❹ Unhealthy Food Safety Practices

Over 30% of food poisoning cases occur within the home environment due to risky food handling, storage and preparation practices.  In fact, food safety in the home is one of the issues many individuals take lightly and as much as 90 % of home cooks and home chefs unknowingly contaminate food. (1) 
Poor food safety practices not only compromise food but leads to contamination all around the kitchen, including on handles, counter-tops, faucets and trash cans. (1)

However, research shows that getting individuals to change poor food safety habits can take longer than simply exposing them to food safety messages before cooking. (2) 
Habits are often hard to break especially when they have been passed on from generation to generation or done out of convenience. This does not mean educators should stop trying to get the message of food safety out there but should seek out innovative ways to  present the message. (3)
Nevertheless,  listed below are ❹ unhealthy food safety practices. Accompanying each point is a video from USDAfoodsafety.com explaining how to these practices can be improved. 

①  Washing meat and poultry before cooking -70 %of consumers rinse or wash raw poultry before cooking it (1)

② Relying on the colour of meat/poultry/seafood to indicate when it is fully cooked- Less than 10 % of food thermometer owners actually use it to check for done-ness of all types of poultry (1)

③ Putting raw meat/poultry on the top shelf in the refrigerator - only 18 % of consumers correctly store raw poultry products in the refrigerator (1)

④  Defrosting frozen meat/poultry at room temperature- only 11 % of consumers who thaw raw poultry in cold water do it correctly (1)

Bottom-line, habits are hard to break but that should not stop anyone from at least trying their best every day to practice good food safety practices (see poster below). 

Be Food Safe!

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References:
1) Kansas State University. "Food safety fumble: Research finds 90 percent of home chefs contaminate food." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 29 January 2015. .

2) Katherine M. Kosa, Sheryl C. Cates, Samantha Bradley, Edgar Chambers IV, Sandria Godwin. Consumer-Reported Handling of Raw Poultry Products at Home: Results from a National Survey. Journal of Food Protection, 2015; 78 (1): 180 DOI: 10.4315/0362-028X.JFP-14-231

3) North Carolina State University. "Food safety social media guide developed by researchers." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 4 August 2014.