Washing your hands is not optional when cooking
Rachel Sanders is a nutrition and food safety expert and lecturer at Northampton College. She is an expert in making sure the people working in a kitchen maintain excellent health standards and there are several methods that she has taught and employed to keep people safe. One of these is ensuring that people wash their hands for a long enough time, she taught students to sing happy birthday to themselves twice over while washing their hands to ensure that they have done this for long enough.
Most people, especially those working in the catering industry, understand the need for food safety and hygiene in preventing illness. However over 1 million people, every year, in the UK still suffer from some sort of food poisoning and of this 1 million over 20,000 require hospital treatment. People speculate that the reason this figure is still so high is that people know the rules but it is all too easy not to follow them.
One of the most common areas that people lack knowledge in the UK is the risk that is posed from fruit and vegetables. Generally people associate food poisoning with meat, but one of the biggest causes of food poisoning is often from vegetables. Often there is also cross contamination as people are less careful in changing boards and equipment when cooking with vegetables.
A chief scientist at the FSA is Dr Andrew Wadge has recently commented, “Unfortunately it is a rather common myth that vegetables cannot make us sick however there are many harmful bacteria in the soil and these are the cause of many food poisoning cases in the UK each year. Some food producers have excellent controls in place but it is really impossible to get rid of all contamination.
“It is important that people realise the importance of washing vegetables, and salads, before they eaten. The only time that you do not have to wash a salad or vegetables is if the packages marked as ready to eat.”
Ms Sanders has commented about this situation, “It is all too easy to violate this rule. Just think about how many times you have been in the supermarket and have eaten a grape without thinking twice. It only requires a few seconds of washing to remove the harmful bacteria from fruit that is something that I cannot recommend enough.”
In order to emphasise how important handwashing is to her students, Ms Sanders has a special gel which they can put on their hands after washing which will highlight any bacteria left when their hands are put under ultraviolet light. For most students this is a real eye-opener to how resilient bacteria are to washing your hands.
She also recommends that every kitchen has different sets of chopping boards. For example you should have one that is specifically allocated to cutting raw meat, and it is also important to make sure that you use a different board for different vegetables, especially if you are mixing cooked with uncooked.
