September is Food Safety Education Month in the US, an initiative by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) endeavoring to spread knowledge on how to prevent foodborne illnesses. While we hear about another product recall or foodborne illness outbreak seemingly regularly, the fact remains that most instances of foodborne illness are due to something that occurred in the home. The CDC has outlined four key steps that each of us should take at home to avoid sentencing our fellow diners to a few days within sprinting distance of a bathroom, or worse. Let’s go through the four steps so that we can practice them at home and allow them to become habits that are reflected in our work.
The first step is clean. When preparing food (or when living through a generational pandemic) it is imperative that we clean our hands and certain surfaces often. Washing hands should be done before, during, and after preparing food, using soap and water. Among the five pathogens that cause the most cases of foodborne illness, norovirus and Staphylococcus aureus are often tied back to poor hand hygiene. S. aureus is part of the native flora of many people’s skin and when introduced to food in high levels can grow and make us sick. Norovirus, colloquially known as “the stomach flu”, is spread through vomitus and via fecal shedding. So, if for no other reason than to avoid hearing the words “vomitus” and “fecal shedding” again, wash your hands. Utensils, cutting boards, and countertops should be cleaned with hot soapy water in the home. Dishwashers and their detergents are also great for removing small amounts of soils and sanitizing dishes.
Separate refers to using different utensils for and storing of raw products. You may be familiar with the food storage hierarchy but if not, fret not, as it is quite simple. For example, raw meats (and the pathogens they carry) are prescribed to be stored on the bottom shelf. Diversey’s cutting-edge research can confirm that meat juices do, in fact, abide by the law of gravity. By storing them on a bottom shelf we avoid re-creating Isaac Newton’s apple tree moment where the apple is Salmonella, newton’s head is a spinach salad, and the headache is still a headache but we add fecal shedding and/or vomitus to the outcome. A general rule of thumb is that ready-to-eat foods should not have the opportunity to be dripped on by non-ready-to-eat foods, e.g. raw meats. Click here for more specifics.
The third step, cook, simply means that we need to ensure that we prepare and re-heat foods to an adequate temperature. This is particularly important for meats; you can see a printable chart with various temperatures here. If you aren’t going to serve cooked food immediately, you’ll want to continue to hold the food’s temperature above 140° F until it’s time to eat. There are still bacteria on your food after it’s cooked to the appropriate temperature; our goal is to prevent them from growing to levels that can cause foodborne illnesses. I highly recommend purchasing and using a digital kitchen thermometer. Using a kitchen thermometer will make your food taste better because you will know when it is finished cooking. No longer will you have to eat the dehydrated slabs of meat that your family’s grill “master” calls chicken breast. Nor will you have to slice your serving in half to check if you’re being served chicken tartare. Win-win;. If any of this sounds familiar, you should buy a kitchen thermometer. If you feel personally attacked by this, you should buy a kitchen thermometer.
Finally, we’ll discuss the fourth step: cool. While this is indeed a word commonly used to describe the author, in this context it means to refrigerate your food. It seems obvious to say that we should use the massive appliance in our kitchen. But did you know that you should thaw meats in there, not on the counter? When thawing at room temperature parts of your item can support the growth of bacteria while other parts are still frozen solid. It is also important to keep track of the time that a food item is not cool. Yes, “not cool” is what you say to someone who didn’t wash their hands before preparing food, which resulted in you experiencing vomitus and fecal shedding. But it also refers to foods whose temperature is above 40° F. At a picnic when it’s hot (hotter than 90° F) foods should go in the fridge within an hour; within two hours when dealing with room temperatures. Imagine the growth of bacteria on the fruit salad that has been sitting in the sun for 3 hours. Honeydew? More like: honey don’t eat that.
Thanks for reading and look for more Food Safety Education Month content in the coming weeks! Diversey’s own Drs. David Buckley and Carine Nkemngong will be writing blogs on the topics of produce wash and the difference between sanitizing and disinfecting, respectively. Hopefully I grabbed your attention with gross words just enough to get you to tune back in!
