Food Safety Is Even More Important Now Than It Has Been

Back in the Dark Ages, when I was becoming a chef, if you wanted a job in food service of any kind, regardless of the establishment, you were legally required to take a course in food safety given by the state. Afterward, you had to take and pass a test that literally included everything in the course to obtain certification. 

Most food service establishments paid for your course, your certificate, and laminated state pictured ID card, which you received after successful completion. To ensure that you always had your ID card and hadn't forgotten it, the cards were continuously kept under the cash drawers of the registers for the entirety of your employment to ensure that they could prove employees were certified when the inspectors came.

Apparently, this is no longer true anywhere in the US anymore. Let me know if this is still a thing where you are.

I mention this because I shop curbside. Having someone else select my food is a necessary evil that I have had to learn to accept; and it hasn't been easy. 

The duties associated with the position of "shopper" varies a little from place to place, but at its' root, this person walks up and down the aisles and fills your order. This position is entry level and people do not tend to stay long, either through promotion (those people hold this position the longest), or because they are no longer employed there. It is a revolving door of personnel and I am thrilled when I see someone more than once.

When you order your food online, in addition to notes you can make for every individual item, there is a "notes" section where one can say something general to the shopper. In that section, order after order, I thank them, wish them a lovely day, and instruct them my to make sure that they pack the raw meat separately from ALL other food. 

I also realize that if they require direction to pack raw meat separately, then they are also likely not turning the plastic bag inside out over their hand to handle the raw meat during the selection process, while subsequently doing the rest of my shopping. Fortunately, most of my food items are in packaging.

This is also why I don't order fresh food that one would typically eat without cooking. You can't wash cross-contamination of this kind away under the faucet.

Even still, a couple of weeks ago, I risked ordering an apple. I haven't had one since lockdown began and Autumn usually makes me want an apple occasionally. And even though my note about packing separately was there, they put my solitary apple in with the raw pork. This meant that I had to cook the apple to eat it, which wasn't at all what I wanted.

In the past couple of decades, food safety oversight at production and processing plants has been greatly reduced, and now, even more so. So while there will be times that we can't avoid illness because of that fact, we can avoid a lot of it by adhering to food safety rules.

So here is a food safety guide that you can open in a new window and slide to your desktop to share with whomever you think needs it.