UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - For many fans, football isn't football without a good tailgate party. And a food-safety specialist in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences wants you to remember that the four C's of food safety apply to tailgating, too.

Limited space in cars and coolers forces some tailgaters to choose between food safety and team spirit. So Cathy Cutter, associate professor of food science, worked with food-safety specialist Stephanie Penn to produce "Food Safety Tailgating Tips: Be on the 'Offense' Against Foodborne Illness," a brochure to remind fans that food poisoning doesn't have a favorite team.

"We asked tailgaters what were some of the practices that they employed during tailgating," Cutter says. "And we realized that some people -- because of constraints in cooler and trunk space -- tend to cut corners when it comes to food safety. So we wanted to remind tailgaters that it's important to implement food-safety practices even while tailgating, because the last thing you want to do is come back from an exciting football game and get sick."

The brochure presents basic food-safety practices from a pigskin perspective -- easy for tailgaters to use from the back of cars, at the stadium or field sites or at their tables. It includes tips on how to shop for a tailgate, the essentials of a hand washing station, the temperature danger zone and a guide to cooking temperatures, as well as an explanation of the four "C's" of food safety: Cold, Clean, Cooking and Cross-contamination.

The same information is incorporated into a color display that will be made available for supermarkets and other places where tailgaters can benefit from food-safety reinforcement. And it doesn't stop there, Cutter says: she and other food-safety specialists will be leaving the laboratory for some on-site follow-up evaluation.

"We're going to make a few trips to tailgates, talk to people and see if they're utilizing this information," she says. "We'll give them advice and some incentives, then come back in a few weeks and see if they've implemented any of the information to determine our impact."

Annually, about 5,000 deaths and 76 million illnesses are attributable to foodborne pathogens each year in the United States, Cutter says, and most victims don't even know what they have.

"For most people, it goes under the radar -- they'll have flu-like symptoms and think they caught a bug, when in some cases it's a foodborne illness," she says. "We're trying to raise awareness so that people can avoid illness, go to work on Monday morning and come back for the next football game."

Single copies of "Tailgating Tips: Be on the 'Offense' Against Foodborne Illness" can be obtained free of charge by Pennsylvania residents through county Penn State Cooperative Extension offices, or by contacting the College of Agricultural Sciences Publications Distribution Center at 814-865-6713 or by e-mail at AgPubsDist@psu.edu. For cost information on out-of-state or bulk orders, contact the Publications Distribution Center.

The brochure is available on the Web at http://pubs.cas.psu.edu/FreePubs/pdfs/UK135.pdf; the display can be found at http://pubs.cas.psu.edu/FreePubs/pdfs/XK0007.pdf.

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EDITORS: Contact Claudia Mincemoyer at 814-863-7851 or cxm324@psu.edu.

Writer/Editor Gary Abdullah Phone: 814-863-2708 E-mail: gxa2@psu.edu