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Show If you get airsick, it might foe tlhe food Weekly Special ffffijy"" Washington The government's food testers are spot-checking airline in-flight meals not for taste, but for temperature. Food and Drug Administration inspectors will leave critiques of the menu to airborne gourmets. They are strictly down-to-earth investigators, investiga-tors, concerned that the cold food you get on your flight is kept cold enough, and the hot food hot enough, to discourage the growth of bacteria that can cause food poisoning. The FDA's "danger zone" for food waiting to be served in flight is between 45 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The FDA currently is taking the temperatures of meals being put aboard at Chicago, Baltimore, Atlanta and Dallas airports. It hopes to check meals loaded aboard 408 planes by Sept. 30, but had tested only 82 planes in the nine months ending June 25. An FDA spokesman cheerily assured us that "70 percent of the planes passed with flying colors." We take the pessimistic view: 30 percent flunked. We also know that only 28 of 142 planes or just under 20 percent failed the FDA's standards in a similar spotcheck in New York a year ago. That means there was a 50 percent increase in the rate of failure in one year. A summary of the 1984 tests was prepared at the request of Rep. Dennis Eckart, D-Ohio. Our associate associ-ate Tony Capaccio obtained a copy of the summary and went over it with Williams Adams, chairman of the In-Flight Food Services Association, the airline caterers' trade organization. organiza-tion. ' Adams pointed out, accurately, that the FDA sample was only a fraction of the nearly, 350 million ' 'tnekls' 'served aboard 'airlines ' last year. "I don't know of any food-related illness because of temperature," Adams said. He added, "But that doesn't mean the possibility isn't there." Here are some of the report's findings: FDA inspectors found instances "in which foods such as steaks, chicken, fish, milk and non-dairy creamers were being loaded on aircraft with little or no dry ice and stored at unsafe temperatures." On two Eastern Airlines flights out of Newark; to Fort Lauderdale and Bermuda, inspectors found steaks stored for later serving that had internal temperatures of 54 to 59 degrees. The airline said it followed up on the "extremely minor" problem with re-educational efforts. On an American Airlines flight from Newark to Dallas, caterers were loading plates of steak, chicken cutlets and fish with temperatures of 68 to 72 degrees. Two dinners of "braised beef Portugal" had temperatures tem-peratures of 70 degrees. On a Pan American flight from New York to Chicago, inspectors found three chicken and steak dinners in one gallery at 70 degrees; in another gallery three out of 35 chicken platters were at 66 to 70 degrees. The FDA inspectors informed in-formed Pam Am personnel, but were told the meals would be served anyway because re-stocking the plane would delay the flight. Pan Am said it has since tightened up its supervision of the catering service and has been given "a clean bill of health" by FDA. WATCH ON WASTE: Part of virtually every payment to a defense contractor-covers what is called ...'.'cost per standard Jiour of work." This is, definedas1, , the, price. fpr an hour's work by a trained employee with proper tools and supervision. Small businesses charge $25 to $35 an hour for high-quality machine-shop jobs. But the big defense contractors have been charging anywhere from $300 to $3,300 for an hour of similar work. And the Pentagon has been paying without whimper. A regional office of the Laboi Department's Employment Standards Stand-ards Administration is located in Dallas, but when it came time for the annual management meeting this month, it was held in Houston. Since one-third of the agency staffers attending live in Dallas, there would have been no need for airfare and per-diem expenses if the meeting had been held there. As it was, the transportation costs came to $5,370 and per diem amounted to $14,400. Extra cost to the taxpayers: $4,908. Fort Monroe, Va., is so old it is surrounded by a moat. Yet Congress won't let the Defense Department close it. They won't even let the Pentagon convert it into a museum, .rather than operate it as a 20th-century 20th-century military facility, though this would save $10 million a year. DIPLOMATIC DIGEST: At the same time the Reagan administration administra-tion is praising the anti-Soviet guerrillas guer-rillas in Afghanistan and supplying them with arms, it is also granting the Soviet puppet regime in Kabul "most favored nation" status in trade relations. About $13 million in imports from Afghanistan includes licorice root, cashmere goat hair and oriental rugs. The $7.3 million worth of goods the U.S. exports to Afghanistan includes $2.6 million in aircraft parts, plus cigarettes and second-hand clothes. The Soviet Embassy recently invited some 60 Housing administrative administra-tive assistants for an evening of j aviar,rwdkaril4i cufeaijA$pltural exchange. The staffers viewed a film about Moscow and engaged in a question-and-answer session with their hosts. It was the first time such a group has been invited to the embassy since 1974. Just to be safe, they cleared the affair with the FBI, the CIA and the State Department. Copyright, 1985 United Feature Syndicate, Inc. |