Wednesday, August 5, 1998
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

Poultry Requires Careful Preparation

I was standing in front of the meat counter at my favorite supermarket last week, making small talk while the butcher weighed and wrapped a whole raw chicken, not paying much attention until I noticed that he’d moved on to the next part of my order—slicing some cold, cooked turkey breast—without washing his hands.

Uh-oh, I thought, what do I do now? Give the butcher a lecture on the hazards of food contamination? Thank him politely, then dump the turkey in Aisle 2? Or pay for it and throw it out on the way to the car?

I took it home and made sandwiches for my kids. And nobody died, nobody took sick, nobody even complained. Still, I took a chance. The odds were against us—how much so was brought home to me a few days later when I started reading “Spoiled: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It,” newly out in paperback (Penguin, $14.95) by Nicols Fox. “If chicken were tap water, the supply would be cut off,” she writes, regarding a 1995 baseline study of contamination levels in chickens by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Among other things, it found that greater than 99 percent of broiler carcasses had detectable levels of E. coli. And though most members of the E. coli genus are benign, their presence is an indicator of fecal contamination.

Now, I adore chicken. I know how to cook it a hundred different ways—every one of them guaranteed to make my family (except for one vegetarian member) hum in contented delight. But increasingly, I have to wonder whether it’s worth the risk. The poor hygiene displayed by my butcher—a young man who appeared to be only a couple of years out of high school—is actually a prime example of what is now referred to, in the food industry, as “cross-contamination.”

Fox talks about it in her book, and relates this true story as a typical example: A teenager was cooking a hamburger, and doing a thorough job of it, when his brother came in, tossed his own (raw) burger in the skillet, and turned and mashed it down with a spatula. The first boy then used the same spatula to remove his burger. It was that boy who became sick.

When you’re cooking for your kids, use separate pans, spatulas and cutting boards for raw meats and vegetables. When you barbecue, never put the cooked chicken back into the same pan from which the raw chicken came. Thoroughly cooked chicken is perfectly safe—for everybody, writes Fox, except the person who prepares it. So wash your hands repeatedly: before, during, and after handling raw meat.

Studies have found levels of salmonella contamination in 20 to 85 percent of all U.S. chickens. More than 40,000 cases of salmonella infections are reported each year to the Centers for Disease Control, and those are believed to be only a fraction of the total cases.

Other studies have shown that the majority of broiler carcasses and parts are contaminated with campylobacter, a bacteria that most consumers have never even heard of—despite the fact that it is now considered the leading cause of foodborne bacterial infection in the U.S., responsible for 4 million cases a year.

And if you think you’re doing your family a favor by feeding them turkey burgers instead of hamburgers, think again. Ground turkey has been identified by the USDA as the most contaminated poultry product, with average levels of 49.9 percent of salmonella.

What accounts for these new and rapidly changing food diseases?

Certainly, the intensive farming practices in America play a major factor. Enormous flocks, sometimes as many as 100,000 birds, are crowded into hen houses that go uncleaned between the slaughter of one flock and the introduction of the next. They often receive antibiotics in their feed to ward off the diseases encouraged by close confinement. They arrive at the slaughterhouses frightened and stressed and when they’re frightened and stressed they’re more like to have diarrhea. Once killed, they’re plunged into a chilled chlorine bath—Fox calls it a “fecal soup”—that adds 8 percent water weight to each carcass.

“It’s hideous cycle, and all these things are done to make chickens more competitive,” Fox says. “And they are cheap, far cheaper than they should be, and it’s no wonder that they are contaminated.”

Reading this makes one shudder. Still, I figured, I usually buy organic chickens. Certainly, that gives me and my family some immunity. So I called Fox at her house in Maine, to ask that question, among others.

“I don’t doubt they’re going to taste better and be better for you,” she replied. “But as far as microbrial safety, you have to ask questions about the chickens’ transport, because that can stress the animals. Was the hen house cleaned out between each flock and allowed to air out? Were they water chilled or not? Certainly, organic chickens are probably healthier chickens so you’ve probably lowered your risk, but you haven’t necessarily eliminated it.” So much for self-protection.

Copyright 1998 San Jose Mercury News