Get Eating: Food (and Leftover) Safety at Home

Are you cooking more at home or maybe diving into cooking for the first time? Cooking, baking and probably canning pretty soon are trending now. Cooking can be fun and rewarding, and it can occasionally make you sick. Right now, we all need to stay as healthy as we possibly can, especially our elders. So how do we prevent food-borne illness in our kitchens? How do we know that our leftovers are safe to eat if they’re not fuzzy of funky-smelling?

For help figuring out food safety, we reached out to Janice Hall, our Regional Extension Agent focused on Food Safety and Quality. She connected us with the Fight Bac Campaign of the Partnership for Food Safety Education. There are so many resources on this website! You can even find kids video games and coloring placemats or figure out how to add food safety to your recipe vlogging (ask my kid).

To get a food safety refresher start with The Four Core Practices. The big four are":

Clean - Clean hands, clean kitchen, clean produce + tips & suggestions.

Separate - In the grocery store & at home, keep your raw meat separate from other food, especially food you’re not going to cook.

Cook - All about cooking and reheating meat to safe temperatures. If you’ve never cooked a chicken or roast before, or even if you have, brush up on the Safe Minimal Internal Temperatures your food needs to reach to kill bacteria.

Chill - Keep that food cold! Storage Times for Refrigerator and Freezer will answer those critical questions like can I still eat last week’s hotdogs or will last night’s pizza make me sick? (I need to attach this to my fridge! I always have these questions.)

Take a minute, check out the resources, and let us know what you think. Happy home cooking!