Experts take aim at cookbooks for being ‘unsafe’

Who doesn’t love a cookbook?  The information and motivation to try new and exciting recipes or try new twists on an old favourite.

It seems there are a group of experts that are taking umbrage with most cookbooks because they believe they are lacking in food safety information.

The main point of the study undertaken by North Carolina University is to look at “Recipes containing raw animal ingredients in 29 popular cookbooks,” and determine if they offer “safe endpoint temperature recommendations and reducing cross-contamination risks.”

Lead researcher on the study, Dr Ben Chapman, told The Daily Mail, “Cookbooks tell people how to cook, so we wanted to see if cookbooks were providing any food-safety information related to cooking meat, poultry, seafood or eggs, and whether they were telling people to cook in a way that could affect the risk of contracting foodborne illness”.

The study looked at 29 best-selling cookbooks and over 1,749 recipes and found that only 1,497 had raw ingredients that could have their temperature measured to reduce risk.

Many online are saying that meat cooking is assumed knowledge of the person cooking and not the responsibility to those that write the cookbook.

What do you think?  Do you think all cookbooks should supply information on food safety or do you think that’s not their responsibility?