That new cookbook may have a great spaghetti bolognese recipe, but it probably likely won’t give you good advice when it comes to how to handle meat safely, health experts have warned.
Researchers found that bestselling cookbooks provide readers with little advice about how to reduce food-safety risks.
And when they did give advice, most of it was inaccurate and not based on sound science.
Research has found that bestselling cookbooks provide readers with little advice about how to reduce food-safety risks, and when they do give advice, most of it is inaccurate and not based on sound science. When cooking animal products, certain iternal food temperatures should be reached to ensure safety. Foodsafety.gov reccomends that fresh Beef, Veal or Lamb is cooked at 145°F (63°C) with a rest time of 3 minutes
‘Cookbooks aren’t widely viewed as a primary source of food-safety information, but cookbook sales are strong and they’re intended to be instructional,’ said Dr Ben Chapman, senior author of the study and an associate professor of agricultural and human sciences at North Carolina State University.
‘Cookbooks tell people how to cook, so we wanted to see if cookbooks were providing any food-safety information related to cooking meat, poultry, seafood or eggs, and whether they were telling people to cook in a way that could affect the risk of contracting foodborne illness,’ he said.
To conduct the study, researchers based at North Carolina State University analyzed 1,497 recipes in 29 cookbooks that appeared on New York Times best sellers list for food and diet books.
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All of these recipes were chosen because they included raw animal ingredients including meat, poultry, seafood or eggs.
While 1,749 recipes in the books contained raw animal ingredients, only 1,497 contained a raw animal that could effectively be measured with a digital thermometer.
When evaluating each recipe, the researchers considered three things: Does the recipe tell readers to cook the dish to a specific internal temperature?
If it does include a temperature, has that temperature been shown to be ‘safe’? For example, cooking chicken to 165°F.
Eggs should be cooked until the yolk and white are firm, according to FoodSafety.gov. Egg dishes should reach an internal temperature of 160°F (71°C) before they’re eaten
Finally, does the recipe perpetuate food-safety myths – such as advising to cook poultry until the juices ‘run clear’.
Such myths have been proven to be an unreliable way to determine if food has reached a high enough temperature to be cooked safely.
The researchers revealed that only 123 recipes – 8 per cent of all the recipes analyzed – mentioned cooking the dish to a specific temperature, and not all the temperatures listed were high enough to reduce the risk of foodborne illnesses.
‘In other words, very few recipes provided relevant food-safety information, and 34 of those 123 recipes gave readers information that wasn’t safe,’ Dr Chapman said.
‘Put another way, only 89 out of 1,497 recipes gave readers reliable information that they could use to reduce their risk of foodborne illness.’
They also found that 99.7 per cent of recipes provided readers with ‘subjective indicators’ to determine when a dish was done cooking – but none of those indicators were reliable enough to tell if the dish had reached a safe enough temperature.
The most common subjective indicator that the researchers came across was cooking time, which appeared in 44 per cent of the recipes.
‘And cooking time is particularly unreliable, because so many factors can affect how long it takes to cook something: the size of the dish being cooked, how cold it was before going into the oven, differences in cooking equipment, and so on,’ said Katrina Levine, the lead author of the study and an extension associate at North Carolina State’s Department of Agricultural and Human Sciences.
Other ‘myth’ indicators used in the cookbook include the color or texture of the meat and vague instructions such as ‘cook until done’.
‘This is important because cooking meat, poultry, seafood and eggs to a safe internal temperature kills off pathogens that cause foodborne illness,’ Ms Levine said.
‘These temperatures were established based on extensive research, targeting the most likely pathogens found in each food,’ she said.
A list of safe cooking temperatures can be found on the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) website.
‘Ideally, cookbooks can help us make food tasty and reduce our risk of getting sick, so we’d like to see recipes include good endpoint cooking temperatures,’ Dr Chapman said.
‘A similar study was done 25 years ago and found similar results – so nothing has changed in the past quarter century.’
By talking about the results of this new study, Dr Chapman hopes to encourage that change.
The researchers revealed that only 123 recipes – 8 per cent of all the recipes analyzed – mentioned cooking the dish to a specific temperature, and not all the temperatures listed were high enough to reduce the risk of foodborne illnesses