Seafood from Open Gulf Waters Is Safe to Eat
With the ongoing reopening of Gulf fisheries, fishermen are going back to work and Americans can confidently and safely enjoy Gulf seafood again.
Consumers need to know that seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is safe and fishermen need to be able to sell their products with confidence. That’s why there’s a comprehensive, coordinated, and multi-agency program to ensure the safety of Gulf Coast seafood. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are working with other Federal agencies and state officials to closely monitor the situation and its potential impact on the safety of seafood.
Seafood from open waters is safe to eat. Here are the facts:
- Every seafood sample from reopened waters has passed testing.
- When waters were impacted by oil or at risk of being impacted by oil, they were closed to fisherman.
- Areas considered for reopening must be free of oil before testing even starts.
- Dispersants were not applied in areas that are opened for fishing, and tests of reopened waters do not show the presence of any dispersants.
- FDA and NOAA test samples for oil and dispersants, and every sample from reopened waters has passed those tests.
Here are more resources to get the latest information on seafood safety:
From FDA.gov:
- FDA's Role In Seafood Safety
- Key Questions and Answers
- Seafood Safety and Dispersants Fact Sheet
- Reopening of Closed Waters Information by State
From NOAA.gov:
- NOAA’s Role in Seafood Safety
- NOAA, FDA, and Gulf Coast State Officials Affirm Commitment to Ensuring Safety of Gulf Coast Seafood
- Assessing Gulf Coast Seafood
Home-Canned Vegetables: Delicious and Safe
At the USDA’s Meat and Poultry Hotline, we receive about 70,000 calls a year from people who want to know how to prepare and store food safely. We can tell from our calls that it’s late summer, because we’re starting to get lots of questions about canning vegetables at home.
Canning is an excellent method of preserving your garden produce — if it’s done correctly and safely. If not, the vegetables you worked so hard to grow, harvest, and preserve could be deadly. If the bacterium that causes botulism survive and grow inside a sealed jar of food, they can produce a poisonous toxin. Even a taste of food containing this toxin can be fatal.
Here are some tips to ensure that your canned vegetables don’t spoil and make you or your family sick.
- Make sure you use the latest canning methods and recommendations. Scientific research is continually being conducted on food preservation. Make sure your food preservation information is always current with up-to-date, scientifically tested guidelines. For this reason, don’t use outdated publications or cookbooks, even if they were handed down to you from trusted family cooks.
- Use the right equipment for the kind of foods that you are canning. Pressure canning is the only recommended method for canning vegetables, as well as meat, poultry, and seafood. The bacterium that causes botulism is destroyed in these foods when they are processed at the correct time and pressure in pressure canners. Using boiling water canners for these foods poses a real risk of botulism poisoning.
- Follow these recommendations to ensure that home-canned vegetables are safe:
- Use a pressure canner.
- Be sure the gauge of the pressure canner is accurate.
- Use up-to-date process times and pressures for the kind of food, the size of jar, and the method of packing food in the jar.
Also, before eating home-canned vegetables, check to make sure that: - The jar lid is firmly sealed and concave.
- No liquid is leaking from the jar.
- No liquid spurts out when you open the jar.
- No unnatural or “off” odors can be detected.
If you need in-depth, step-by-step instruction on home canning, we recommend consulting these excellent resources:
- The state and county extension service of your state university; they’re specialists in home canning.
- The National Center for Home Food Preservation is your best source on the web for current research-based canning recommendations, including the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning.
For general questions, feel free to contact us at the Hotline (1-888-674-6854 toll-free) or online at AskKaren.gov.
What's Your Summer Food Safety IQ?
Summer holidays provide us with a much needed break from school and work, but that doesn’t mean that we should take a break from being smart about food safety. If anything, we need to be more careful, since foodborne illnesses increase during the summer.
Test your summer food safety IQ by taking this short quiz. You’ll find the answers at the bottom of this blog.
- Why do foodborne illnesses increase during the summer?
- Bacteria, including those that cause foodborne illness, tend to multiply faster when the temperatures are warm
- People are cooking and eating outside more, away from the refrigerators, thermometers, and washing facilities of a kitchen.
- Both (a) and (b).
- You’re having a cookout in the backyard, and the hamburgers are ready for the grill. How can you tell if the burgers are done and safe to eat?
- They have been cooked for at least 4 minutes on each side.
- A thermometer inserted in the middle of the patties registers at least 160 °F.
- They are brown in the middle and no pink is showing.
- The burgers are done, and you’re ready to take them off the grill. Is it safe to put the cooked burgers back on the plate that held the raw meat?
- Yes, as long as you wipe off the plate with a paper towel.
- Yes, because the burgers are thoroughly cooked.
- No, because any bacteria in the raw meat or juices could contaminate the cooked burgers.
- It’s 3:00 p.m. and you just finished making fresh salsa for a party that begins at 6:00 p.m. Is it safe to leave the salsa out on the counter for three hours, until the party begins?
- Yes, because the acid in the tomatoes will keep harmful bacteria from growing.
- No, because bacteria grows rapidly in food at room temperature.
- No, because your family might eat it all before the party starts.
- You want to make some homemade ice cream, and the recipe calls for eggs. You’ve heard that raw eggs may be contaminated with Salmonella. What should you do?
- Use an egg substitute product or pasteurized eggs instead of raw eggs.
- Cook and chill the milk before adding the eggs.
- Don’t worry about it. It’s never made you sick in the past, has it?
Answers
- 1c: The combination of warm weather and outdoor meals can be deadly. Check out Foodborne Illness Peaks in Summer - Why? to learn more.
- 2b: You can’t rely on timing or the appearance of meat to tell that it’s done. Find out why the USDA recommends using a food thermometer.
- 3c: Be smart. Keep foods apart. Don’t cross-contaminate.
- 4b: Never leave perishable food out of the refrigerator for more than two hours (or one hour if the temperature is over 90 °F. Learn more about how to keep salsa and guacamole safe.
- 5a: Check out these options for making homemade ice cream safely.
So, how did you do? Remember, even if you don't have all of the answers, we do. We're available by email, phone, and even live chat.