Food Safety Basics

Hi! I’m Jennifer McEntire with the Institute of Food Technologists. And today, we’re going to talk about how to handle your food safely. This is really important because a lot has changed and we know a lot more about how to handle food safely to try to protect our family from illness.

There are four basic steps that you can take. That’s cook, clean, chill and separate. These are recommended by the partnership for food safety education which is a group that includes the CDC, the USDA, the FDA, IFT, the Institute of Food Technologists and many other partners.

And what we’re going to do today, right now, is look at one of the main ways that food can become contaminated and also cross contamination. For example, by the time you finish watching all the segments in this video, the bacteria that might be on this food could have doubled. So it’s really important that we handle our food safely. This is particularly important for people with young children. I have a two-year-old daughter for the elderly which would include people like my parents, for people who have immune issues, those who have illness. It’s very important to handle food properly.

So what we’re going to do today is look across contamination. And for example, I might cut this piece of chicken and I know that I need to use two cutting boards. And so as I’m cutting the chicken, I’ve done a good job. I have my other cutting board out there. I have another knife which is recommend. You should always separate your raw food from the cooked food.

So as I finish here, what I don’t want to do now is I’ve done such a good job for pairing my other station. I don’t want to not wash my hands and take this and cross contaminate through my fingers. So we definitely want to keep our food separate but we also want to be aware of what our hands are doing, what our knives are doing, what our surface is doing and make sure that we keep everything clean. This is the first step and a major step in food safety.

So what should we do? What we need to do is wash our hands. So that’s the next thing that we’re going to do.


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