Meat thermometer usage higher in households with children

The 2014 ERS Eating & Health Module of the American Time Use Survey features new questions about food safety practices when preparing meals. This is the first nationally-representative, large scale Federal survey to ask Americans about their use of meat thermometers when preparing meat, poultry, or seafood. Survey respondents who said that they are the usual meal preparers or those who split the task with other household members were asked whether they had prepared any meals with meat, poultry, or seafood in the last week. Eighty-nine percent of the usual/split meal preparers prepared some form of meat. Of those, 12.9 percent used a meat thermometer in preparing meals. Meal preparers in households with children had a higher rate of meat thermometer usage (15.2 percent) than in households without children (11.7 percent). The shares of men and women meal preparers who used a meat thermometer—14.2 and 12.2 percent, respectively—were not statistically different from each other. The data for this chart are from the ERS report, Americans’ Eating Patterns and Time Spent on Food: The 2014 Eating & Health Module Data, released on July 28, 2016.