While babysitting or preparing home meals, young people (and adults too) sometimes overlook cleanliness procedures. One of the first employment opportunities for teenagers is often in a fast-food restaurant where the safe handling and proper cooking of foods is essential. To teach students about food safety practices, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) formed a partnership to develop a free curriculum kit titled "Science and Our Food Supply." In this article, the author discusses one of the lab activities in the program called "the hamburger lab." Students use a controlled experiment to fry meat, swab for bacteria, and incubate agar plates to determine bacteria-safe cooking temperatures. In this article, the author talks about how the activity came about. (Contains 1 figure.)