Doing your part for Food Safety Education Month

When it comes to food safety, the question often centers on what should fall under the category of personal responsibility and what are the obligations of corporations and monitoring agencies?

That gray area is the issue — as evidenced by the E. Coli outbreak associated with raw Nestle Toll House cookie dough earlier this year. Should people be expected to avoid eating raw cookie dough? Or should contaminated cookie dough never reach your grocery cart? Both positions seem unrealistic. Everybody licks the spoon and no system can produce completely safe raw foods.

Nestle’s refrigerated cookie dough is back on the market with a new warning label and packaging emphasizing that eating raw cookie dough poses a potential threat to one’s health.

But in light of what is being called Food Education Safety Month, the Barf Blog contends that urging consumers to be proactive in ferreting out potential dangers is not a strong-enough approach. Putting the onus on individual consumers to be aware of recalls does seem to be a poor way to stop the spread of a contaminated product.

And yet, the idea of a central database where we could enter all the food products we eat and receive recall notices — in the same manner as Google Alerts or a Twitter feed — is an intriguing one. If a warning system required only passive participation, it might engage more people.

[Image via Flickr: chego101]