THE FAST FOOD "CONUNDRUM"-HOW SAFE ARE FAST FOODS?

Whether it is really a scoop or was already known to many people, the so called expose by a whistle blower regarding some of the practices being indulged in by restaurants and fast food chains may yet persuade some consumers to cut down their frequency of eating out side. Recycling old foods is a practice followed by many restaurants due to economic considerations though there are countless others who are scrupulous in rejecting any old foods, not sold within a few hours after its preparation. Of course food spoilage might not be an issue in recycling prepared old foods but flavor and taste can be affected to some extent due to repeated exposure to heat during reformulating and preparing another product from the old one. The advanced refrigeration system and facilities available to day make it possible to keep foods for relatively longer periods without any major deterioration and there fore consumers should not have any worries about safety aspects. Nonetheless if restaurants claim that their preparations are made from fresh ingredients, they must avoid the temptation of recycling old foods which should be donated to the local Food Banks. After all to day's consumer attaches great value to freshness and the faith he reposes on the restaurant for transparency and fair play should not be violated  Here is a gist of the expose which made headline news recently.  

"While the way that Wendy's recycles overcooked hamburgers into the next day's vat of chili may be frugal, Cozmo23's description of it isn't exactly appetizing. (Though the rest of the thread, with riffs on British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay's possible reaction? Awesome.)  It's not limited to Wendy's, either: Lethal_Lunacy77 reports that the Chick-Fil-A he worked at did something similar with their chicken salad, stripping old chicken patties of their breading before chopping them up and mixing in mayo. And fast-food places aren't the only ones that recycle, apparently. "Being a dishwasher in an Italian eatery, i am instructed to throw garlic bread that looks untouched after being put out on the customers table into a separate bin where they are taken from, then used in meatballs," writes Burkey217. "Years ago my older brother was a busboy at a local well-respected restaurant. He let me know that the uneaten dinner rolls that were brought to each table (in a basket w/ packages of butter) were saved and placed into new baskets to go out to guests later in the evening," Chef_Brokentoe adds". 

In India where there are millions of small restaurants, operating on a limited budget, recycling is a big temptation too good to be resisted. Since almost all foods are heated to high temperatures before consumption, here again danger from microbiological hazards, per se, is very remote. However there is one area of danger in foods offered in Indian restaurants which involves the quality of cooking oil used for preparing fried and roasted products. Deterioration of cooking oil when exposed to temperatures as high as 180-200C is an established fact and some of the artifacts generated during prolonged exposure to heat can pose health risks with serious short term and long term health consequences. Scientific advise that heated oil should not be reused is not taken seriously and no restaurant seems to be willing to discard the frying oil after a couple of use considering the high prevailing prices for edible oils in the market. Fortunately the predominant cooking medium happens to be Palm oil and Palmolein, both relatively stable fats compared to others. Why the recycling may not become a controversial issue is due to the market reality that restaurants indulging in such practices, offering foods with reduced quality due to recycling, will be in danger of being elbowed out of the market place over a period of time.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

BPA TO THE FORE AGAIN!-HOW DANGEROUS IT CAN BE?

It was only recently that the EU cleared the controversy surrounding the risk posed by BPA through migration from plastic bottles and aluminum can coatings, indicating that this potential endocrine disruptor chemical levels in foods migrated from them are too low to cause any health damage. Now comes the news that concentration of BPA in paper products handled every day by the consumers is very much higher than that found in packed water and foods. Of course these paper products are not edible and therefore there cannot be any danger of imbibing the chemical through the oral route. However what is of concern is that those who frequently handle these paper products with high BPA levels can absorb the same through the skin, posing some danger to them. Here is more information about the new twist to BPA saga.

"It seems there's no escaping the chemical bisphenol A (BPA), which is used to make plastics like water bottles and to coat the insides of aluminum cans. Now a new study shows that BPA is also in a wide variety of paper products, including napkins, toilet paper, tickets, food wrappers, newspapers, and printer paper. "The concentrations are very high in the paper products," says study researcher Kurunthachalam Kannan, PhD, a research scientist at the New York State Department of Health. Kannan tested more than 200 paper samples from 15 different types of products. He found BPA levels in paper that were 100 to 1 million times higher than amounts detected in canned and packaged foods. The study is published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. Researchers say that because only a fraction of that is absorbed through the skin, most people probably pick up far less BPA handling paper than they do from their diets. But those amounts may wind up being significant for people like cashiers or printers who have to touch a lot of BPA-tainted paper as part of their jobs. "We've been focused on food, but there could be certain groups of people that could be exposed through other routes and other sources," says Joseph Braun, PhD, a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, who is studying how BPA may affect kids' behavior. He was not involved in the latest study. In Braun's studies, pregnant women who worked as cashiers had BPA levels that were about 30% higher than pregnant women who had different kinds of jobs".

The findings by the group about BPA danger must receive the attention of safety experts as the focus so far has been only on food ignoring other sources to which humans are exposed regularly. This is an occupational hazard which needs to be addressed and ways and means ought to be evolved to protect the personnel vulnerable to exposure to BPA. Now is the time to critically examine various daily use materials by people and assess the extent of cumulative exposure to BPA through frequent contacts with such materials. Omnipotence of plastics in to day's life is making the environment more and more unsafe causing a number of health disorders about which the society and the government will have be more alert!

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com