Questions e-mailed to foodsafety@osu.edu will automatically go to trained students answering hotline questions as well as a group of faculty members studying different aspects of food safety from the Department of Food Science and Technology, the Department of Human Nutrition, the Food Industries Center, and Ohio State University Extension.

The hotline phones and emails are answered from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.  The students answering questions on the hotline are also developing a comprehensive database of food-safety related questions and answers to draw upon in answering future questions. That will be another advantage of the hotline.

"One of the great things about the hotline is that it is drawing together faculty with food-safety expertise from across the university . . . . . some food safety Web sites only give their own perspective in answering questions, but, sometimes, there's conflicting information regarding food safety. Since we're independent of those agencies, we can be frank with consumers and offer broader, more comprehensive information." ," said Lydia Medeiros, food safety specialist for OSU Extension, College of Education and Human Ecology.

Besides Medeiros, principal investigators involved in the project are Ken Lee, director of the Center for Food Safety and AgroSecurity, and Valente Alvarez, director of the Food Industries Center. Both Lee and Alvarez are also OSU professors of food science and technology.