Dear Martha,

You are recognized everywhere for your many talents - in home decor, landscaping, color sense and cuisine - and for your exquisite taste. Even my husband’s persnickety Westport, CT aunt thinks that you’re wonderful. But after browsing through the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of “Everyday Food” magazine, it’s very obvious to me that a course in safe food preparation is missing from your resume.

First, let’s talk turkey. Unless you have spent the last few decades living in an isolation booth, you must know that by USDA’s own admission, 20-25% of raw ground turkey meat is contaminated with Salmonella. Yet your recipe directions do not provide for a reliable “kill” step. For example, your “Whole-wheat spaghetti and turkey meatballs” recipe directs the reader to prepare the meatballs as follows:

“In a skillet, heat 1 tablespoon olive oil over medium high. Cook 20 frozen Light Turkey Meatballs until browned, 5 to 7 minutes. Add 1 1/2 cups store-bought marinara sauce and 1/2 cup water: Cook until heated through, 5 minutes.”

These instructions leave too much to the reader’s imagination. Browning alone is not enough to cook the meatballs completely, and “heated through” can mean different things to different people. Starting with hard-frozen meatballs increases the risk that the center of the meatballs won’t reach 165ºF, which is the “safe” temperature recommended by USDA.

I also take strong exception to your instructions for cooking chicken in the microwave. Microwave cooking is a notoriously unreliable way to kill bacteria, especially in a solid piece of meat such as a chicken breast. Customers who purchased ConAgra’s Banquet pot pies found that out the hard way. Cooking the chicken breasts until the meat is “...just opaque throughout...” is not a guarantee of microbiological safety.

A few weeks ago, when I was browsing eggnog recipes on-line, I came across yours. It sounded very tasty, but also very risky. It was completely inappropriate for you to publish a recipe that called for raw eggs without adding at least a precautionary statement about the possibility that the eggs might contain Salmonella Enteritidis. You could easily have recommended that pasteurized eggs be used in the recipe.

According to (now 10 year old) data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are approximately 76 million cases of food-borne disease in the US every year. That is more than one case of food-borne illness for every four people in this country every year. It is time that you, and others like you, shouldered some responsibility for teaching the public how to cook meals that are not only tasty and nutritious, but also are microbiologically safe.

Sincerely,

Phyllis Entis, MSc., SM(NRM)

Microwave Oven Safety

Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration released a "Consumer Update" about microwave ovens. This update covered a lot of territory - how microwave ovens work, the types of injuries that can result from their use, and how to operate a microwave oven safely. But they forgot to mention one detail. Microwave ovens are a very poor way to cook food safely.

Twenty years of research into cooking poultry in microwave ovens have led to one consistent conclusion. It is neither safe nor reliable. Any of us who have tried to cook a piece of meat or a chicken pot pie knows that food heats very unevenly in a microwave.

As long ago as 1989, researchers compared the performance of conventional ovens, microwave ovens, and convection microwave ovens side-by-side. They found that a whole chicken, when cooked to an internal temperature of 185ºF in a microwave oven, still contained live Salmonella. The chickens cooked to the same temperature (or lower) in conventional or convection-microwave ovens were Salmonella-free. Other researchers in other countries have confirmed this performance both with Salmonella and with other dangerous microbes such as Listeria monocytogenes.

We should be thankful that FDA took the time to remind all of us not to stand too close to the microwave oven while it's running, and to handle hot liquids with care, but it would have been even better had they told us not to use it to prepare our Thanksgiving turkey.