How do you feel about salmonella?

[Ferret_Herder]

One problem with bacterial infections on meat is that cooking doesn’t kill toxins that bacteria produce. So something that’s really gone crazy can still make you sick after cooking.

Salmonella can be an issue with beef but seems to be mostly from cross-contamination. I think the issue with ground meat is usually more an E. coli thing. My WAG about the frequency today is, besides better news reporting, that we also have more huge (“factory”) farms that have a greater chance of spreading nasty bacteria among the thousands of closely-confined animals on these big farms, versus a little or big family farm here and there with many fewer animals and more room for them.

My own habits: I often wear gloves when prepping meat just because I wash my hands so many times during the day (I work in a medical center and mostly with patients with compromised immune systems so I don’t want to infect anyone) that I want to give my poor hands a break. I’m careful to not cross-contaminate by doing meat prep work first on its own cutting board (I have some of those plastic boards that are color-coded for red meat / poultry / seafood / veggies) and with its own knife, then that goes into the sink ASAP, and do veggies next, or vice versa. Gloves get tossed after handling meat. If I have to reuse the knife, it gets washed in plenty of soap and hot water.

[Kalhoun]

@Belrix

A common infection path is touching meat and then handling lettuce or some other uncooked vegetable. That’s why one of the best things you can do is wash your hands after handling the meat.

Yes, cooking kills the bacteria that causes Salmonella.

Undercooking meat, of course, is risky but not usually on whole meats (like a chicken or turkey). Salmonella is a surface bacteria so unless it’s ground into the meat, like hamburger, then cooking the surface of the meat kills its most-likely lurking area.

That one reason I switch cutting boards for meat/veggies - it’s the transfer to the veggies that’s dangerous.

Phew! We don’t eat salads, so I think we’re safe. I must say, I’m not as bad as I used to be…I don’t use the same knife to do both meat and veggies, and actually I have used separate cutting boards on more than one occasion. I guess I’m better at this than I thought!!

[kittenblue]

No gloves, no bleach, no separate cutting boards, no dishwasher. I do wash the cutting board after meat has been on it, before cutting anything else, but I don’t worry too much about it. I eat sunny-side-up eggs, and raw cookie dough. I read somewhere that the actual chances that the particular egg you are eating has been contaminated are really extremely low, and I cling to that fact. I’ve never had an attack of food poisoning, except that one time after eating at Chipotle.

[Rebo]

I wash my hands, cutting board and knives after handling raw meat. I have a plastic board for meat, and a wooden board for veggies. I don’t bleach. My dishwashing/handwashing soap is anti-bacterial.

I don’t worry too much besides those precautions.

[Tamex]

@tesseract

I have a question – is salmonella risk different/greater now than say 20 years ago? I have no idea why it would or would not be, just a question. We grew up drinking raw eggs fairly regularly in the form of eggnog-- eggs, milk, cinnamon, vanilla, and some sugar blended in the blender – yum – and we never got sick, that I know of, from doing it.

My sister and I found a similar recipe for eggnog in an old Betty Crocker cookbook one day after school. The cookbook was probably from the late 60’s, and we found it in the early 90’s. So good, but mom was horrified when she found out we were eating raw eggs. I asked, “Well, if eating raw eggs is so bad, why did they print this recipe?” Mom’s reply was “Well, eggs didn’t have salmonella back then.”

This site explains that salmonella started to be found in clean, intact chicken eggs in the 1980’s, especially in the northeastern US.

[Mame]

IANAD, but I used to be a food and industrial microbiologist.

The main factors in whether or not you contract Salmonellosis are:

The strain of salmonella present in the food.
How fatty the food is.
The number of salmonella present in the food.
How good your immune system is
Luck.

FWIW, I think bleaching food prep areas and antibacterial hand washes in the domestic situation are way overkill unless you have severely immunocompromised people around, and probably still unnecessary and counterproductive. Gloves offer no advantage other than reducing the frequency of handwashing, or protecting the food if the food preparer is a carrier of an infectious disease.

The only advantage of plastic cuttingboards over wood ones is the ability to put them in the dishwasher. A woooen board should be washed thoroughly in ordinary soap or dishwashing liquid and water after the food is prepped, then dried and oiled if necessary.

Basic food prep sense works better than antimicrobial ingredients.

Wash hands in ordinary soap and water before starting food prep. (I do the benches too, but years of lab practice has that ingrained in me )
Prep vegies before meats.
Wash hands in ordinary soap and water after handling raw food.
Don’t use the same utensils for raw and cooked foods.
Your fingers count as raw foods - don’t use them for tasting anything that isn’t going to be cooked or eaten soon after. This emphatically includes sauces like home made mayonnaise.
Don’t leave food warm for longer than an hour or so.
You want to know the biggest cause of food contamination in a kitchen? Dishcloths/washcloths/kitchen sponges - whatever they are called in your neck of the woods. Truly.

This risks turning into Food Micro 101, which I haven’t taught for many, many years. So, rather than rant at you-all, if anyone has any food micro questions, I may be able to help.

(Be warned - the use of antimicrobial washes/cloths/chopping boards in the food prep situation is a bugbear of mine.)

[casdave]

Given that the precuations against food poisoning are so simple, and the consequencies range from the inconvenient to the absolute dire, does it really make any sense not to wash items and clean work surfaces between changes of use?

