How to Prevent Food Born Illnesses at Home

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) calculates that every year in the United States, there are approximately 76 million cases of food-borne illness, with 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. With careful food preparation and cleanliness, you can avoid this at home hazard.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Bleach wipes for the kitchen counter
• Wash hands frequently or use surgical gloves.
• Meat-only cutting board
• Clean, damp dish towel to place under your cutting board to keep it from slipping around
• Meat thermometer

How to Handle Raw Meat

1. Chickens carry salmonella. Unwrap the store bought chicken and place it on the specified cutting board for raw meats. Put on your surgical gloves. Cut meat in appropriate portions. Cook chicken slowly so the inside gets done at the same time as the outside of the meat. Use the same procedure with ground hamburger patties.
2. Treat me with care! Purchase your meats from a reliable source and ask questions. Commercial Factory Farm chickens have high counts of fecal mater on them. Locally raised beef, pork, fish can often be purchased from local farms. Due to the independent farmer's higher standards, contain less pathogens.
3. Procuring fresh fish can be difficult, depending where you live. Ask the salesman behind the counter if you can smell the fish. Have him put it on a sheet of wax paper. Hold it to you nose. You should not smell a fish aroma, just the smell of the briney sea. If the eyes are grey, back away. If the fish department smells like ammonia, take a pass.
4. Purchase Me From a Local Farmer Through feeding and breeding, pork has lost it's reputation as a source of Trichinosis. However, the possibility of other pathogens exists. So also cook pork to an interior temperature of 165 degrees.

Tips & Warnings

• Purchase your chickens from local sources and support the local economy,
• Factory Farm animals live in squalor, so they represent a high risk.
• Give the chicken a bath before he becomes supper.
• Go on line and introduce yourself to H.A.C.C.P set up by Nasa and Pillsbury to keep astronauts safe in space.
• Organic is the best tasting meat of all.
• When finished, use a bleach wipe and clean off the refrigerator handle, the phone receiver, the door handle to outside, or anything you might have handled while working with raw meats or eggs.
• Never work with raw meats when you have an open wound.
• Cook chicken to an internal temperature of 165.
• Cook burgers to the same internal temperature.
• Prepare fish in the same manner. Slow cook and use a meat thermometer.
• Never eat raw steak or chicken tartar.