A few other tips:
- This one’s a bit of a no-brainer, but always wash your hands with soap and warm water before and after handling ingredients.
- Use a quality instant-read thermometer to ensure that meat is cooked thoroughly. Goldman suggests sticking to the USDA-recommended safe cooking temperatures for meat, fish and egg dishes (available at www.usda.gov), “which are a little bit higher than a lot of cookbooks recommend.”
- Ban bloody burgers. “You really shouldn’t ever be eating hamburgers rare or medium rare” because of the risk that the toxic strain of E. coli, which “can contaminate the surface of meat,” might get mixed in throughout ground beef, says Morris. (On the other hand, he says it’s okay to eat a good steak rare, because searing it kills surface bacteria.)
- Use separate cutting boards — and also knives — for meat and produce. Otherwise, you might transfer harmful bacteria from raw meat, poultry or fish onto salad greens or other food that isn’t going to be cooked, says gastroenterologist Robynne Chutkan, an assistant professor at the Georgetown University Medical Center.
- Refrigerate or freeze leftovers as soon as possible, before microorganisms can multiply. This is especially important in picnic season, warns Goldman, who says that any grub that’s been outside for more than two hours on a warm day should be trashed.
- Finally, before dining out, consider checking an establishment’s health inspection history through local governments’ Web sites, many of which will have such information.
Still, there’s only so much that any of us can do to avoid food-borne illnesses. “Unfortunately, there are a lot of opportunities for contamination along the chain from farm to fork, for all foods,’ says Morris of the Emerging Pathogens Institute. He points out that all the good hygiene in the world won’t protect you from disease-causing microorganisms found in fare that’s already fully cooked when you buy it, such as deli meats or soft cheeses, or pathogens that get inside produce through tainted water or soil and can’t be washed away.
“The major problems are upstream — outside of the supermarket, outside of restaurants, outside of our own kitchens — and have to do with how meat and all our food is produced, in this country,” says GWU’s Leibler, who, along with Morris and all of the others I spoke with, stresses the need for better industry practices and more stringent government monitoring and regulation.
“At the end of the day, you can make sure you cook everything thoroughly and be ultra-careful about cross-contamination, but this issue won’t go away just by keeping your kitchen clean, or being vegetarian, or even purchasing local meat or vegetables and buying organics,” she says. “This is a problem for everyone who eats.”
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