Lead by BAC! Fighter Darla Klausner, the airmen of Fairchild Air Force Base (AFB) answered the call - the call to Fight BAC!® In April, through collaboration with the 92nd Public Health Flight and the Defense Commissary Agency, Darla executed a Fight BAC!® Food Safety Awareness Campaign at the Fairchild AFB Commissary. Their mission: to provide Fairchild residents with information on how to properly clean, separate, cook, and chill food to prevent foodborne illness.

Over a busy couple of days, Darla and her team of airmen from the 92nd Public Health Flight distributed Fight BAC!® fliers, magnets, and stickers to commissary patrons. By the campaign’s end, they had reached over 300 people, stressing the importance of food safe practices. Mission accomplished!

Interacting face to face with consumers is a powerful way to drive food safety messages home - we salute Darla and the airmen at Fairchild for their work in spreading food safe messages! Together, we can achieve a food safe America. 

With over 20 years in public schools teaching food safety, Melissa Blaine still finds ways to get creative with Fight BAC!®. Melissa is a Family and Consumer Sciences teacher at Grant Middle School in New Mexico. Melissa has been using Fight BAC!® for years in her classrooms and she says her 6th graders love it! But she stays creative and mixes things up by adapting the Fight BAC!® handouts to challenge her kids in new ways on the four core messages: Clean, Separate, Cook, and Chill. Melissa says that the “6th graders are enthusiastic learners and want to be in the kitchen and cook, not just to eat, but to become more independent. They can use these skills in class, at home and in the future in food service jobs”.

Thank you Melissa for the 20 years you have spent Fighting BAC!®

Rebecca Richter, a Consumer and Family Science teacher, instructs her 6th grade students on the importance of safe food handling by empowering them to be food detectives. For years, Rebecca has been showing her students the Food Detectives video because her students can relate to its messages. She bases her lessons on this video, encouraging her students to think like detectives figuring out a foodborne illness outbreak. They even use Fight BAC!® stickers to make sheriff-like stars to deputize themselves. Sometimes, Rebecca says, the students tell HER when she is doing something incorrectly like improperly washing her hands. “They get excited for food safety and they take it home with them,” she says, further explaining that her students usually do not hear about safe food handling until they get to her classroom. Watch out- don’t get stopped by a food detective in Meridian!