Chefs and home cooks are rolling the dice on food safety
This article by , Senior Lecturer in the Environment, School of Environment, Natural Resources & Geography and , Professor, Environmental Economics, was originally published on . Read the .
Encouraging anyone to honestly answer an embarrassing question is no easy task 鈥� not least when it might affect their job.
Members of the public were asked to agree or disagree with the statement: I always wash my hands immediately after handling raw meat, poultry or fish;: Via PixabayFor our , we wanted to know whether chefs in a range of restaurants and eateries, from fast food venues and local cafes to famous city bistros and award-winning restaurants, were undertaking 鈥渦nsafe鈥� food practices. As some of these 鈥� such as returning to the kitchen within 48 hours of a bout of diarrhoea or vomiting 鈥� contravene Food Standard Agency guidelines, it was unlikely that all respondents would answer as honestly if asked about them.
This was not just a project to catch specific food professionals in a lie, we wanted to find out the extent to which the public and chefs handled food in unsafe ways. With cases of food-borne diseases reported every year in the UK, at a cost of approximately 拢1.5 billion in terms of resource in welfare losses, the need to identify risky food handling is urgent.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is acutely aware of the problem and has instigated initiatives such as the (FHRS) that involves inspections and punishments following the identification of poor food handling behaviours in restaurants and eateries. However, such initiatives do not always manage to change the behaviour of the food handlers 鈥� and inadequate food handling practices frequently go unseen or unreported.
Dicing with destiny
Yet still, we were faced with the issue of getting honest answers to our research questions. So we rolled a dice, or to be precise, two of them. As part of our research, 132 chefs and 926 members of the public were asked to agree or disagree with the following four statements:
I always wash my hands immediately after handling raw meat, poultry or fish;
I have worked in a kitchen within 48 hours of suffering from diarrhoea and/or vomiting;
I have worked in a kitchen where meat that is 鈥渙n the turn鈥� has been served;
I have served chicken at a barbecue when I wasn鈥檛 totally sure that it was fully cooked.
Here, the dice rolling was part of a (RRT): interviewees secretly rolled two dice and gave 鈥渇orced鈥� responses if particular values resulted. If they rolled a 2, 3 or 4, they had to answer yes. If they rolled 11 or 12, they had to answer no. All required an honest answer.
Denying the first, or admitting to the other three statements would be embarrassing for members of the public, and could possibly lead to dismissal for professional caterers. Because they knew that a 鈥測es鈥� could have been forced by the interviewee鈥檚 dice roll, they were more willing to report a true, unforced, 鈥測es鈥�.
We were unable to distinguish between individuals who had given a forced response and those who had answered truthfully. But we knew statistically that 75% of the dice rolls would lead to a honest response and so were able to determine the proportion of the public and chefs who had admitted to performing one of the risky behaviours. We als