Site Aims to Untangle Web's Food Safety Info

Is the leftover turkey from Thanksgiving still okay to eat? A new food safety Web site lets consumers know that cooked poultry can be refrigerated for three to four days before bacteria pose a risk. The site also has an extensive list of local, regional and national food recalls.

Ad-free for now but not for long, the site, http://www.usfoodsafety.com, was launched last month by Susan Reef, a Wilmington, Mass., food industry consultant. Among its features are articles (such as "Tailgate Food Safety") culled from government and university sites.

Reef says she got the idea during the tomato/salmonella scare last summer after an elderly woman shopping alongside her in a supermarket held up a tomato and asked if she thought it was safe to eat.

That led Reef to discover how hard it can be to ferret out food recall and safety information online. Her new site helps cuts through some of the confusion.

You can also keep abreast of safety issues if you know which sites to visit.

The food safety site hosted by the Food and Drug Administration, http://www.foodsafety.gov, can be a challenge to navigate. But if you go to http://www.fda.gov and click on "recalls," you'll find a mix of drug and food information.

Don't expect to learn about egg, poultry and meat recalls there, however. That information is posted instead by the U.S. Department of Agriculture at http://www.usda.gov. (Click on "recalls.")

The best place to find allergen-linked recalls (including foods containing milk or peanuts) is posted by the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network (http://www.foodallergy.org/alerts.html), a nonprofit organization based in Fairfax.

And if you have a very specific food safety question ("Is a slow cooker safe?"), hundreds of Q-and-A's are listed at Ask Karen, a search engine hosted by the FDA. To use it, go to http://www.fsis.usda.gov and click on "Ask a Food Safety Question."

Karen's answer? The direct heat from the pot, lengthy cooking and the steam created within the tightly covered container combine to destroy bacteria and make the slow cooker a safe way to prepare foods.

-- Francesca Lunzer Kritz