Have you ever placed an order for fries, or chicken nuggets, and when you received your order, the ketchup packages were in the box touching the fries? Or the chicken nugget sauce packages were in the box touching the chicken nuggets? I hate when condiment packages are touching my food. Mainly because I have seen these same condiment packages in random places in restaurants…the floor, on tables, in people’s nasty hands (where they pick all the packages up, then decide they don’t need all of them so they put some back), etc. I don’t like the fact that these same packages could be the ones touching my food…possibly carrying some awful type of bacteria. This brings me to my topic: Food-Borne Illness. Food-borne illness comes as a result of consuming food contaminated with harmful toxins, chemicals, bacteria, parasites, etc. Food can be contaminated with things like kitchen cleaning tools, lead (in some cooking pots/pans), copper, zinc, dirt, bones, metal shavings from cans, glass, hair, etc. Just about anything you can think of can contaminate your food. Now I know that this world is full of things that have these things on them and in them. I am not ignorant of that fact. I also know that our bodies were designed to protect us against certain bacteria, etc., and our bodies know how to eliminate them if necessary. I know these things. Nonetheless, I always like to decrease the risk of obtaining any illness from some less researched bacteria. Have you seen the movie Contagion? Then you may understand my point.
Here are 7 things you need to know in preventing cross contamination…
1. Cook your own food. You never know what is going on in the back of somebody else’s kitchen, so you cannot control what they are doing to your food.
2. Inspect your food. If you are going out to eat (and even at home), look at your food closely to see if there are any visible contaminants. Smell your food to make sure it doesn’t have a funny chemical smell.
3. Wash your hands in between dealing with raw meat and dry ingredients. If you are cooking something at home, always wash your hands in between dealing with everything.
4. Keep your refrigerator temperature at 41 degrees. This keeps your food out of the temperature danger zone, which is where bacteria could develop in your food.
5. Store raw meat, poultry, and seafood at the bottom of the refrigerator. We do not want raw meat drippings to get on other foods in the refrigerator.
6. Keep fruits and vegetables separate from raw meats. I even tell the cashier at the local grocer not to put my packaged raw meat in the same bag with ANY other food. I take no chances.
7. Get rid of refrigerated leftovers after 3-4 days. You can’t always see or smell if a food is spoiled, so do this to be on the safe side.
There are many more tips I could give concerning this, but these tips are what I found to be most interesting because a lot of us don’t pay attention to them. If you would like more information on this, or more tips, let me know, and I might create another blog about it (I taught a food safety class, and this is not even a fourth of the information.). Until next time…
-Jenelle N. Robinson
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