Food Safety Tips You Need to Know
Food safety is something that’s usually all too easy to ignore. After all, 99% of the time, we eat in blissful ignorance and suffer no ill effects. However, food poisoning is very common and you must be constantly vigilant. Here are some basic tips that you’ll thank me for later!
If you come down with a case of food poisoning, what can you look forward to?
- Extreme diarrhea and vomiting - basically, you will void your bowels repeatedly and be unable to keep any food down.
- Severe dehydration, which can be lessened by drinking large amounts of water with electrolytes (remember: you’re losing sodium and potassium, which are crucial nutrients in preventing dehydration. Water alone won’t cut it!).
- Cramping and other abdominal pain.
- Possibly, a visit to the Emergency Room.
It’s important to consider the source of the food that you eat. Is it from a country with established food-handling regulations? And what happened to it in transport? You can’t possibly know this information all the time (unless you grow your own food!), so you should take extra care in all food handling.
Radiation has been proven to kill most potential causes of food-borne illness. Since people usually don’t have the means to produce industrial-strength radiation (and because people are concerned about consuming irradiated anything), what can you do?
Take the following precautions:
- Clean your hands and all surfaces thoroughly when touching or preparing food. Use antibacterial soap, and consider bleach for surfaces/boards.
- Do not allow any cross-contamination. Did you just use a cutting board and knife for chicken? Get another for the beef you are about to prep, and don’t allow any cooked food to come in contact with leftover juice from uncooked food.
- Cook to proper temperatures. Undercooked meats - especially poultry and fish - are a leading cause of Salmonella and E. Coli (food poisoning).
- Store food properly and refrigerate ASAP. This includes keeping cold items cold for as long as possible - so pick up your refrigerated and frozen goods last when shopping.
- Pay attention to the “sell by” and “use by” dates on packages.
There’s much more you can do, and I recommend visiting the US Dept of Agriculture’s excellent guide for more information and a useful chart on properly handling/storing different types of food.
Remember: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure! Take food safety seriously and use proper precautions at all times.
Sources (external links will open in new windows):
- Guidelines for Proper Cooking
- Little progress in preventing foodborne ills: CDC
- Irradiation Almost Erases Risk of Food Poisoning
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April 30th, 2008 at 3:53 am
That is all well and good but one wonders if with all this sanitizing we need to be doing that we are leading ourselves open to catching something from the smallest thing. I mean that being exposed to germs helps to build our immunity and if you cut off all germs then our immunity suffers.
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