For example, when you purchase food this weekend at the Festival of the Americas or the Optimist Balloon Festival, you can be assured that a health department inspector has checked out and approved each food booth operator's food safety precautions. The booths must also pass inspection by the Abilene Fire Department. When inspectors meet with food booth operators, they do more than just check to see if everything looks clean. The inspector asks about planned cooking methods to ensure everything is cooked properly and completely. For example, hamburgers should be cooked to an internal temperature of 165 degrees to kill bacteria that can be present in raw ground beef.
Inspectors also check what's on the menu to be served.
For example, we'd never encourage people to cook turkey and dressing in an outdoor food booth because cooking stuffed poultry is risky even under the best conditions. We are concerned about the potential for uncooked ground meat to be contaminated with certain types of e coli bacteria, so we ask people in food booths to use pre-formed hamburger patties from an approved source to help reduce the handling of the meat. We also limit the person who's grilling the meat to doing just that. We don't want that person also doing things like assembling the finished burgers because there's a potential for spreading any bacteria which might have been in the raw meat. You don't need a lot of bacteria to make someone sick, and good hand washing can be difficult to do in these booths, so we want to prohibit the transfer of that bacteria to other foods like lettuce and tomatoes.