Newswise — To bring food safety awareness to Generations X and Y and those who are employed in retail foodservices, Iowa State University Extension has turned to online video, with an eye toward making sure food safety messages reach all audiences. "We're moving away from traditional communications of text-based food safety messages," said Catherine Strohbehn, a Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management specialist at ISU. She explained that another way for online viewers to look at food safety information includes increased visuals. "Our food safety project team developed a 'Yuck Photo Gallery,'" Strohbehn said. "For example, agar plates illustrate microbial growth from people that have dried their hands on an apron and then touched the agar plate. There are also photos that show microbial growth from hands that have touched refrigerator door handles. The point is for people to think, 'Yuck! Don't touch my food!'" They hope that young people who work in food service, or those who have trouble reading big blocks of text, will get the food safety message. The Yuck Photo Gallery and other food safety resources are posted online at http://www.extension.iastate.edu/foodsafety. Strohbehn, who manages the site with support from the Food Safety Consortium, is seeking to increase the use of podcasts and streaming videos that were first loaded on the site to show a televised guide to food safety. The video covered employee practices, time and temperature abuse and sanitization. "We thought about trying to capture the youth market or the college-age student," she said. "We tried putting it on podcasting to get feedback from the students on whether this was useful. Their general response was they liked the delivery method but the video content was originally targeted to older people when they're working in food service situations. The students found that a bit boring, so our long-term plans and some works in progress are to get more visuals, moving away from text-based food safety messages." It's more than just a matter of style. Strohbehn noted that research indicates there are generational differences in learning.
"Look at this next generation in the quick service restaurants and even in institutional college and university dining situations. When you're walking around you see the students with the iPods. We want to try to reach that because many of those kids are working in food service situations." A new SafeFood Blog has Food Safety Consortium researchers Jim Dickson, Joe Sebranek, Sam Beattie, Jim McKean and Strohbehn sharing their insights into everyday food safety issues along the farm-to-fork continuum. Elsewhere on the site, Strohbehn has updated materials targeted to consumers who prepare food away from home, particularly those involved in temporary food stands. Church or civic groups often set up food stands for a day that may potentially be serving hazardous food.
"We developed an Extension publication that our field staff uses if they are asked to train these groups," she said. "Often they don't get asked, so we're trying to reach new audiences. Ultimately our goal is to put segments of that on our food safety Web page."
Some pages in the site are useful for the implementation of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) programs for institutions such as schools and assisted living facilities, as well child care centers and restaurants. The programs are aimed at intervening where food contamination might occur. All the plans have been updated to reflect Iowa's food code enacted in 2005.
"Through those plans we've developed templates of standard operating procedures, which are really the foundation for a HACCP plan," Strohbehn said. "The U.S. Department of Agriculure estimates that about half of every U.S. consumer dollar spent on food is spent on food prepared away from home. So, we want to provide information that will help those preparing food away from home to do so safely." The Web site also ties into an ISU effort that examines consumers' motivation to practice food safety properly. The new study, led by Dr. Susan Arendt, is funded by a USDA grant. It examines such questions as why people don't follow proper food handling practices, even when they know it's the right thing to do. "We're trying to get beyond the gap between knowledge and behavior," Strohbehn said. "We've developed Web pages for each of the major research projects. That's where some of the new delivery methods like podcasting or blogging will come into play. I think we'll find that when we conduct focus groups with student age groups, the thinking is 'I don't want to go somewhere to watch a video. Bring it to me,' What we're trying to do in the whole food safety area is focus on the Web site and keep it fresh and current."
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