Safe Recipe Style Guide to provide food safety instructions in recipes
The Partnership for Food Safety Education (PFSE) launched a new tool that is expected to dramatically improve consumers’ food safety behaviors at home. PFSE announced the release of a new Safe Recipe Style Guide at the 2019 Consumer Food Safety Education Conference where more than 400 public and private sector experts are convened to address how to improve food safety behaviors.
The Safe Recipe Style Guide is designed for use by any recipe writer – professional recipe developers and food journalists – who writes and publicizes recipes for distribution to the public. It provides specific, concise recipe text to address the four major areas of most food safety violations in home kitchens: temperature, handwashing, cross contamination and produce handling. It can be found online at www.saferecipeguide.org.
The new guide was inspired by a study in the Journal of Food Protection¹ that shows significant improvement in food safety behavior in home kitchens when recipes contain food safety instructions written into the text. “Our challenge was to figure out how to get these simple instructions incorporated into more recipes,” said Shelley Feist, executive director of the PFSE. “That’s when we came up with the idea to provide food editors with a recipe writing style guide – just like the AP Stylebook – only this guide would provide easy ways to incorporate food safety instructions.”
“Consumers play a key role when it comes to preventing foodborne illness and keeping their families safe and healthy” said Mindy Brashears, Ph.D., Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety at USDA. “The research is clear – consumers do not wash their hands at critical steps of food preparation, which can lead to cross-contamination of harmful bacteria. The more information that we can provide to help consumers, the better they are able to prevent foodborne illness.”
PFSE plans a year-long roll-out of the Style Guide, to educate the media and food industry about the new guidelines, and the potential public health benefits of their use.
Source: The Food Marketing Institute
