Protection Trends - January/February 2020 - 27

eral agencies' advice about safe temperatures is unequivocal:
food that is cooked until it reaches the thermometer-verified
temperature officials recommend is considered safe, and food
that is cooked without use of a thermometer to verify internal
temperature is not safe (7).
USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) offers
more detailed guidance about achieving and verifying that a
food has reached the recommended temperature. The agency offers guidance on how to select a thermometer (24).
It explains when to use a thermometer during the cooking
cycle and how to clean a thermometer (23). Directions for
placing a thermometer in a wide array of meats, casseroles,
and egg dishes are provided (22).
FSIS also explains the research that guided its recommendations, showing that color and texture of cooked ground beef
is not a good guide to safety: sometimes ground beef will turn
brown before reaching the safe temperature of 160°F. Further,
the agency advises consumers that its pre-1997 advice to cook
ground beef patties until the center and the cooked-out juices
are no longer pink and to look for a firm "cooked" texture
were insufficient to make meat safe (21). In 1997, FSIS began
recommending that consumers cook hamburgers to 160°F and
verify this temperature with a thermometer. Both CDC and
FDA followed in 1998 (17). To make sure that consumers are
aware of its advice, the agency has an outreach program and
monitors consumer food-safety behavior so as to modify its
efforts to promote food safety (25).
Clearly, the federal government provides food safety
information along with easy-to-follow instructions for
thermometer use. Undoubtedly, following the instructions
would prevent many foodborne illnesses. Since the costs
of thermometer use seem low and the benefits appear
to be high, cost-benefit decision making on the part of
at-home meal preparers should make thermometer use
nearly universal. However, using the 2014-2016 Eating
and Health Module from the American Time Use Survey,
this study found that only 14% of meal preparers use food
thermometers during a typical week when preparing meals
that require verification to ensure safety.
The federal government provides detailed warnings
regarding the food safety risks to children, pregnant women,
the elderly, and the immunocompromised. Therefore,
households that include members of any of these at-risk
groups would have a strong incentive to take action to avoid
foodborne illness. However, our regression results found
evidence that the presence of children, the elderly, or food
insufficiency had no influence on food thermometer use.
Further, this study found, counterintuitively, that at-home
meal preparers who judged themselves to be in poor physical
health were less likely than those in better physical health to
use a food thermometer.
Local, state and federal governments provide guidance
and oversight of food safety in food-service industries.
The FDA Food Code requires at least one employee at all

hours of operation to be a certified food protection manager
who has passed a test as part of a certified program. Such
training would familiarize a person with the demands of the
Food Code that repeatedly emphasize the importance of
temperature and verifying temperature with a thermometer.
Further, health code violations accrue for not following
proper food safety temperature, sanitation, and hygiene
guidelines. Given this oversight and regulatory environment,
an expectation is that those working in food-service jobs
likely better understand food safety than others and thus have
a higher propensity to utilize food safety practices at home.
This study did find that food service employment is related
to at-home food thermometer use. Workers in leisure and
hospitality, accommodation and food service, and food
preparation and serving are each more likely than others to
use a food thermometer at home. The largest difference was
for the group employed in food preparation and serving, a
job category that most likely includes workers who have had
food safety training and that showed almost twice the use of
thermometers at home as seen for other workers.
The training food service workers receive appears to go
beyond work in commercial kitchens and carries over to
behavior in the home. Had there been no detectable difference
based on food service employment, it would be reasonable to
infer that mandatory training did not influence home behavior.
It would then be unreasonable to expect greater impacts from
voluntary programs. That is, it would be unreasonable to
expect outreach programs, which are inherently voluntary, to
do what mandatory training cannot. There would therefore
be little economic argument for maintaining governmentfinanced outreach and voluntary education programs.
While this study found that food preparation and serving
workers, compared with all other survey respondents, were
12 percentage points more likely to use food thermometers
at home when preparing meals that require temperature
verification, the average rate of use was still only 24% for
those working in food preparation and serving (18). That still
leaves more than three quarters of food service workers who
fail to use a thermometer when they prepare at-home meals
that require temperature verification.
For future policy consideration, low thermometer use
rates may indicate that the public health community has not
done enough to convince meal preparers that temperature
verification is worthwhile. This admits at least three possibilities that might be resolved through further studies of factors
that influence food safety behavior. Meal preparers may not
be convinced that temperature verification would help them
avoid foodborne illness; they may not be aware of the adverse
consequences of foodborne illness, or the ease of avoiding
some foodborne illnesses may not be understood. The findings of this study, that differences in thermometer usage were
related to gender, marital status, age, and ethnicity, may assist
in future outreach efforts.

January/February Food Protection Trends

Food Protection Trends - January/February 2020

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