Is Your Child Eating This In School?
It has often been thought that home-packed food eaten in school during lunches were the most nutritious and healthiest, given the care with which the lunches were packed so carefully by the parents for their darling children. Canteen lunches have the image of being unhealthy, stuffed with fat and salt, with profit in mind and no care for hygiene.
Well, it appears that we may have been wrong. A new study of pre-schoolers lunches where the food was packed at home found that more than 90 percent of these lunches had been exposed to unsafe temperatures for quite a while before the children started eating them. The USDAs recommendations are that the food must be kept at temperatures below 40 degrees Fahrenheit (about 4.5 degrees Celcius) in order to prevent stray bacteria in the food from multiplying and causing food poisoning. More than 90 percent of these lunches had been noted to be at room temperature. USDA guidelines are that the food should not be at room temperatures for more than 2 hours. The pre-schoolers were thus at a higher risk of getting food poisoning or food-borne illnesses from the food at home.
Even food that is kept in the refrigerator in school to try to maintain the temperature below 40 degrees Fahrenheit may not necessarily be at that level, given the tendency for children to keep opening the refrigerator doors and leaving them open.
The answer appears to be to keep the food in ice packs to slow down bacterial growth.