How Safe is your Food?

Hygiene hints for home

• Dish cloths, even disposable ones, are the perfect breeding ground for bacteria. Boil at the end of every day, dispose of disposables, but best of all use once only paper towels to avoid cross-contamination
  
  
• Always wash hands before and between handling different foods; wet with warm water, apply soap, rub hands together for at least 20 seconds and rinse thoroughly. Dry with disposable paper towel
  
  
• Wash knives, chopping boards and counter tops in hot soapy water between preparing different foods
  
  
• Never allow household pets onto kitchen worksurfaces or to eat off plates or bowls which you use yourself
  
  
• Whilst shopping keep raw meat, poultry and seafood separately wrapped and apart from other food in your trolley
  
  
• Keep cooked foods at the top of the fridge and raw meat, poultry and fish at the bottom
  
  
• Never put cooked food on a plate or dish which previously held raw poultry, fish or meat
  
  
• Don’t use the same knives and chopping boards for raw and cooked foods
  
  
• All poultry and burgers must be cooked right through until there are no pink areas
  
  
• Use a meat thermometer. Cook roasts and steaks to at least 145 degrees Fahrenheit, whole chicken or turkey to 180 Fahrenheit, and burgers to 160 Fahrenheit. If you’re eating out, break open children’s burgers and do not let them eat them if pink. It is safe to eat underdone steak or roast; minimum 145 Fahrenheit; as E.coli and VTEC are on the outside which gets much hotter. When meat is minced these bacteria are spread throughout the burger so temperature must reach at least 160 Fahrenheit
  
  
• Cook eggs till firm, not runny, unless organic, free range and known to be salmonella free, or using pasteurised egg; available in supermarkets in the new year
  
  
• Unless frozen packaged foods say they can be cooked from frozen, make sure they’re thawed first. Frozen poultry should be left to defrost very slowly in the refrigerator, never try to defrost poultry in hot water
  
  
• Be very careful with microwaves. There may be cold spots where bacteria are not killed. If there isn’t a turntable, switch off and turn the dish by hand at least twice during cooking. Burgers, meat and poultry are safest with conventional cooking methods. If the instructions on a packet are not clear, or you do not know the wattage of your microwave oven, check with the manufacturer
  
  
• Fish should be cooked till it flakes easily with a fork and turns just opaque
  
  
• When reheating soups, gravy and all sauces, they must be brought to the boil. Other reheated leftovers should be cooked thoroughly to a temperature of 165 Fahrenheit
  
  
• Hot food should be kept above 63°C
  
  
• If your fridge doesn’t have a built-in temperature gauge, buy a thermometer and make sure it’s always between 0 and 5 °C. Get another for your freezer and keep it below minus 18°C
  
  
• Don’t take chilled or frozen food on a tour of the shopping centre. Use a proper cold bag and get them to your own fridge or freezer as soon as possible
  
  
• Never re-freeze previously frozen food
  
  
• Make sure you remove all stuffing from cooked chicken or turkey before storing it in the fridge; it’s actually better to cook the stuffing separately if you anticipate leftovers
  
  
• Cold food should be kept below 5 °C
  
  
• Cooked food should be covered and cooled as quickly as possible and refrigerated within two hours
  
  
• Never defrost food on the kitchen counter; put it in the fridge, and that goes for marinating dishes too
  
  
• If you’ve got a lot of leftovers put them in several smaller containers for more rapid cooling in the fridge
  
  
• Don’t overfill your refrigerator; it’s the circulating air that keeps your food at the right temperature and safe

High profile outbreaks from restaurants or food shops get lots of publicity, but most food poisoning happens in the home. You can’t tell just by looking or smelling whether your food is contaminated. If in doubt throw it out is the safest bet. Wash everything, even prepacked and washed vegetables, and particularly salads, the Food Standards Agency found serious contamination with Salmonella in more than a thousand samples of ready-to-eat salads. The combination of packing fresh food in gas and keeping it refrigerated may help it look fresh even though it’s contaminated and past it’s best. Pre-cut and packed vegetables may look great but still give you a dose of listeria.

Finding a hair in your soup may put you off, but it’s not likely to do you anything like the harm of not washing your hands when you’ve been to the toilet or changed the baby’s nappy.

Thirty years ago it was safe to eat steak tartare (raw minced beef) served with a raw egg in the middle of it, you could have enjoyed your steak or roast beef running with blood if you liked it, children could lick a finger dipped into the cake mix and we didn’t get sick.

Every time someone does something to the food you eat there’s a risk of contamination. Every time agribusiness and factory farming find yet another way to speed growth, increase productivity and maximise profit there’s a risk to your health. To minimise these risks buy as much as possible from local sources, direct from farms you know or farmer’s markets, or from butchers, greengrocers, and fishmongers who you trust. To minimise the risks still further, go as organic as you can.