When buying food, it is important to bear the principles of food hygiene and safety in mind. For example, try to leave buying chilled and frozen foods to the end of your shopping, to make sure it spends as little time out of the cold environment as possible. When transporting chilled and frozen goods home, make use of a cool bag to minimise the effect of leaving it in a warm car and store it away appropriately as soon as you get home. Make certain that you keep all raw foods and cooked foods separate; as I mentioned last time, cooking kills of most bacteria found in raw food – storing the two together can cause to prevent cross contamination of bacteria from the raw food to the cooked.

It doesn’t take a food safety course to know that it is important to pay attention to use-by and best-before dates. If you do all your shopping in one trip, try to organise your weekly meals around them and, when preparing food to eat at a later date, make certain this date falls within the use-by date as well.