Before you dig into those leftovers... Southern food scientist helps you decide, ‘Risky or not?’

The worst day of Ben Chapman’s career lasted almost 100 hours.

As director of the food safety extension and research program at North Carolina State University, Chapman was charged with overseeing the home food preservation competition at the State Fair. His job was to recruit volunteer judges who would sample the apple butters, pickled peppers, and chow chows, and decide which entries were worthy of blue ribbons.

In 2014, one of the judges came to him after eating from a jar of peaches and onions. They didn’t taste acidified, the judge reported.

A terrified Chapman tested the pseudo pickles’ pH level. It was 6.1.—an ideal environment for breeding botulism, the most toxic naturally occurring substance known to man.

Over the next four days, there was a chance that the canning enthusiast’s vision would blur, and neck would weaken. Approximately 5-10 percent of botulism cases are fatal. Because testing substances for the toxin is practically impossible, all that Chapman and the judge could do was wait.

Fortunately, none of the symptoms of botulism poisoning ever materialized. The judge was fine. Chapman was shaken.

“We can’t do this,” Chapman declared after the incubation period was up. The situation was too scary to risk a repeat. Chapman implemented a new set of rules, requiring contestants to provide their recipes and submit their entries for pH testing before tasting.

People were furious. One outraged preserves maker, persuaded that the state was trying to pilfer family secrets, had to be escorted off the fairgrounds by security.

“Food is very emotional,” Chapman says. “People base their food safety beliefs on whatever their habit is.”

In a region fixated on storytelling and deferential to tradition, Chapman has emerged as the most visible proponent of evidence-based decision-making in the kitchen.

That doesn’t mean he’s dictatorial: Chapman has no problem with people choosing to knowingly eat preserves coated with botulism toxins if that’s indeed their jam. But he’s keen to take the mysteries and myths out of life-and-death calculations.

Through a pair of popular podcasts that he cohosts with a Rutgers University food scientist, Chapman is teaching tens of thousands of home cooks and restaurant patrons to accurately assess their risk of getting sick from eating whatever they encounter out in the world, from a stick of gum in a 33-year-old baseball card pack to an ice sculpture (Fine to lick, Chapman says.)

‘The world of risk’

Chapman, 44, joined North Carolina State’s faculty in 2008. But he grew up outside Toronto, which is unlikely to surprise anyone who meets him: Chapman has the burly Canadian energy that Americans associate with roles played by his fellow countryman Seth Rogen.

As an undergrad at the University of Guelph, Chapman initially studied genetics. But he discovered he was more interested in the sum than the parts, so he shifted his focus to plants, earning his master’s degree by studying tomatoes contaminated with salmonella. For his doctorate, he set up video cameras in commercial kitchens to figure out how frequently food handlers washed their hands.

Chapman found that food handlers, on average, were each committing one critical violation per hour, which was far more than the law assumed society could bear: That degree of noncompliance was supposed to lead directly to massive outbreaks of foodborne illness.

Yet customers weren’t keeling over, which made Chapman wonder if the regulations were as sensible as they seemed.

“That’s when I really got involved in the world of risk,” says Chapman, who soon thereafter created The Barf Blog to chronicle the latest developments in food safety and dissect long-held assumptions.

Despite the amount of time that Chapman has spent thinking about listeria and norovirus, he swears a random observer would never guess from his eating or cooking practices that he makes his living in food safety.

Sure, he doesn’t take supermarket chicken out of its plastic shopping bag when he puts it in the refrigerator: “It’s totally likely there’s campylobacter on that package.” And rather than holler “Is dinner ready?”, his two tweens are apt to grab a meat thermometer and say, “It’s 165; it’s fine.” But he didn’t flinch at breaking open a biscuit while discussing E. coli in flour when we got together for breakfast.

Still, his hockey teammates are hip to Chapman’s line of work. Just before we met, one of them texted him: “Chapman. Milk purchased 11 o’clock last night, kept in my car.” Drink up, Chapman advised.

When to trash the pickles

Those kinds of conundrums are at the heart of Risky or Not?, the more accessible of the two podcasts that Chapman hosts with Rutgers professor Don Schaffner. Chapman and Schaffner first teamed up over a microphone at a food safety conference with a StoryCorps booth. Then in the late aughts, when Schaffner learned about podcasting, he realized their partnership could translate to a listening audience.

Food Safety Talk debuted in 2009. It was a relative hit with early adopters who were quickly running out of new shows to download, including podcaster Merlin Mann.

Mann suggested a spinoff. As much as he liked their two-hour technical talk, he wanted to hear Chapman and Schaffner spend 10 minutes debating the risk of consuming a particular item. Unrefrigerated pesto. Pizza sent through the mail. Snow.

Every episode of Risky or Not? starts with an ominous snippet of Jonathan Coulton’s peppy ditty “Bacteria,” warning that “You might not see them, but they’re there.” In the intro that follows, Chapman vows they won’t “waffle, dither, disassemble, or equivocate”—which is precisely what they proceed to do.

“That’s the bit,” Chapman says. “Don and I both like the messy parts.”

Wacky TikTok trends and obscure customs, such as a Pennsylvania festival for which townspeople dry sheets of pasta in their bedrooms, are ideal fodder for the show because they allow the food safety experts to probe the components of foodborne illness cultivation, such as surfaces, time, temperature, and unclean hands.

According to an analysis by listener Braden Williams, through May 2022, Chapman and Schaffer found consensus in all but 8 percent of episodes, both siding with “Not Risky” nearly 70 percent of the time. In split decisions, Chapman was almost twice as likely to rule “Risky.”

When they both reach a risky verdict, listeners remember it.

“I’ve definitely learned stuff,” longtime listener Andrew Mason said in a phone interview. Mason is a software engineer in Durham but has never met Chapman personally. “I’m obviously not a microbiologist or any -ist, but now I do think about what I leave out too long.”

Just before our call, Mason said, he’d come across a jar of pickled Calabrian chiles. He hadn’t taken their solution into account when he stored them, and they’d gone rancid.

Mason considered what he knew about antipasto platters, bacteria, and digestive distress.

The pickles went into the trash.

This story first appeared in The Food Section, a Charleston-based newsletter covering food and drink across the American South. To learn more about the James Beard Award-winning publication, visit thefoodsection.substack.com.