Commonsense Food Safety

Regarding cutting boards, my advice is to buy two, making at least one a plastic board that can fit in your dishwasher for sanitizing. Wooden boards should not go in the dishwasher. Buying two boards is a good way to prevent cross-contamination. Using a laundry marker, or other permanent ink pen, mark one board for meat and poultry, and use the other for produce, etc. Or, if you like a wooden board, use it for any food that can be served raw, and use a plastic board for protein. Mark one side of the protein board to use only for poultry; use the other side for other meat and fish. When a dishwasher isn’t suitable, wash the boards with soap and water followed by a rinse made from a mixture of 1 ½ teaspoons of either Clorox bleach or white vinegar per pint of water.

Be aware that cross-contamination also occurs with knives and other utensils, kitchen counters, towels, or your bare hands, so these need to be washed between uses. For extra care, use the rinse described above.

While there are a lot of bugs out there, a few foods cause the most problems in the home kitchen – poultry and eggs, ground beef, pork, and fish. It’s good to remember the temperatures these foods need to reach to disarm any bugs. Cook poultry to 165 degrees in its thickest part, any ground beef dish to 155 degrees, pork to 150 degrees, and fish to 140 degrees. Eggs should be cooked until the yolk starts to firm.

Once eaten or cooked, remember to get the food out of the temperature danger zone by either chilling or freezing it. Try to get the food as cool as possible before putting it in the refrigerator – the refrigerator can’t do a good job of chilling really hot food. So if the food is still really hot, stir it until cooled down, or put it into an ice bath, or, if it’s wintertime, put the container outside.

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