HOTELS & HOSPITALITY
THE POISONED CHALICE
Essity’s Jeremy Bennett looks at the dangers posed by food contamination in the hotel and restaurant kitchen and considers how incidences of food poisoning can be avoided in the catering sector.
Food poisoning can have a devastating effect on any catering business.
A restaurant manager in France was recently charged with involuntary homicide after one of his customers died and 15 others became unwell following a meal at his premises during the 2023 Rugby World Cup tournament.
Meanwhile, the owners of a restaurant in Majorca are facing at least two years in prison after around 100 of their customers fell ill with salmonella.
Food poisoning can also have terrible consequences for the sufferer, too. A young Olympic hopeful contracted EColi and developed a rare reaction to the bug after eating a meal from a London fast-food outlet in 2017. Cyclist Lizzi Jordan fell into a coma and when she awoke, she discovered she had lost her sight. Lizzi is now hoping to compete in the 2024 Paris Paralympics.
Besides having the potential to cause life-changing conditions and even death, food poisoning can also cost a business billions of pounds in product wastage, recalls and brand erosion. But it is by no means a new phenomenon, the link between acute gastric illness and food having first been identified in the late 19th century.
Doctors before that time tended to focus more strongly on deadlier diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis, smallpox and cholera since these resulted in frequent epidemics and deaths. But when such diseases began to decline, food poisoning became an increasing worry and medical chiefs sought to extend their knowledge of the condition.
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As a result, the UK health authorities began to raise public awareness of the need to regulate and improve food handling practices. And they were certainly in need of improvement.
Around one-fifth of British meat in the 1860s was thought to originate from animals that were either considerably diseased or had died of pleuro-pneumonia. Studies carried out in 1877 also revealed that around a quarter of the milk on sale in the UK contained excessive chalk, while 10% of our butter was tinted with copper.
And Gloucestershire cheese was routinely coloured with red lead while strychnine was often added to beer to enhance its bitter taste. This allowed unscrupulous tavern-keepers to water down the beer without their customers noticing.
Food poisoning incidents began to be logged in 1939 and by 1957 the estimated number of food infections occurring annually in England and Wales had hit 15,100. This figure is thought to have rocketed to around half a million today.
There are several reasons behind this apparent leap in the number of food poisoning cases. Greater public awareness – and the advent of the National Health Service - means that many more people are consulting their doctors about gastric ailments than they did in the past.
Laboratory advances also mean that micro-organisms can be more easily identified than they used to. And the fact that people are shopping less frequently and consuming more cook-chill dishes means that some foods
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