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Food
Handling
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Issues
in Food Handling
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Background
Wash hands
Prevent
cross contamination
Cook
foods thoroughly
Store
foods properly
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Background
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Food safety is a growing concern today
as public awareness for foodborne illnesses has been raised.
For a full listing of potentially dangerous pathogens see our growing
foodborne illnesses page.
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Wash
hands
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Always wash your hands carefully before
preparing foods. For proper cleanliness, use warm soapy
water.
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Prevent
cross contamination
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While preparing foods you should keep
meats, including poultry and fish, separate from other foods.
Pay particular attention to dripping juices which may contaminate
other foods meant to be eaten raw such as lettuce for a salad.
Cutting boards, knives, and other utensils
should always be properly disinfected before using them for other
foods. A good recommendation would be to cut first those foods
to be eaten raw.
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Cook
foods thoroughly
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There are two foods in particular for
which special attention should be paid. Those are ground
meats, pork and poultry (as well as eggs). Failure to
head these precautions can result is serious bouts with E.Coli,
Salmonella, Shigella, and other food borne illnesses.
- Always cook these meats all the way
through. Ground beef should be cooked until its completely
brown. Ground beef has a greater chance of harboring
bacteria due to methods by which it is processed. As
a rule of thumb, these meats should be cooked to an internal temperature
of 160 degrees.
- Never eat these meats pink.
Sliced steak is an exception to this rule as the methods for producing
steaks are less likely to produce illness than their ground beef
counterparts.
- Cook seafood until it is no longer
clear at parts. At this point it should become slightly
flaky. The consumption of raw shellfish (oysters, clams
and mussels) is not at all recommended. Shellfish poisonings
range from cholera, hepatitis A virus, norwalk virus as well as
the consumption of neurotoxins from toxic algae and dinoflagellates.
- Eggs should be cooked until they no
longer run.
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Store
foods properly
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- After preparing foods the uneaten
portions should be promptly refrigerated. To illustrate
why, consider a single bacterium falling onto your food.
Under ideal laboratory conditions a bacteria may double every twenty
minutes, so its not hard to imagine how in 60 minutes, one bacterium
could become eight. After 2 hours it could become 64
and after 6 hours that one bacterium could become as many as 256,000.
Under more real conditions, the burden of exposure would be significantly
less, but still probably enough to cause infection.
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| |
|
|
Healthy
Eating | Nutritional
Content |
Education
| Food
Safety | Links
| Glossary
| Site
Map
|
|
|