Avoiding Food Poisoning 3
Last time we learnt that food needs to be stored properly to be safe. Whilst everything in the last post was true, there is an important principle which must be remembered at all times when storing food – the principle of drippage!
Raw food – especially meat – is home to a variety of bacteria that can make you really ill if you ingest them. For this reason, we cook our food to make it safe to eat. Sound simple, but yet lots of people overlook the problem that drippage causes.
Drippage occurs when raw food touches, or drips on, prepared food that is soon to be consumed. It also occurs when people fail to wash chopping boards and knives after preparing raw food with them – disgusting creatures. When ready-to-eat food gets drippaged by raw food, the bacteria form the raw food spread onto the lovely ready-to-eat food and the dangers of this should be obvious! The whole reason we cook food is to kill of the bacteria and make it safe to eat; there’s no point doing that if you let your prepared food pick up new bacteria from food that is still raw! Hence the obvious things to say are these; always wash your hands, knives, chopping boards etc before and after preparing raw food – especially raw meat. Furthermore, store raw food away from ready-to-eat food so that there is no chance of drippage occurring when you’re not looking (stealth-drippage). Finally, make sure you regularly wash the tea-towels or leave your washing to drip dry instead of smearing it with germs.
Next time: a summary!
