While many associate the Super Bowl with football, for USDA food safety experts, the real high-stakes game is Thanksgiving. According to Meredith Carothers, a food safety expert with the USDA’s Meat and Poultry Hotline, Thanksgiving is their “food safety Super Bowl of the year”.
The holiday presents numerous food safety challenges because there are “so many food safety points to make and so many things to consider”.
Stress and Shortcuts: The Recipe for Risk
Thanksgiving meal prep can be a stressful event, with cooks potentially facing various pressures:
- Time Constraints: Tensions can be high due to tight timelines.
- Impression Management: There’s often pressure to impress loved ones.
- Novelty: Doing the cooking for the first time adds to the stress.
This stress can lead cooks to miss critical steps in the meal preparation process or take shortcuts, which may result in a food safety issue.
The Unique Questions the Hotline Fields
The USDA’s Meat and Poultry Hotline has been fielding questions for 40 years, and many unique food safety questions are posed to staff during the Thanksgiving season. Carothers mentions a few notable examples of questions asked over the decades:
- A turkey was brined in a trash bag and then cooked with melted plastic still on it. The question was whether the turkey was still safe to eat.
- Somebody tried to thaw their turkey in a dishwasher or in the shower.
While these questions may be unique, Carothers notes a declining trend in such bizarre food safety inquiries. She surmises this is because people call, learn the correct information, and then “in theory pass that information on to others”. Much of what we learn about cooking is passed down by cooking with others.
Food Safety Resources
The USDA’s Meat and Poultry Hotline, along with their food safety education team, develops partnerships and resources to ensure food safety information gets into the hands of consumers.
The USDA’s Meat and Poultry Hotline is available to answer food safety questions during the Thanksgiving season and anytime of the year.
- Call: $1-888-674-6854$ (1-888-MP-HOTLINE)
- Email: MPHotline@usda.gov
