What You Should Know About Food Hygiene — Just Life Trends
Good food hygiene is crucial for your personal safety and the safety of others you cook for, whether you’re a professional chef or a home cook.
When we go out to eat, we all have expectations (and many of us have been shocked by the state of some professional kitchens on shows like Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares), but it’s all too easy to let those expectations slip in our own homes if we’re not careful — and the consequences can be just as deadly.
Food poisoning, which is typically dismissed as a minor ailment brought on by a shady takeaway, may easily occur at home and can be extremely severe, especially for small children, who account for up to 125,000 food poisoning deaths each year.
This emphasises the importance of following the same cleanliness guidelines in our home kitchens as we would in a restaurant.
We’ve gathered the essentials on food hygiene for both home cooks and chefs, so you can maintain your kitchen a safe environment for your loved ones.
So, What Are The Food Poisoning Facts?
- 1 in 10 of the world’s population gets sick with food poisoning each year, resulting in a loss of 33 million healthy life years (DALYs) annually
- 11 million workdays are lost each year in the UK alone
- 50% of people with Infectious Intestinal Disease (IID) missed work or school
- Norovirus and Campylobacter are the most common food-borne bacteria
Cleaning Rotas
If you’re a home cook, creating a cleaning checklist or rota is a wonderful way to stay on top of all of the cleaning tasks; if you work in a professional kitchen, you should already have one.
Divide the household tasks into daily, weekly, or monthly tasks to see how often each one has to be completed. For reference, everything you cook on, including the oven, vents, worktops, and any fryers or appliances, should be cleaned on a daily basis.
You should also clean your floors lightly every day, with more thorough cleanings once a week and once a month. To avoid contamination, the fridge should be examined and emptied every day.
Fridge
Your refrigerator is another potential source of food contamination. When food cools, it’s common for water to leak out of its structure. This water contains microorganisms that can contaminate food and cause sickness.
Raw meat, in particular, has a high risk of producing food poisoning and is prone to leaking water and blood into nearby food. As a result, it’s critical that you keep your meat on the lowest shelf and keep other foods away from it (particularly foods that may be eaten raw such as fruit and vegetables).
Food should be kept chilled at 8°C or lower, or frozen at -18°C at the very least. Foods that have been pre-frozen should not be defrosted and then re-frozen, as this can allow bacterial colonies to grow.
Cupboards
Foods kept at room temperature are less likely to cause significant problems like food poisoning. However, once opened, you can extend the life of your pantry products by firmly wrapping or resealing them.
Separation of Utensils
Cross-contamination can occur when raw meat and fresh vegetables are cut using the same knife or chopping board, allowing germs like salmonella to spread and cause disease.
To avoid cross-contamination, use separate utensils for raw meat and raw vegetables, or wash your cooking items in hot soapy water between ingredients. It’s not a good idea to have raw meat and fresh veggies on the same surface at the same time.
Nails And Hair
When preparing food, make sure your hair is clean and tied back. This is due to the fact that hair in your food can transmit disease-causing microbes like Staph Aureus, a bacteria that can cause serious infections.
Hair can hurt your digestive system, as well as spread food-borne infections like cholera and typhoid. Hair contamination in food can lead to the establishment of biological pathogenic colonies, hence it’s also called a microbiological contaminant.
Long or artificial nails, which are more difficult to clean, can also be a breeding ground for bacteria and pathogenic activity. Nails should ideally be kept short and tidy. Wearing medical gloves over long or artificial nails is a suitable alternative if this is not practicable, although gloves should be changed after handling raw meat.
Long hair and beards should be pulled back or tucked into a hairnet.
Issues Concerning Environmental Health
To avoid microbiological transmission, any cuts should be sealed with a blue plaster. The blue also makes it possible to see the plaster if it falls off.
If you have a transmissible skin infection, you should avoid preparing or working with food to avoid contaminating the food and cooking facilities.
Gloves can also aid to prevent water, irritants, and allergy exposure.
If you can incorporate the food hygiene ideas in this article into your regular cooking practises, you and others around you should be able to stay healthier, safer, and more sanitary when making meals.
Originally published at https://justlifetrends.com on April 24, 2022.