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dealing with pathogens—reduce infections, reduce outbreaks, and prevent antibiotic-resistant Salmonella. Another objective calls for an increase to 79% in “the proportion of consumers who follow key food safety practices.” Because baseline data from a 1998 survey confirmed that 72% of consumers already did so, the goal recognizes that home code violations are not the principal cause of outbreaks. For this reason, DHHS added a “developmental” objective—one for which no baseline information is available—to “improve food employee behaviors and food preparation practices that directly relate to foodborne illnesses in retail food establishments.”10 Taken together, these objectives continue to place the responsibility for food safety on food handlers, not on food producers or processors.

The phrase key food safety practices refers to elements of an education campaign jointly organized by the USDA and DHHS through an entity called the Partnership for Food Safety Education, an “ambitious public-private partnership created to reduce the incidence of foodborne illness by educating Americans about safe food handling practices.”11 Additional members include the U.S. Department of Education, an association of food and drug officials, seven food trade associations, two consumer organizations, and one individual—the outspoken food safety advocate Carol Tucker Foreman, a partnership entity unto herself.

Because Ms. Foreman appears again in these pages, she deserves a more formal introduction. In 1999, she became distinguished fellow and director of the Food Policy Institute of the Consumer Federation of America, but her previous career reflects the revolving door between jobs in government, industry, and the public interest sector. From 1973 to 1977, she directed the Consumer Federation. Under the administration of President Jimmy Carter, she served as USDA assistant secretary for Food and Consumer Services, where she was a strong advocate of consumer-friendly policies in dietary guidance, food assistance, and food safety. Subsequently, she founded the Safe Food Coalition, which advocated overhaul of the USDA’s meat and poultry inspection system. For 18 years, she headed a Washington, DC–based consulting practice that included corporations such as Monsanto, the agricultural biotechnology company, among its clients. Because she lobbied on behalf of Monsanto in its successful attempt to win FDA approval of a bioengineered cow growth hormone (see chapter 6), some groups question her reliability as a food safety advocate.12 On the issue of food safety, her record speaks for itself; her forceful lobbying for Pathogen Reduction: HACCP has been unwavering, as will soon be evident.

FIGURE 8. The Partnership for Food Safety’s Fight BAC! campaign. This public-private partnership places the burden of food safety responsibility on the public rather than focusing on food production, processing, or service, which are more prevalent sources of food-borne illness.

To return to the partnership: its principal contribution to food safety education is a campaign called Fight BAC! Keep Food Safe from Bacteria. Fight BAC! promotes the four food safety actions described in table 9 (page 75) and illustrated in figure 8: clean, separate, cook, and chill.13 The partnership produces this illustration and related materials—brochures, posters, public service announcements, and refrigerator magnets—in English and Spanish.

In addition to its role in the partnership, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) offers its own Food Safety Education (FSE) programs. These encourage consumers to cook ground beef to temperatures high enough to kill harmful bacteria and to use cooking thermometers to check such critical control points. Its materials emphasize the scientific nature of such practices: “A unique aspect to the FSE programs is their basis in sound science, as well as education theory and market research. The safe handling advice consumers get from FSIS educational programs and the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline is based on the latest scientific information