Food Safety 101

Food safety should be the first priority in the kitchen.  Alice Henneman, food safety expert and dietary educator at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, shares indispensable tips and advice on setting up a safe home kitchen.  

Suggested Recipes:

Beef Recipes
Chicken Recipes
Main Course Recipes

1. What has motivated you to become an expert on safe cooking methods?  Are there special challenges in educating the public about food safety?

I attended a program on food safety this week and the speaker asked how many in the audience had personally had a foodborne illness at least once in their lives. Over 100 people were at the meeting and every hand went up! 

I’m a great advocate of cooking some of your meals at home – the enticing aromas, the tastes, the lingering at the table after the meal over a cup of coffee, glass of wine or just the conclusion to a leisurely conversation. Plus, it doesn’t take that much time to prepare a great-tasting meal for a fraction of the cost of dining out.

However, unless you take a family and consumer class in school, there is no place in the general educational system where you are taught about food safety in a home setting; and who wants to spoil a wonderful homemade meal with a foodborne illness! That is why I became interested in home food safety.  Not to become the “food police,” but to people keep those home-cooked meal memories wonderful!

People can’t count on their sense of smell, taste and sight to tell if a food is safe. Each year in the United States, 76 million people become ill from a foodborne illness and 5,000 people die.  Would this many people eat something if they thought it tasted, looked or smelled bad?

Even if tasting would tell… a “tiny taste” may not protect you. As few as 10 bacteria could cause some foodborne illnesses, such as E. coli!
Also, it can take a ½ hour to 6 weeks to become sick from unsafe foods. You usually feel OK immediately after eating and become sick later. Even if you did get sick from tasting, it may not be soon enough to warn you against feeding the food to someone else.