NSF-certified equipment can help ensure safer food preparation areas

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 11, 2002 by Gary Bensky

The kitchen easily can become a hazardous environment. Products that were fresh and safe one moment can become dangerous and even deadly the next. Frequent news stories about salmonella-contaminated cantaloupes and E. coil-infected ground beef, lettuce and strawberries are constant reminders of the potential perils lurking in every food item.

Those potential dangers are in the back of our minds continually, and they should be. Is that product past its peak? What's the date on that tub of cottage cheese? Do I detect a film of slime on the salmon fillet? How long has that shrimp bisque been in the refrigerator?

You can control what happens in your kitchen, but what has happened to those products before they reached your back door? Did the supplier rotate its products properly? Was the delivery truck even refrigerated? In many kitchens, when the back doorbell rings, everyone from the chef down is equal. All hands stop to put everything away properly. But how many times do we see a delivery stacked up in a corner of the kitchen for endless hours until someone responsible gets around to putting it away?

On the long trek from the farm to the commercial kitchen, innumerable dangers threaten the foods we eat. It has been published that roughly 75 percent of food-related sickness reported to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta result from improper handling of foods in restaurants. Another one-fifth of all reported cases result from improper handling of foods in the home. The remaining 5 percent occur because of improper food handling in processing plants.

It is increasingly important to possess a level of knowledge regarding these issues and how we actually handle foods in our operations.

Food-safety hazards can be divided into three categories: biological contamination from bacteria, viruses, parasites and fungi; chemical contamination from pesticides, food additives, preservatives, cleaning supplies or toxic metals; and physical contamination from foreign objects like dirt, glass or hair.

The four reasons pathogens spread are as follows:

* Time-temperature abuse. This is probably the most common offense. It includes the failure to store or hold foods at the correct temperatures, the failure to cook or reheat foods to the proper temperature and the failure to properly chill foods after they're cooked.

* Cross contamination. That happens when microorganisms are transferred from the surface of one food to another.

* Contamination from food-contact surfaces. That occurs when equipment is cleaned and sanitized improperly or when foods come in contact with surfaces contaminated by raw poultry, meat or fish.

* Contamination from poor personal hygiene. That occurs when people touch foods with open cuts or sores, cough or sneeze on foods, or fail to wash their hands often. It's amazing to see workstations without sinks. Latex disposable gloves are great if used properly. They protect food from cuts and sores. But unless they are changed every time different foods are touched, they are useless.

The National Restaurant Association is attempting to elevate the industry's food-safety knowlege with its ServSafe program, which offers training and certification to foodservice professionals.

Where foodservice equipment is concerned, food safety means setting a standard in terms of the design and construction of all the different types of appliances, machines and even storage units. The generally accepted authority on equipment safety is the noncommercial agency known as NSF International, formerly known as the National Sanitation Foundation. Located in Ann Arbor, Mich., the NSF accepts manufacturers' equipment for testing in hopes of receiving NSF certification.

The agency's goal is to ensure that foodservice equipment "shall be designed and constructed in a way to exclude vermin, dust, dirt, splash or spillage from the food zone and be easily cleaned, maintained and serviced."

Because obtaining NSF certification is voluntary, many products on the market do not have NSF certification and might not pass muster under the scrutiny of particular health department officials.

The reason many products are not certified or even brought to market is a financial one. Many manufacturers lament the fact that some things are just not worth producing. By the time they pay the cost of submitting equipment for certification, the selling price becomes prohibitive and consumers buy cheaper noncertified units.

Although some may criticize the agency for being arbitrary as well as adding a lot of cost to equipment design and production, it's really all we've got.