AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
You hardly need statistics to tell you that there is a growth industry happening wherever you do the food shopping. The refrigerated shelves of lasagne, chicken curry or cottage pie are stretching exponentially in supermarkets and convenience stores. Ready meals are moving more and more of the culinary action from homes to production sites.
One in every 10 families now buy a ready meal once a week and the trend is growing, catching up on the frozen food market and the value of ready meal sales is growing faster than other food sectors as new customers begin buying them and the price of each meal goes up. Big and growing business, then for the 75 companies in the sector with sales estimated at €320 million.
Is the market growth driven by a desire to chicken tikka masala or to eat a grab and go or is the surge also about a craving for convenience? Market research suggests that the latter is a big factor, people don’t want to spend time cooking. Perhaps, more accurately people don’t have the time to cook or they are trying to save precious time for other things, like children or themselves.
So ready meals are a hot item on the shopping list now. But how healthy and how safe are they?
Worryingly there have now been three food recalls over concerns about listeriosis within a fortnight. The first involved what the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI.) termed an extensive outbreak in which one person died and nine other were found to be infected. One recall involved 141 products from Lusk, Co. Dublin-based Ballymaguire Foods. The two further recalls involved spinach and salads products from McCormack Family Farms and traditional hummus from Tom and Ollie plus potted coriander from O’Hanlon Herbs. The FSAI emphasise that there is no evidence that these are linked to any other food recall.
Listeria monocytogenes is a pathogenic bacteria, found in water infected by sewage, soil and some foodstuffs and can cause infections when ingested by people who are susceptible like the elderly and pregnant women or where high levels of the bacteria present. It’s a sneaky bacteria, which can survive refrigeration and even freezing but heat does kill it.
Uncooked foodstuffs like soft cheeses , salads and foods which haven’t been heated thoroughly are sometimes a source. Also the symptoms are not immediate and can take up to 70 days to become apparent. According to the FSAI, there are between 14-22 identified cases a year, symptoms are flu-like with vomiting and diarrhoea but for most of us our immune systems see off the infection without our being aware of it.
While the authorities like the FSAI are there to protect food quality, there are measures that we can take after we have bought the product to make sure it is safe, points out Elena Alexa, lecturer in food safety management at Technological University (TU) Dublin.
In the case of food safety concerns with uncooked foods like grab-and-go salads or snacks there are many different elements and ingredients involved before the food is consumed, Elena says: “It is down to the consumer to insure how it is kept and to shorten the steps between buying and consuming.Food should be kept in the fridge at the proper temperature of between 1-4 degrees, delaying the growth of micro- organisms.”
We are inclined to blame meat products for contamination but fruit and vegetables can also be a source and these should be washed, while raw and cooked foods should be stored separately to avoid cross-contamination, points out Elena. “With oven ready foods they need to be cooked at a suitable temperature – so that the whole product reaches as least 70 degrees including core product on a temperature probe.”
A frequent source of problems is where consumers don’t follow the cooking instruction for products which need to be cooked long enough at a suitable temperature, whether in oven or microwave to insure that the food is piping hot. “People don’t read the labels,” says Elena, mentioning that temperatures between 4-60 degrees can be ideal for rapid bacterial growth.
“Unless all the evidence is ready about contamination, it is hard to know the source of the infection and in most cases the source is never identified.”
At the end of the day, the best protection as consumers is to follow food safety advice.
