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This past weekend, Reuters reported the death of an elder woman in Minnesota due to Salmonella infection. She is the seventh person in the U.S. to die from this bacteria. As of last Wednesday, 491 people have been infected during the current outbreak. And, 125 products have been recalled by the FDA, including cookies, crackers, ice cream and even some pet foods.
Below are some ways to avoid possible infection:
- Washing your hands and kitchen surfaces before working with any food may seem obvious, but many people forget.
- Wash your hands and counter tops or cutting boards in between working with vegetables and raw meats to avoid cross-contamination.
- Antibacterial soap or simple soap and water work well.
- Use fresh, clean dish towels and change often.
- Thoroughly wash all fruit, even if you are not going to eat the skin.
- Any fruit that might touch the ground, such as tomatoes, is susceptible to Salmonella. So, spend even more time scrubbing these fruits.
- Cut off any vines or parts that were attached to the plant. When eating tomatoes, make sure to cut off and discard the hard nib on the top of the fruit, because the bacteria can implant itself there easily.
- Take off the outer leaves of cabbage and lettuce, and the outer skin of onions.
- When baking, make sure to thoroughly cook the baked foods before eating them. Salmonella usually comes from raw eggs. Do not eat raw cookie dough no matter how tempting it may be!
- Salmonella poisoning often occurs from poultry and raw eggs that haven't been properly cooked, or frozen and not properly cooked, or left sitting too long after being cooked.
- Got pets? Make sure after handling them you wash your hands.
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1-25-2009 @8:10PM Heccy said... As a microbiologist I have one quibble with this list: Please do not use antibacterial soap...EVER. There is no need seeing as washing with regular soap and water is virtually identical with regards to antimicrobial activity. The small increase in efficacy that one gains with antibacterial soaps is dwarfed by the harm that comes from placing evolutionary pressure on bacteria that selects for resistance to antibiotics. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a growing problem that is exacerbated by the lack of new antibiotics coming down the pipeline from pharma companies. We do not need to help them gain a foothold by using pointless products.
Also, while the rest of the list is reasonable, people should not become paranoid. The chances of eggs being contaminated with Salmonella are extremely low already and if you clean the eggshells with soap, they drop even further. So while chugging down eggs rocky-style might not be the best thing for you, dont freak out about a little taste of cookie dough (as long as you aren't an infant, senior citizen, immunocompromised or pregnant). I just had some this morning and it was delicious.
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1-26-2009 @1:15AM Stephanie said... My husband emailed a cookie dough company when he was younger asking if it was safe to eat their cookie dough, as his mother told him not to. They sent him a letter saying they flash pasteurize their eggs and that it was safe, but that they didn't recommend doing it.. just in case.
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1-26-2009 @4:52AM Julie said... Thank you for the list it never hurts to keep informed, we all just have to take extra care in the purchase and preparation of our food.
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1-26-2009 @10:23AM Adam Fields said... These kinds of problems are largely endemic to the industrialized food system we have. Where to even begin?!
1) Food sits around for a few weeks before it gets to you, giving ample time for more bacterial growth. Even if it's infected, fresher food is less likely to have sufficient quantities of foodborne illness bacteria to make you sick.
2) Food is all mixed together in processing plants, increading the likelihood of infectious outbreaks. Either it's heavily processed so food from one animal ends up in hundreds or thousands of products, or the equipment is touched by everything as it goes by.
3) Livestock is routinely treated with antibiotics, and their waste is dumped back into the environment and back onto the fields where these vegetables are grown.
Every time you shop at the supermarket, every time you buy food in a box or a can or a jar, you encourage the kinds of practices that make these problems worse, in a little way that's repeated hundreds of millions of times across the country.
You're seeing it in action. Support your local small farms. Your buying choices have a cumulative effect, and the more small farms you buy from, the more there will be.
Either way, you have to take action to be healthy - you can either continue to buy products from a tainted centralized system and be paranoid in your kitchen (to little effect), or you can buy from small producers you trust and cook with them without the same kind of fear.
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1-26-2009 @1:28PM Michael Schmitt said... I'm a busy person on the go, so which farm do I go to for a quick hot-pocket? I enjoy a good cup of coffee in the morning... which farm do I go to for that? ... the sugar on my Wheaties in the morning, etc....
I know that @Adam Fields means well when he talks about buying locally when possible, and I agree to a certain extent. But from an "affordable food" point of view, one cannot create foods to feed a nation by having a plant built locally for each and every large city out there. The economies of scale don't allow for this, and the excess carbon footprint (10 small plants vs 1 large plant) would be increasing the load on the environment.
There is going to have to be a realization that a combination of local/distance foods are going to be a part of our food chain, and we are going to have to do what we can to maximize the safety of the existing systems we have in place.
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1-26-2009 @2:47PM Rt said... I have to laf.
