Trends in U.S. consumers' safe handling and consumption of food and their risk perceptions, 1988 through 2010.

Although survey results measuring the safety of consumers' food handling and risky food consumption practices have been published for over 20 years, evaluation of trends is impossible because the designs of published studies are not comparable. The Food Safety Surveys used comparable methods to interview U.S.

Practice-specific risk perceptions and self-reported food safety practices.

The relationship between risk perception and risk avoidance is typically analyzed using self-reported measures. However, in domains such as driving or food handling, the validity of responses about usual behavior is threatened because people think about the situations in which they are self-aware, such as when they encounter a hazard. Indeed, researchers have often noted a divergence between what people say about their behavior and how they actually behave.

A camera's view of consumer food-handling behaviors.

Objective: To compare consumer food-handling behaviors with the Fight BAC! consumer food-safety recommendations.

Design: Subjects were videotaped in their home while preparing a meal. Videotapes were coded according to Fight BAC! recommendations.

Foodborne Illness: Perceptions, Experience, and Preventive Behaviors in the United States.

Data from national telephone surveys conducted in 1988 and 1993 were used to describe consumer perceptions of foodborne illness. The 1993 data were also used to assess the relationship between the perception that a foodborne illness had recently been experienced and awareness, concern, knowledge, and behavior related to food safety. Respondents described foodborne disease primarily as a minor illness without fever that occurs within a day of eating a contaminated food prepared in a restaurant.