Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives Andrew George, supported the Food Standards Agency’s (FSA) Food Safety Week which highlighted the risk of food poisoning.

Andrew George attended a recent FSA event, ‘Kitchen Check’, in the House of Commons to show his support for the campaign.

He said:

“It’s important to get the basics right when it comes to storing and preparing food. There are more than a million cases of food poisoning each year. Doing simple things like washing your hands before preparing food and the sensible storage of refrigerated foods are good ways of avoiding getting ill.”

A recent survey by the FSA showed that more than 80% of the UK public admitted to one or more habits that put them at risk of food poisoning, including 1 in 3 people not checking ‘use-by’ dates, with 85% of them instead wrongly using the ‘sniff test’ and 68% just checking the colour – even though this will not always reveal whether food is safe to eat.

These and other statistics have been published by the FSA for Food Safety Week. The Food Standards Agency has been getting people to think about food hygiene at home, by completing the new Kitchen Check. The Kitchen Check gets people to look at their own food preparation practices and gives them a score and some tips based on their answers.