Four simple steps focus on food safety

Sept. 19--Making sure your food is safe starts with four steps before sitting down for a meal or even just grabbing a snack.

Cleaning, separating, cooking and chilling foods properly will lower your chances of contracting a foodborne illness, Krystal Staggs, Mosaic Life Care's clinic nutrition manager, says. Food poisoning in particular is known to cause stomach cramps, vomiting and/or diarrhea and could last around 48 hours depending on the severity.

"You have to think of those populations that are at higher risk which we see a lot here in the hospital," Staggs says. "Our elderly adults, people with decreased immune systems, children, pregnant moms, those people could experience more severe symptoms or more long-term complications, so we just don't want to risk it."

September is National Food Safety Education Month, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 6 people will get sick from eating contaminated food, leading to 128,000 hospital visits and about 3,000 deaths.

The first step, cleaning, doesn't just have to do with the food. It also applies to general hand-washing before any meal, something that Staggs says is fairly easy to do but easy to forget.

"That's probably one of the easiest to fix, and it's one of the most common that's not done," she says.

Wash your hands with hot, soapy water for at least 20 seconds before a meal, and be sure that surfaces and utensils are clean as well. Again, it's an easy routine to avoid entirely, but will yield several benefits in the long run.

The second step, separating, involves the proper storage and spacing of various foods that may cross-contaminate others due to proximity.

"We practice this a lot in our kitchen: make sure that your raw foods and your ready-to-eat foods are separate," Staggs says. "When you think about it, when you go to the grocery store, your baggers would never bag your apples with your raw chicken."

Be sure to have separate cutting boards for raw meat as well as for your vegetables and wash them often, she explains.

Furthermore, keeping these foods away from each other in the refrigerator is another nice habit to get into.

Next up, cooking has to do with how you actually prepare the meals themselves. While Staggs recommends websites like foodsafety.gov for precise temperatures, the minimum temperature for cooking meats is around 140 to 160 degrees. Reheating those foods requires a temperature of about 165 degrees.

Staggs recommends cooks have a meat thermometer nearby when cooking in order to properly measure the temperature of their foods.

"By cooking it appropriately, you're making sure that those harmful foods have been killed," she says.

The final step involves chilling your food appropriately.

Do not leave food out for more than two hours before placing it in the refrigerator or the freezer. And if your food is outside, decrease that time to one hour.

"One, I know I'm guilty of (at home) is letting foods sit out too long," Staggs says. "Especially going into the fall season now -- with football games, especially -- we just let things sit out and kind of munch over the course of several hours. That's not recommended."

She says to be sure and clean out your refrigerator often, as this will allow air to circulate and cool the foods more thoroughly.

She says that out of those four steps, she would venture to guess about three of them are often ignored. Especially with kids coming home after school, it's easy for them to grab a snack without even thinking about washing their hands.

Other situations, such as taking a quick lunch in order to avoid falling behind on work, mean that many, if not all, of these steps are essentially thrown out the window. Having hand sanitizer nearby, going to a trusted food vendor or having small snacks not known to carry as much harmful bacteria, like cheese sticks or almonds, is advised in such circumstances.

Daniel Cobb can be reached at daniel.cobb@newspressnow.com. Follow him on Twitter: @NPNowCobb.

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