Food Hygiene Goes Out of the Window When Brits Barbecue

The British summertime is drawing to its inevitable close and along with it go all those literal fair weather promises you made to yourself. Why didn't you use the extra long evenings to take that outdoor yoga class on a multi-storey car park in Peckham? Couldn't you have saved the True Detective binge watch for when it starts to go dark at 3 PM? And what happened to camping?

But if the weather performs its usual trick of saving its best self until we're actually quite looking forward to wearing bed socks again, we have at least one or two weekends of serviceable sunshine left. Just enough time to make good all those unchecked items on your summer bucket list … Or at least hold a barbecue at your place and finally use up the sausages you've had in the freezer since that randomly sunny afternoon in May.

But before you rally the squad and clear out your local supermarket's two-for-one Angus beef burger supply, here's a weirdly timed piece of research to put you off eating anything cooked in someone's back garden and stuffed into a bun ever again. According to a survey from "sanitising water" brand Aquaint (no, me neither), hygiene levels at British barbecues are a major cause for concern.

The company's research found that 51 percent of Britons use the same tongs for raw and cooked meats when barbecuing, and more than a quarter admitted to not washing their hands between touching uncooked meat, vegetables, and barbecue utensils.

Ew. Was no one listening during the food tech lesson on separating raw meat from pretty much anything that may come into contact with your mouth?

Aquaint also found that only six in ten Britons wash their hands regularly when hosting a barbecue.

Bola Lafe, the company's managing director is pretty disgusted (and, presumably, also rubbing his impeccably clean hands together at the thought of all those germs ready to be eliminated by, uh, sanitising water), saying: "It appears that rough-and-ready diners decide to dodge the dangers and hope for the best, rather than taking the time to wash their hands before eating or preparing food for family and friends."

Quite. Just because you're eating chicken tikka skewers while sitting on a plant pot doesn't mean basic hygiene rules go out of the window, guys!

The stats are even more gross when you consider that it was only three months ago that 73 percent of British supermarket chicken was found to be contaminated with food poisoning bug, campylobacter. While the bacteria can be killed with correct cooking methods, tongs crawling with raw chicken juice probably won't do the trick.

Unsurprisingly, NHS data shows that an extra 120,000 cases of food poisoning occur between June and August in the UK and the Food Standards Agency issues its own guidelines on having "sizzling and safe barbecue" (read: please don't give your elderly relatives diarrhoea with undercooked drumsticks) every year.

Of course, hygienic preparation of barbecue food isn't that hard a concept to master. Wash your hands, try not to mix the burger spatulas, check the sausages aren't too pink, and don't let Uncle Tony breathe too much over the salad.

Nail those basics and before you know it, you'll be into November and the thought of eating anything that isn't blended into soup-form and hot enough to blister the roof of your mouth will be a distant memory.