We’ve blogged about home food safety here more times than I can count. It hit home (literally) last night.
My boys go to a Montessori school where they have access to a kitchen. Lunch is truly part of their curriculum, a place where they discuss nutrition, recycling and also honor healthy food and communal dining. They are encouraged to bring “oven food”, in glass containers or wrapped in foil to heat up in the oven (no microwaves allowed) so they can have a hot lunch. As a sidebar, it is very gratifying to have your children choose a bowl of homemade beef stew for lunch over PB&J!
Yesterday’s lunch was “stuffed hamburgers”. My son forgot to put his dish on the oven tray at lunch time for heating, so was not able to heat it up. He chose not to eat it cold (can you blame him?), but apparently go hungry about 3 pm between the end of school and start of his afternoon Performing Arts class, so ate his now 8-hour old, non-refrigerated hamburger. I’ll spare you the details of what happened when he got home about 6 pm.
This was our home-grown beef, ground and frozen straight from a USDA-inspected carcass at a plant whose cleanliness I see with my own eyes each month. The meat was cooked properly and placed in the refrigerator immediately after we finished our supper. My son has a very sensitive palate–often declaring the milk to be ‘off’ days before the rest of us suspect anything. He said the burger was delicious. The failure here was that he has an uninsulated lunch box, so foods like leftovers and sandwhiches should NEVER be eaten if not consumed at lunch.
Fortunately, the onset of what I can only attribute to food poisoning was so rapid that Eric does not seem to be suffering any after effects this morning.
I think when he gets home from school today we’ll be making an online visit to the FSIS’s mobile food safety game.
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