Food Safety at Home

According to statistics 25% of us suffer from food poisoning every year. According to the CDC: “We estimate that foodborne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year”

Fortunately for most of us, we are healthy enough to recover fairly quickly from a foodborne illness and we’ll probably blame our illness on a virus, a stomach bug or the flu. As long as you recover, you can blame your illness on whatever you like but if you want to avoid another mystery illness in the future it pays to know the basics. What most of us seem to overlook is the fact that foodborne illness may be out of your control. If you eat out, (and who doesn’t?) you are putting your faith in the people that prepare and serve your food. Even at home we are subject to the sanitary conditions in farms and factories so we depend on government inspectors and regulations.

Typhoid Mary, at the start of the 20^th century Mary Mallon was a healthy domestic worker, Mary cooked for several families. Typhoid followed her around and infected the families who ate her food. Mary didn’t believe a healthy person like herself could be making people sick so she resisted efforts to stop her. She was eventually restricted to an isolated cottage where she could do no more damage. Mary was a healthy Typhoid carrier, she never displayed signs of the disease but her blood and her stool both had the Typhoid germs present. She wasn’t a junkie sharing needles with other junkies; she was contaminating the food she served with her own feces. Alright! There’s lesson one, wash your hands! Unless you live in a sealed bubble you have no idea what bacteria or viruses may be present on the things you touch. Once you touch a contaminated object it’s simple to rub your eye or scratch your nose and introduce the germs into your own body. Perhaps worse is if you contaminate your hands and then touch food, if conditions are right bacteria will multiply and infect the person who eats the food. Better still, after you wash your hands is to use hand sanitizer.

Of course it’s not just your hands that need to be washed, wash your food too! Anything that you will eat without cooking must be washed thoroughly, you never know who handled it last or what was on their hands. Something that is often overlooked at home is washing the fruits and vegetables that are going to be peeled before eating. Cantaloupes are a prime example, they have a rough skin and any microorganism that is on the skin will be transferred into the melon if you peel it before washing it. Sixteen people have died in September from eating cantaloupe contaminated with Listeria and they would probably be alive if they had followed this simple precaution, wash all of your food to be eaten raw, before peeling or cutting and use a brush on rough surfaces.

Oh, if it were only as simple as that; the next way we are making ourselves sick is by not using time and temperature controls. The dangerous temperature zone is between 41 and 135 degrees Fahrenheit. Food should spend as little time as possible in that zone of temperatures because bacteria grow rapidly in the “zone”. The next rule is Keep hot food above 135° and cold food below 41°unfortunately the “Zone” isn’t good enough to kill bacteria; it merely slows the rate at which bacteria reproduce. We rarely get rid of all bacteria but fewer bacteria are easier for our immune systems to handle. Time is also critical as a control, simply put, the less time food spends in the temperature danger zone the safer it is to eat. There are many rules that food manufacturers need to follow but we can simplify things a bit here.

1) If hot food spends 4 hours in the danger zone it should be discarded. So, if you fried some chicken and you want to take it on a picnic, you should eat it within 4 hours of removing it from the heat and then discard it, don’t try to save money by putting it in the refrigerator. As long as hot food is kept above 135 degrees it is considered safe to eat.
2) If you are holding food hot, it should be reheated if it falls into the danger zone for two hours.Using our chicken example, when the chicken spends more than 2 hours in the danger zone it should be reheated to 165°if you want to keep it beyond 4 hours
3) Foods that are reheated should be heated to at least 165° for 15 seconds Those are important numbers to remember, check that frozen entrée and you’ll see the same warning, heat to 165 degrees. Although the 15 second warning may be missing it is just as important, it takes that long to sanitize your food and stop the growth of bacteria.
4) Buy and use an Instant Read Thermometer. There are two things to note, 1) calibrate your thermometer to be accurate; immerse the tip in ice water and turn the nut at the bottom of the dial until the dial reads 32 degrees. The ice water test is always accurate where the same calibration using boiling water depends on altitude. 2) Most thermometers will have a dimple part way up the shaft, the shaft is supposed to be inserted in the food up to the dimple to be accurate. Remember to wash and sanitize the thermometer between uses, including the same piece of chicken.

The most dangerous temperatures for bacterial growth are between 70° and 125 degrees. In restaurants, any time you are going to refrigerate food for later consumption it must be cooled to below 70° within 2 hours and then to below 41° within another 4 hours. That’s still a good rule to use at home, don’t cool food on the counter! In spite of what you may have heard, modern refrigerators are perfectly capable of cooling foods put in when they are quite warm. The reason not to put hot food in the fridge is because it will raise the temperature of the surrounding foods. Use your own judgment, two gallons of hot soup will probably spoil everything in the fridge but a small casserole placed away from other foods will cool quickly enough as to present little hazard. As for that two gallon pot of soup, add some ice or ice in plastic bags to cool it before you refrigerate it.

5) Avoid cross contamination. While you are preparing food, if you are cutting raw chicken and then using the same surface for cutting lettuce, the bacteria from the chicken will contaminate the lettuce. Sanitize as you go or use a different cutting board for different foods.
6) A capful of bleach in a gallon of water is all you need to sanitize. That is the cheapest and one of the best possible disinfectants you can use, leave a cloth or sponge in a container of bleach water and use it to wipe counters and cuttingboards. There are numerous brands of disinfectants on the market but do you know what is in them? Bleach evaporates very soon, if you sniff an old bottle of bleach you’ll notice it has little smell because the chlorine has evaporated leaving water behind.
7) Never eat food from a damaged can It just may be a source of Botulism which is a deadly toxin formed by bacteria that thrive in low oxygen environments.
8) Know where your food comes from Reputable businesses are highly regulated as to what is and is not allowed. When you eat something you are putting your trust in the source that they are harvesting food that is safe to eat.

Individual foods:
Pork is no longer a significant source of Trichinosis, hog farmers are highly regulated and are required to cook any leftovers fed to their herds so as long as you don’t get your pork from “Old McDonald”s family farm you can cook pork to 145° and be safe. This is a new recommendation as of 5/11, previously the temp was 155
Poultry is a frequent source of Salmonella and this is made worse by the mass production methods of slaughtering. Always cook chicken to at least 165° to 180° and sanitize any surface that touches raw poultry.
Ground beef and other ground meats should be cooked to a minimum temperature of 160° again because of the mass production methods being used ground beef has been infected with EColi all too frequently. If you want rare hamburgers it is safer to grind your own.

Seafood, steaks, roasts and eggs should be cooked to minimum 145°

These are the temperature requirements from the FDA and are used be health departments across the country. You could ignore these temperature rules and never be ill because of the many safeguards already in place but you’d be gambling with your own health.

Note, there is a difference between clean, sanitized and sterilized. Clean just means debris has been removed, there is no visible dirt, sanitized will be clean and most bacteria will be killed but heat resistant spores will survive. Sterilized isn’t something we deal with cooking but it means there will be nothing left alive, there are no microorganisms that can infect you left on a sterile item. When dealing with food sanitize to be safe!