Introduction to Food Safety

[0:05]Food service professionals take food and workplace safety seriously, or they don't stay in business for long. Safety and sanitation in the food service industry include issues of storing foods to keep them safe from contamination, preparing foods in a way to minimize the chance of contamination, following proper cleaning protocols, and creating a workplace that is safe for food and food handlers. Foods can become contaminated or become harmful to humans through three pathways: pathogenic contamination, chemical contamination, and physical contamination. Let's explore each of these categories so we can better understand how to combat and prevent them. Pathogens are disease-causing microorganisms that can contaminate foods and cause severe illness in anyone who eats them. Millions of people each year are affected by foodborne pathogens and outbreaks that result in financial loss, illness, and even death. Certain foods are more susceptible to pathogens, including meat, fish, poultry, eggs, cooked rice, and cooked potatoes. In a kitchen, chemical contamination can come from three possible sources: residues such as pesticides or hormones left on or in foods from the supplier, cleaning compounds such as ammonia, chlorine, or silver polish, toxic metals or compounds used for cooking utensils such as chipped enamel or peeling Teflon. Physical contamination can occur with the supplier or vendor, such as when foreign particles get into the food product during the harvesting or packing. More likely, physical contamination occurs in the kitchen during food preparation and service, when hair, broken glass, or splinters of wood or metal fall into the food. Physical contamination can also occur when cleaning. For example, scrubbing a griddle using an old or inferior quality grill brick can result in glass particles in the brick breaking off and getting into the food being cooked on the grill. Another example is when pieces of cleaning tools being used to scrub pots and pans, such as pieces of metal from stainless steel scrubbers, contaminates the food being cooked. Cross-contamination is another danger during food preparation. This occurs when a previously safe item is exposed to an unsafe item and then becomes contaminated. The most obvious examples are in the use of cutting boards. If you have just placed raw chicken on a cutting board, you don't want to cut your tomatoes for the salad on that same cutting board. Now that we've talked about how foods can become contaminated, in the next video, we'll talk about what we can do in the kitchen to keep foods in our customer safe.