Could celebrity recipes be poisoning you?
SHE’S offered plenty of outlandish nutritional suggestions, from bone broth to powdered fungi smoothies – and even drinking nothing but goat’s milk for eight days to fight ‘parasites’. But Gwyneth Paltrow has now found herself in trouble with academics – for putting fans at risk of food poisoning by failing to give them basic cooking advice.
Experts said the 44-year-old’s chicken recipes overlooked the risk of salmonella and campylobacter. Her roast chicken recipe in her cook book My Father’s Daughter was criticised for failing to give followers an end temperature that the dish should reach.
In an analysis of 1,497 recipes in 29 cook books, researchers found fewer than 9 per cent included the temperature cooked meat should reach before being eaten. The cook books, many by celebrity chefs, also neglect to tell people about simple hand-washing or to avoid washing chicken under the tap – something Miss Paltrow suggests in another book, It’s All Good.
This flies in the face of advice from the Food Standards Agency, which warns people never to wash raw chicken because of campylobacter. It states: ‘Thorough cooking kills it. Campylobacter can be spread easily and just a few bacteria could cause illness.’
Other examples of chefs whose cookbooks did not focus enough on safety were said to include Giada De Laurentiis, presenter of the Food Network, Rachael Ray, Ina Garten – known as the Barefoot Contessa – and Israeli-born British chef Yotam Ottolenghi.
Campylobacter causes severe diarrhoea, abdominal pains and a fever that can take ten days to pass. Senior study author Dr Ben Chapman, a food safety specialist at North Carolina State University, said: ‘I wanted to see in the Gwyneth Paltrow recipe somewhere that we know a chicken is done when it reaches 74C (165F). It provides the temperature and how long it should be cooked for but, while that is good information, it doesn’t mention what temperature it should be at the end.’
Only 89 out of 1,497 recipes stud- ied gave readers reliable information to reduce their risk of food poisoning, while 34 gave unsafe advice. The paper, published in the British Food Journal, says more information is needed on crosscontamination by uncooked meat.
My Father’s Daughter was not formally included in the study, but was separately mentioned by Dr Chapman. It’s All Good, a 2013 cook book by Miss Paltrow which does warn home cooks to remove their chicken from the oven at 165F, was included in the study. Grand Central Publishing, which publishes Miss Paltrow’s cook books, said the recipe in My Father’s Daughter stated the chicken should be roasted at 400F for 70 minutes, ‘ample time to cook a three to four pound chicken’.