Here are some tips to help keep you and your family safe from a food-borne illness this holiday season.
The goal of handling food safely is primarily to keep bacteria from contaminating food and growing in numbers large enough to cause illness. However, disease-causing viruses are also an issue.
People who have compromised immune systems such as cancer patients, the elderly and the very young, are especially vulnerable to becoming ill from food. Therefore, these individuals may require a special diet. For the rest of us, here are some guidelines:
1. Hand Washing
To prevent food-borne illness, wash your hands before handling food, especially after going to the bathroom. The surface of people's hands often becomes covered with bacteria and viruses that can cause illness. Washing your hands removes these organisms.
In addition, wash your hands between handling raw foods and ready-to-eat foods. For example, let's say you are going to prepare uncooked poultry, meat, fish or chicken, and then make a salad. Wash your hands between preparing the uncooked animal product and the salad. Better yet, prepare the salad first.
You may choose from several options when deciding how to defrost your frozen turkeys or other animal foods. The primary options for defrosting are: in the refrigerator, under cold running water, the microwave oven, or as part of the cooking process.
The reason proper defrosting is important is because the outside of the food will become warmer sooner than the inside of food. Uneven temperature differences allow time for bacteria to multiply. The goal is to keep the food cold enough to prevent dangerous levels of bacteria but warm enough to allow for defrosting.
Should you choose to defrost large pieces of meat, poultry or fish in the refrigerator, allow for two or more days to fully defrost. When using cold running water for defrosting, make sure the water flows quickly enough over the food.
The safest way to defrost food is to make this step part of the cooking process. However, including this step will require longer cooking times.
Turkeys and other large pieces of meat must be thoroughly cooked to minimize the risk. The best way to ensure that such foods have safely cooked is to insert a metal-stemmed thermometer into the center of the thickest part of the food to measure its temperature. To be safe, the center should reach 180 degrees Fahrenheit.
After dinner, cut up large pieces of meat and poultry to allow the food to cool off faster in the refrigerator. Don't let animal-based leftovers such as meat, fish and poultry sit out at room temperature for too long—30 to 45 minutes maximum.
5. Washing food
Following these tips should help make your holidays safer. Above all, when in doubt, throw it out!