Eat Safe Food: Follow These Tips

There are far too many reports of contaminated foods. Lettuce is the most recent example. But spinach, peanut butter, baby formula, and several other foods have been recalled over the past couple of years alone.

Food expert Marion Nestle (a professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, and author of several books including What to Eat and Safe Food) dispenses helpful tips in her informative answers to the following questions:

What can consumers do to protect themselves from food contamination?

Fortunately, cooking solves a lot of food safety problems.

Following standard food safety rules at home makes good sense for everyone. These are:

• Keep hot foods hot.

• Refrigerate foods.

• Separate raw from cooked foods.

• Keep food preparation surfaces and utensils clean.

• Wash anything that will be eaten raw.

• Cook everything else long enough to kill potentially harmful microbes. (The higher the temperature, the faster bugs get killed.)

The basic principles are simple: Microbes proliferate at warm temperatures, refrigeration slows down proliferation, and cooking kills everything.

What are high-risk foods, and what can consumers do to protect themselves when dealing with these foods?

These days anything uncooked is high risk.

The problems with the contaminated spinach would have been solved easily by blanching the spinach for a minute in boiling water.