Every year, 76 million Americans contract a foodborne illness.  Healthcare expenses and loss of productivity result in an estimated cost of 19 to 37 billion dollars annually.  The seriousness of these illnesses causes an average of five thousand deaths per year.  These are appalling statistics because proper food handling practices could virtually eliminate incidents of foodborne illness.  A large part of the problem is that many people do not receive sufficient education on safe food handling.  While the answer is to make this information accessible, the question remains as to how to most effectively disseminate it. 

We propose that the key to reducing foodborne illness as a national risk is to educate youth, specifically students in middle school grades, where better habits can be more easily adopted.  This approach has a further-reaching effect, as these target students can be encouraged to share what they learn in school with other students and adults with whom they interact, thus creating a ripple effect of food safety information.  A classroom-based program can also be targeted to high-risk urban and rural areas where food safety education may not be readily accessible otherwise.  As an ideal, students in the classrooms receive an engaging project-based food safety unit complete with at-home activities involving parents and other adults.  This model improves not only the distribution of critical information, but also provides opportunity for better food handling habits for the next generation.  This project focuses on developing such a program for the states of Tennessee and North Carolina, with the objective of creating a paradigm that could be adapted for other states.
 
 Current attempts to include food safety in schools focus on stand-alone, extracurricular units.  Not only is classroom time limited for such activities, but in this model, food safety education becomes largely an academic exercise with little impact in students’ daily lives.  We propose that food safety education should be an enriching part of core curriculum, providing students with interactive, hands-on projects and linking useful information to everyday life.  This project is designed to make effective and engaging food safety resources and curricula available to classroom teachers and correlate and integrate these materials into Tennessee and North Carolina state standards in core subject areas for seventh grade.  By integrating food safety into pre-existing core curricula, these concepts will be reinforced from multiple sources, which serve to emphasize the importance of food safety.