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Fight Bac! Campaign combats foodborne illness through education By Celena E. Kusch
Dr. J. Lynne Brown, associate professor of food science at Penn State, is project leader for Fight BAC! in Pennsylvania Schools, a program that provides food safety education materials for teachers to use in their classrooms.	Fifty years ago, summer meant a constant supply of fresh vegetables in the garden, produce exchanges throughout the neighborhood and canning and pickling in the kitchen. While some continue to carry on the traditions of home food processing, most of today’s families have become disconnected from the food system, a cultural shift that has had an impact on more than just the pocketbook. Dr. J. Lynne Brown, associate professor of food science and project leader for Fight BAC! in Pennsylvania Schools, has studied this phenomenon. She explained, “A lot of parents don’t cook anymore; they can buy prepackaged meals or eat at fast-food restaurants. As a result, parents are not teaching their children proper food handling as much. A significant part of the birth cohorts born after the baby boomers have not had to face food safety concerns in the way earlier generations did. Older generations often relied on canning, gardening and other home-based food processing and were taught about the need for food safety by their elders. Today’s generations are not exposed to that kind of experience. Many young people feel that all food is safe, and there’s no need to worry, but that’s just not true.” Part of the national Fight BAC! campaign, the Fight BAC! in Pennsylvania Schools project, promotes awareness of food safety to prevent incidents of foodborne illness that affect 33,000 Americans each year. Through a statewide education campaign, Fight BAC! familiarizes students in Pennsylvania’s middle and high schools with key principles of food safety: hand washing, proper cooling and storage, sufficient heating of food during preparation and avoiding cross contamination. Fight BAC! expands on a partnership established during the Enhancing the Safety of Pennsylvania Food project (1995–98). The Fight BAC! project is a collaboration among Penn State Cooperative Extension, the Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Newspaper in Education (NIE) Committee of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Publishers Association. A grant from the Penn State Outreach and Cooperative Extension Program Innovation Fund enabled the group to organize the Pennsylvania Fight BAC! campaign. Project leaders, in addition to Lynne Brown, are Roberta Brown, vocation education adviser for the Pennsylvania Bureau of Curriculum and Instruction, and Susan Morgan, chair of the NIE committee. According to Lynne Brown, “The project is really a collaboration of a large number of people. A central part of our project involves building teams of teachers, Cooperative Extension agents and NIE coordinators. It really has been a long time since most teachers have had new instruction in food safety. Fight BAC! provides curriculum materials that make it easy for teachers to meet the standards for food safety instruction. The Cooperative Extension family living agents have been especially pleased with working in these teams. It has opened up a door to future connections and sharing of information and materials with teachers. NIE coordinators have also been able to build on local connections, moving the food safety programs into the elementary classroom, as well.” Through the Fight BAC! project’s connections to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the program has reached 500 elementary, middle and high school teachers. Most are family and consumer science instructors, but some are middle school science teachers interested in integrating food safety scientific principles into their general science courses. Each teacher represents one school and an average of 40 students each year. To launch the program, Fight BAC! in Pennsylvania Schools produced a video teleconference for teachers to provide the needs assessment for the development of activities and lesson plans to inform their students about food safety and the food safety system. From this assessment, Lynne Brown created a food safety curriculum resource notebook incorporating a national representation of educational resources, including her own research and materials from other state Cooperative Extension organizations. The curriculum resource notebook includes lesson plans, sample activities, Internet resources and a 12-page educational supplement developed by the coordinators of the NIE program to provide students with a better understanding of the food system, help them recognize their responsibilities when buying and handling food, and teach readers what consumers can do to enhance food safety. “During the videoconference, the teachers said over and over again that they need hands-on activities,” Lynne Brown noted, “so we have incorporated many of these activities into the curriculum. In the hand-washing section, for example, we use Glow Germ, a fluorescent compound that glows under a black light. Teachers can apply it, shake some students’ hands as they enter the room, then turn out the lights to illustrate how germs pass from person to person. Teachers have commented that kids need to see the bacteria to make these lessons meaningful. With the Glow Germ, students like to see how the germs disappear after washing their hands properly.” Roberta Brown finds that innovative activities like these have made an impact on the way teachers approach nutrition education. “Fight BAC! is a wonderful model for taking University materials and bringing them into the classroom,” Roberta Brown said. “This success comes from focusing on a particular discipline, developing materials designed to meet the teacher’s needs and strategically delivering those materials through the videoconference and the workshops. The work of Cooperative Extension and of teachers in the classroom complement each other very well. The partnership has made both stronger.” According to Lynne Brown, future plans for Fight BAC! will use Penn State research to enrich existing programs. Improvements include enhancing the NIE supplements by adding activities, making them more user-friendly and designing more detailed lesson plans; developing and testing a hand-washing curriculum in collaboration with Williamsport Health District nurses and educators; and adapting Fight BAC! resources for use with the elderly. Lynne Brown is spearheading the program for the elderly. “Certain populations are more at risk, including Meals on Wheels recipients. These groups often do not exercise food safety in terms of the temperature of food: storing food at cool temperatures, heating food enough to serve and using a meat thermometer, for example. I’m applying for a grant to develop Fight BAC! materials aimed at the elderly.” An outreach program of the College of Agricultural Sciences