Studies uploaded to the Consumerist website have shown people are more likely to get food poisoning from an evening out at a restaurant more than if they had eaten at home.
A report entitled “Outbreak Alert! 2014” recorded that 1,610 restaurant outbreaks sent approximately 28,000 customers home with food borne sicknesses. The biggest culprits of the group were seafood, fresh produce and packaged foods. All these food products were supposed to have been regulated by the Food and Drug Administration; however, the regulations have slowly started tightening up since 2011 with the new FDA Food Safety Modernization Act.
Another common cause of food borne illness stemmed from dairy products, with raw, unpasteurized milk being the main culprit. The statistic of food poisoning caused by dairy products has only increased throughout the previous decade.
Though the reports of outbreaks from contaminated food have decreased over the past decade, it is still a major problem of which the public is mostly unaware. The Center for Science in the Public Interest’s Food Safety Director Caroline Smith DeWaal stated that these outbreaks are underreported to “epidemic proportions.” This means there may be even more outbreaks than the study accounts for. Smith also says few are trying to determine the cause of these outbreaks.
Despite this information, some students are not shaken by it and do not plan on forever abstaining from evenings out at restaurants. Others continue to have faith in the local establishments they visit regularly. One of the students holding this opinion is English major, Steven Savoie.
“I would [only] go to a restaurant I knew well, [one] that I had been to several times before,” said Savoie. “[I would] stick with that.”
Emily Eyster, a freshman art major, said her family goes to restaurants too infrequently to worry about food poisoning, but even with the information, they’d still take their chances.
“My family eats a lot at home anyway,” said Eyster. “Even so, we’d still go out if we didn’t feel like cooking. [The information] would probably freak out my mom a little, but if my little sister said, ‘I want to go somewhere to eat,’ then we’d probably go somewhere.”