AF uses the shock-jock approach to promote small farms. Fear mongering seems especially effective these days. The logic isn't particularly strong either. The statement "...the more small farms you buy from, the more there will be." was easily picked apart by MS.
MS, on the other hand, has over simplified things a bit. Just because economies of scale work doesn't mean there isn't a place for niche players. Nice try MS but logic goes only so far with some people - the desire for Utopia overrides common sense.
By nature farms are not very close to population centers so they rely on distributors. The most the small farms can hope for is having a few restaurants buy most of their product, the rest can go to a small market if one is close. Most farms, large or small, use distributors for both those markets. Growing crops in cities may be the answer, but that is not this topic.
This thread diverted from salmonella so lets try to get back on track.
I am not a microbiologist but I agree with the part about antibacterial soap. I think most of these people will die of fear before they die from germs.
Eggs and chicken have the reputation but the latest national outbreaks I read about were spinach (or was that lettuce?), hamburger, and peanuts.
The whole list is based on fear and not on probability. I am reminded of the phrase, "what do you want, egg in your beer?". Eating raw eggs was commonplace long before there was refrigeration.
Cleanliness is good but there is something to be said for our natural immune system.
The short answer would be to eat some dirt. The long answer is infants used to get some protection by drinking their mother's milk. The elderly were exposed to enuf germs during their life it would take something more severe than salmonella to get them.
Statistically, there are many things more dangerous than food borne illness - like driving a car, something we don't give a second thot.
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1-26-2009 @5:21PM Adam Fields said... I'm not sure what the "shock-jock" approach is, and I don't see how my argument boils down to fear. Look at the list of recommendations of things to do to avoid getting sick from food you bought from the supermarket? That's what I call fear. How many of the things on that list do you have to do with food you bought from a small farm near you?
To say that I'm the one arguing on fear, when our food system (which is supposed to be keeping us safe) has brought us all of these precautions... well, now you're making _me_ laugh.
As far as convenience goes, you have a point, but I'd argue that convenience isn't everything, and it's easy to mix up convenience with laziness. I'm not arguing against shipping food where you can't get it locally (and yes, I drink coffee, but I've also started buying sugar from Florida instead of someplace even further away), but let's be reasonable on this - I'm arguing against shipping all food because we can. I think doing so has blinded us to the dangers of a centralized food system. Among other things, that has resulted in a decline in quality as well as all of the things above. For example, why are peaches even available for me to buy right now? They're sitting on the shelf at every supermarket around me, because the food distribution system needs something to do. Nobody went into a supermarket and said "hey, can I buy an awful, rock-hard, tasteless peach in January?" - anyone who's buying them is doing so because they're already there. Is that convenience? I'm incredibly busy, yet I still manage to hit the farmer's markets twice a week. You just have to make an explicit decision that this matters to you, and you'll find the time.
Do you really need a hot pocket? It may be convenient, but it's not terribly good for you. Would you be better off if you ate a carrot or something for a snack instead? I can't tell you what you can eat, but I can try to convince you to seek out alternatives that I think are better for you, for your surroundings, and for society as a whole. Next time you eat a hot pocket, think about what really goes into bringing it to you.
The environmental impact of lots of small farms is up in the air, but they tend to be better integrated into their surroundings and have less waste. The environmental impact of large industrial farms is unarguably disastrous on a large scale, especially for CAFOs.
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1-26-2009 @6:28PM Rt said... AF, this has what to do with salmonella?
It seems to me you are a solution in search of a problem.
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1-26-2009 @9:19PM Adam Fields said... This has to do with the fact that salmonella poisoning is significantly worsened by large-scale industrial food production.
You can turn your home kitchen into an antiseptic lab as directed above, or you can choose to buy food that's less likely to be infected with something that'll make you sick.
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1-27-2009 @12:31PM AJ said... I'm not sure how Adam's comments are "shock jock" fear mongering any more than the list in the post is the same.
What I find most amusing about this safe tips list is that if you ever eat in a restaurant, you can rest unassured that most of these rules have been soundly broken, twisted and thrown back into your food. And besides that, "any fruit that touches the ground" can get salmonella? What the hell does that even mean? The same ground that food grows out of? I looked on the FDA site and, sorry - no warnings about eating food that may have come in contact with the ground. Feces, yes, but not necessarily the ground. So a note to all: Don't eat food with poo on it, which means you might not want to eat any meat at all.
It seems to me that the need for a list like this says more about our food supply than our personal hygiene, which is all I think that Adam was getting at.
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3-10-2009 @3:03PM Betty Anne said... I agree with Adam that you can choose to buy foods that are less likely to be infected with something to make you sick. Eggs that have been pasteurized in the shell are available. The process uses warm water.
It wasn't until about 20 years ago that salmonella entered the oviducts of chickens and insinuated itself into the yolk. Previously it was a pathogen of horses and rabbits. No one knows how it made the species jump; this kind of thing happens all the time.
It is not fear mongering -- it is reality. Safe food options are available. Safe food practices are easy enough.
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