Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Pioneer Woman's Sweet Potatoes! That's gotta rock.

I really appreciate AB's concern for food safety. Nobody thinks they've ever sickened anyone, but the millions of people that get foodborne illnesses every year suggest otherwise. Around 80% of chickens sampled have campyloacter and/or salmonella. I'd bet the numbers are pretty high for turkey, too. Use a thermometer, like AB suggests, and make sure all parts of the bird and/or stuffing reach 165 for safety.

Does a carnitas experience count? If so, Las Fuentes in Reseda, CA. They drip with manteca goodness.

Good points re: handwashing. It's very important. Unfortunately it's not happening nearly enough. If it did, we wouldn't be having hundreds of outbreaks every year from foodworker's poop ending up in food.

Can people cross-contaminate with gloves on? Yes. Can people cross-contaminate with bare hands? Yes. Both happen all the time, unfortunately. The purpose of the gloves is not to prevent cross-contamination. The purpose of gloves is to cover up poop on the fingers of foodworkers who don't wash their hands well after using the toilet.

To reduce outbreaks, we need to emphasize three things: employees shouldn't work when sick, they must wash their hands, and they should wear gloves (or use utensils) to handle food.

He has apparently learned nothing from the Fat Duck outbreak. He and his students continue to touch people's food with their bare hands, running the risk of fecal-oral diseases like norovirus.

Great discussion. There are plenty of things everyone along the food chain - farmers, brokers, processors, distributors, and retailers - can do to preserve the microbiological safety of the food we eat. Food safety is fundamentally not about marketing designations like organic, local, sustainable, kosher, halal, etc. Its about whether or not the food safety risks have been properly controlled. Just because you can theoretically see your local organic farmer's face at the farmer's market, doesn't mean that he or she knows anything about managing the microbiological safety of the food or that he or she has made the personal commitment to do so. Food that's grown outside under God's blue sky will never be perfectly safe to eat - there are too many variables. But the farmer and others along the food chain can minimize the risks by learning about and applying sound food safety principles. There probably is some value in us, as consumers, buying food that has had a shorter food chain - i.e. buying directly from the farmer - because there have simply been fewer people in the mix and less opportunity for someone to screw something up. But being able to see the farmer is not a guarantee of safety.