USDA Food Safety Tips for Cooking Thanksgiving Turkeys

USDA Food Safety Tips for Cooking Thanksgiving Turkeys

The Thanksgiving meal is the largest many cooks prepare each year. Getting it just right, especially the turkey, brings a fair amount of pressure whether or not a host is experienced with roasting one. The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is issuing food safety recommendations on how to properly prepare a turkey to make sure yours is both delicious and safe to serve.

“Unsafe handling and undercooking of your turkey can lead to serious foodborne illness, explains Maria Malagon, Director of Food Safety Education with USDA FSIS. “Turkeys may contain Salmonella and Campylobacter, harmful pathogens that are only destroyed by properly preparing and cooking a turkey.”

Consumers should follow certain steps to reduce the risk of foodborne illness. According to Ms. Malagon, “those handling and cooking Thanksgiving meals should be aware of the resources available to them and the measures they can take to keep food safe.”

Steps to follow before cooking a turkey:

• Read labels carefully. Temperature labels show if the bird is fresh or frozen. If you plan to serve a fresh turkey, purchase it no more than two days before Thanksgiving.
• Purchase two thermometers: a refrigerator thermometer to ensure the turkey is stored at 40 °F or slightly below and a food thermometer to make sure the cooked turkey reaches a safe 165 °F.
• Thaw the turkey by using the microwave, the cold water method, or the refrigerator. The refrigerator method is USDA recommended.

Steps to follow when cooking a turkey:

• Wash hands with warm water and soap for 20 seconds before touching any food to prevent the spread of many types of infection and illness.
• Do not wash the turkey. This only spreads pathogens onto kitchen surfaces. The only way to kill bacteria that causes foodborne illness is to fully cook the turkey.
• Keep raw turkey separated from all other foods at all times.
• Use separate cutting boards, plates, and utensils when handling raw turkey to avoid cross-contamination. Wash items that have touched raw meat with warm soap and water, or place them in a dishwasher.
• Cook the turkey until it reaches 165 °F, as measured by a food thermometer. Check the turkey’s temperature by inserting the thermometer in three places: the thickest part of the breast, the innermost part of the thigh, and the innermost part of the wing.

Steps to follow when consuming leftover Thanksgiving food:

• Refrigerate leftovers within two hours to prevent bacteria from growing on the food.
• Store leftovers in shallow pans or containers to decrease cooling time. This prevents the food from spending too much time at unsafe temperatures (between 40 °F to 140 °F).
• Do not store stuffing inside a leftover turkey. Remove the stuffing from the turkey, and refrigerate the stuffing and the meat separately.
• Avoid consuming leftovers that have been left in the refrigerator for longer than 3 or 4 days (next Tuesday to be exact). Use the freezer to store leftovers for longer periods of time.
• Keep leftovers in a cooler with ice or frozen gel packs if the food is traveling home with a guest who lives more than two hours away.

Consumers with more food safety questions can visit FoodSafety.gov to learn more about how to safely select, thaw and prepare a turkey. They may also call the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline at 1-888-MPHotline (1-888-674-6854) or chat live with a food safety specialist at AskKaren.gov, available from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday, in English or Spanish.

USDA Using Questionable Science to Justify New Poultry and Hog Inspection Program

A Government Accountability Office report being released Wednesday questions whether the U.S. Department of Agriculture used bad information to justify plans for nearly nationwide expansion of its poultry-inspection pilot program.

The USDA’s pilot program for allowing plants to speed up processing lines by as much as 25 percent and replace some government inspectors with poultry firm employees. USDA officials say that the new procedures will save money, better identify problems in poultry-processing plants and be more likely to limit Salmonella and other pathogens.

The GAO auditors found that USDA relied on data collected from processing plants more than 11 years ago and some from another study done more than 20 years ago. According to the Post article, GAO also said that USDA should not use data from chicken-processing plants and apply it to turkey plants.

Last year, USDA proposed expansion of its new processing procedures from the 29 plants where the pilot program was being conducted to nearly all of the 239 chicken and 96 turkey plants in the U.S.

Approval of the agency’s plans would have to come from the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, although U.S. Senator Gillibrand has asked that agency’s administrator not to move forward until better research is done. She said that USDA collected more than 175,000 public comments on its proposed plans based on flawed information.

According to the Tuesday Post article, the GAO report also criticizes USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service for not collecting and analyzing data from a similar previous pilot program conducted in pork-processing facilities. The USDA was planning to implement a similar inspection plan for pork without analysing the data from the trial program. USDA officials have already agreed to comply with the GAO audit recommendations, the article stated.

Tuesday’s Washington Post reported this past spring on the increasing use of toxic antimicrobial chemicals in poultry-processing facilities to clean and disinfect carcasses on accelerated processing lines. Inspectors have complained about illness and injury from exposure to these chemicals.

GAO identified strengths and weaknesses of the chicken,pork and turkey pilot projects based on the views cited most frequently by 11 key stakeholder groups representing industry, labor, consumer advocacy, and animal welfare. On the basis of these views, GAO identified strengths including giving plants responsibility and flexibility for ensuring food safety and quality and allowing USDA inspectors to focus more on food safety activities. GAO identified weaknesses including that training of plant personnel assuming sorting responsibilities on the slaughter line is not required or standardized and that faster line speeds allowed under the pilot projects raise concerns about food safety and worker safety.

Source Food Safety News and GAO