Neil Parish MP does the ‘Kitchen Check’

Neil Parish, MP for Tiverton and Honiton, attended a recent Food Standards Agency reception and is pictured here getting to grips with the Agency’s Food Safety Week ‘Kitchen Check’

A recent survey1 by the FSA showed that more than 80% of the UK public admitted to one or more habits that put them at risk of food poisoning, including 1 in 3 people not checking ‘use-by’ dates, with 85% of them instead wrongly using the ‘sniff test’ and 68% just checking the colour – even though this will not always reveal whether food is safe to eat.  Also 1 in 3 people admit they would eat food that has been dropped on the floor.

These statistics have been exposed at the start of Food Safety Week, which has been running from the 10 June.

During the week, the Food Standards Agency has been getting people to think about food hygiene at home, by completing the new Kitchen Check. The Kitchen Check gets people to look at their own food preparation practices and gives them a score and some tips based on their answers.

Neil Parish, who is also a member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, said: “It’s important to make sure you get the basics right when it comes to storing and preparing food. There are more than a million cases of food poisoning each year so doing simple things like washing your hands before preparing food and checking ‘use-by’ dates are good ways of avoiding getting ill.”