It is simply a matter of indoctrination, if you work in a food business you wash things without even thinking about it, its just automatic - in terms of time taken, this is minimal.

Salmonella has many variants, some are anti biotic resistant, some produce more powerful toxins than others, and its true that these toxins are generally destroyed by heat - unlike the toxins of other bacteria.

Its not unusual for folk to apply too much heat too fast, and the interior of the meat is not properly cooked, especially on barbeques and thats when you get the double dose, the bacteria make you sick, and the toxins already present make it all the worse.

Salmonella is one of the more common ways to get food poisoning.

Lets get this in perspective, the symptoms of salmonella poisoning are not pleasant, it hurts makes you feel lousy, but in terms of food poisoning it is relatively mild - though it does not feel that way at the time.

We are discussing salmonella here, but the lack of precautions could readily lead to contamination by other bacteria, and some of these are rather more dangerous.

Dishcloths, drying cloths, mops and other cleaning utensils are the main culprits for spreading contamination, if you wipe down a work surface, then the item used to carry that out should then be disposed of or disinfected.

Disinfection of cloths is very easy, simply boil for three minutes, if you are preparing a large meal it isn’t too hard to keep a vessel with water on a low simmer on the stove to drop stuff into. People get a bit lazy when its only a small meal.

I would not be inclined to use bleach much on food surfaces except as part of a scheduled deep clean, for the most part is would use a sanitiser.

You can go a long way to good food hygine with very hot water - above 70C - means you’ll need gloves, and when you wash utensils get them hot enough to self dry - no need for cloths to dry them out.

[Ferret_Herder]

@Mame

You want to know the biggest cause of food contamination in a kitchen? Dishcloths/washcloths/kitchen sponges - whatever they are called in your neck of the woods. Truly.

Good point about fingers and washcloths. I’m a homebrewer of beer too so I’m very careful (and in the case of brewing undeniably correct) about sanitary working conditions. It’s really easy to get nasty beer once you start slacking off on sanitation.

Dish sponges get moistened and tossed in the microwave regularly. While I’m cooking or brewing I prefer to not do cleanup during the process aside from wipe-ups of spills with clean cloths or paper towels. Meat nearly always gets cut with its own knife, always on its own cutting board, and those go in the sink for washing afterwards. If I need to use the same knife then I usually prefer to do vegetable prep first, then switch over to the meat.

I intentionally go out of my way not to buy antimicrobial cutting boards, dish soap, or hand soap for use in the home. I may not be able to always avoid it at work, but I can stop the resistance issues in my home.

[Kalhoun]

@casdave

Disinfection of cloths is very easy, simply boil for three minutes, if you are preparing a large meal it isn’t too hard to keep a vessel with water on a low simmer on the stove to drop stuff into. People get a bit lazy when its only a small meal.

Do you actually do this? I’ve never known anyone in my entire life who does this. I put dirty dish cloths and towels in the hamper and launder as usual.

[casdave]

If you have lots and lots of cloths, then you can put them in the laundry, but this would mean having a fresh cloth available for every meal preparation time.

That’s if you are looking for good protection.

Disposable cloths are the norm for the food industry, and ideally in the home - in some food businesses, you have a hot water rinse tank, it has heaters in it to keep the water temp up - you wash your utensils and put them in the tank of hot fresh water - this kills the bacteria, and when you remove them they self dry - no cloths required to dry the items.

Dishwashers are better still.

[Aspidistra]

@casdave

The reason that folk can get away with such poor practices as mentioned here, is that for the most part, cooked food is eaten very soon after final preparation, it doesn’t give much time for salmonella to grow.

This is the absolute only reason that some of the previous posters have not had food poisoning - its not some fantastic immune response, its not because the precautions the OP takes are unnecessary (they very much are necassary)

Isn’t you first para here as much as to say that the precautions taken by the OP actually ARE unnecessary - for people cooking food for themselves at home at eating it straight away (which is most of us)? Surely it’s expected that people in the actual food service industry have more stringent standards than home cooks, both because of long waiting times and because they’re feeding so many people.

[susan]

I start by washing my hands. After I handle eggs or meat, I rinse my hands (if I’ve got other steps, like chopping) or wash them with soap (if I’m done or have been, say, kneading ground meat). This means that as I cook, I’m cleaning my hands periodically. All utensils, tools, and the cutting board go into a sink of soapy water or the dishwasher. I wipe surfaces with a soapy cloth and rinse. I wash my hands and usually throw the towel I’ve been drying them on in the wash.

This is how I cook whether I’m handling meat or not. I’ve cooked for a number of people with immune suppression over the years and have never had a problem.

[casdave]

Aspidistra

Whilst you are right that these precautions are probably not really necassary in the home.

The important point is that those posters displaying the lack of knowledge of health risks from food poisoning do not seem to demonstrate that they understand the reasons why they are not getting ill - instead they put it onto ‘a little bit of dirt does you no harm’ or other such dodgy reasoning.

If you understand the reasons why you can do certain things in certain situations, then that is rather differant to me to someone who gets away with it but remains ignorant as to the hows and the whys.

I have no worries about someone who uses the short cuts, but knows when they can do this, and when they cannot. The concern is that people carry bad practices into other situations, maybe they prepare a meal some time in advance of what they normally do due to some reason - such as waiting for visiting relatives, or time changing.

This is when they will come unstuck - it’s better to keep the good practices in place all the time rather than be selective.