Fight bac what you can’t see
Just you, me, and a billion microbes
Ivana Sobat
You’ve decided to impress your date with a great dinner at your place. The plan has been lurking in your mind for the longest time, and you bought the groceries a week ago since you were so excited to pull it all together. You’ve also Google-searched and found a great chicken cordon bleu recipe to go with a rice soufflé, a spinach salad with a strawberry vinaigrette and, to end on a sweet note, a chocolate mousse made the old fashioned way. What would we ever do without Google?
Friday rolls around and your plan will finally be put into action. You’ve been thinking about it all day and ideally would have spent most of the afternoon preparing for the evening. However, you had a quiz that afternoon, an appointment with your professor about the upcoming assignment and the team would be disappointed if you missed the weekly get together for lunch. You finally leave university at 3:30, get home half an hour later and have two hours to prepare the dinner, clean up your place, set the table with great panache and shower (can’t forget that).
At this point, you are pressed for time but decide there’s no point in dwelling on it and go full force with the cooking. First, the chicken. As you are pulling it out of your fridge, you notice that the chicken has left a slight pool of something around the package. You have left chicken breast in your fridge for almost a week, but you’re thinking, “A little fridge perspiration, that’s normal, right?” Just in case, you rinse the chicken breast with some water, place it on the cutting board, gather the rest of the ingredients, turn the oven dial to 220 C and — voila! — one dish down.
You look at the clock and begin to panic, so you quickly measure out the rice, scrape some of the chicken bits off the cutting board and start cutting up the vegetables. You’re starting to feel like you are part Terminator, part Martha Stewart, but you don’t give that much thought; you just keep going. The oven timer goes off, so you pull out the chicken, look to see if it’s done and leave it on the stovetop to cool.
The salad comes next. You pull out the bag of spinach and notice that some of the spinach has wilted on you. First the chicken, now the spinach — great! You gather that the fridge was not cold enough and turn the temperature back down to 4 C. After picking out the fresh looking leaves, you place them in the bowl (the package says pre-washed, so why do it twice?) and add the strawberries and a few nuts, leaving the dressing off to the side for later. Phew!
Oh no, the chocolate mousse! Somehow you doubt that your date will be impressed with the two chocolate bars that you have in the cupboard. The mousse is a must! You scan the recipe for the ingredients, then grab the milk. Before you measure it out, you give it the “smell test,” because you notice that the best before date is today. It smells okay, so it should be edible. You add the rest of the ingredients and, although you used an electric mixer as recommended, the mousse looks more like a fancy pudding — but nice glasses will offset that.
Then comes the boring part — doing the dishes, but you manage that situation in 10 minutes flat and spend another two minutes drying the dishes with the same tea towel you used to wipe the counters after making the chicken. While you are impressed with your new record, you notice that the tea towel has a certain smell to it.
Then you remember the food safe student package that you picked up at university that week. It lists the four principles of food safety: clean, separate, cook, chill. Thinking back over the last hour, you realize that you forgot to properly clean your utensils and cutting board between making the chicken and the salad, your fridge was in the bacteria danger zone above 4 C and you dried your dishes with a dirty towel.
You also read that among 18- to 24-year-olds in Canada, 27 per cent say that they rely on appearance to judge if the leftovers are still edible, many employ the “smell test” before eating the leftovers, and 35 per cent will wait more than 10 days to throw out the leftovers from the fridge.
Because you seem to fit the bad food safety practices, you are suddenly concerned about the dinner you just made. You have made dinner in the past and it has always been okay, should you take the chance this time?
Pick up your safe food handling student kit from November 14 - 17 at University Centre and find out your chances, or check out www.canfightbac.org.
