Food Hygiene and Safety: Best 5 Practices During a Pandemic
I’m vigilant about food hygiene at the best of times, but the coronavirus pandemic has kicked my concern into overdrive.
How can we be sure the food we’re eating is safe with so many messages about how persistent certain germs can be?
Will the virus survive on our food? Can we get it from groceries or takeout? Do we need to invest in a special vegetable wash?
It seems like every day, I have a new question or worry.
In that spirit, I’ve compiled a list of 5 essential food hygiene and safety practices to help you enjoy your meals during this outbreak without worry.
But before we dive into our list, it’s important to understand what we’re dealing with here.
If you’ve been scrubbing everything in sight with antibacterial wipes, you need to know that coronavirus is caused by a virus – hence the name – and not bacteria. Some bacteria do cause infections like strep throat or urinary tract infections, but they don’t cause COVID-19.
Viruses are parasitic, requiring living cells or tissue to grow. They’re often contagious and include the flu, the common cold, chicken pox, viral gastroenteritis and, yes, COVID-19.
Antibiotics and antibacterial products are only effective against bacteria; they won’t kill viruses like COVID-19.
With that distinction in mind, let’s take a look at some smart advice for safe food handling.
1. Order groceries online if possible
You might be allowed to venture out to the grocery store where you live, but that doesn’t mean you should.
I like choosing my own produce, but I like being healthy even more. If it’s at all feasible to order your groceries online, that should be your first choice.
I’ve sat in long online queues and dealt with frustratingly slow websites – I even watched helplessly as my painstakingly-filled shopping cart got erased once – but I had the peace of mind of knowing that I wasn’t exposed to coronavirus while doing so.
When you order online, you generally pay in advance, so you don’t have to exchange payment with the delivery person. That’s a huge plus in my book.
I have them leave my order outside my door, and I wait until they’ve gone back to their truck to head out and bring my shopping inside. I then disinfect everything I touched when I carried the groceries inside, like the doorknob and light switch.
2. Be careful if you have to go to the store
If you can’t order your groceries online for whatever reason, try not to panic too much about going to the store. Although it’s better to avoid it, you should be fine if you take the right precautions.
The first rule, of course, is to avoid going out if you’re feeling unwell. This should be common sense even when we’re not in a pandemic, but we’ve all done it before.
Plan your shopping before you leave. Now isn’t the time to go without a list and wander aimlessly trying to decide what to buy. This isn’t an outing. The less time you spend walking around, the lower your chance will be of contracting something.
Safe grocery shopping
If you just need a few things, bring a reusable grocery bag from home and fill it. If you must use a shopping cart, disinfect the handle before you start shopping. Some stores are already doing this, but it doesn’t hurt to do it yourself as well.
This doesn’t mean you can then be less on-guard when it comes to touching your face, but it may protect you a little if the person who used the cart before you touched their own face while pushing the cart around.
While you’re at the store, remember not to touch your face for any reason. Don’t answer your phone because you’ll be putting the screen you touch right up to your mouth. Bring a paper list if you normally use an app.
Bring along a hand sanitizer with at least 70 percent alcohol and clean your hands every now and then with it, especially if you have a tendency to mindlessly touch your face or hair.
Don’t pick up different items of food and set them back down. Pick up the items you want, toss them in your shopping cart, and keep moving.
If one part of the store is crowded, head to another area and then go back when there are fewer people. Don’t forget to leave 6 feet between yourself and others at all time.
Pay with a card instead of cash if you can, preferably the contactless variety.
After you load your groceries into the car and return the shopping cart, don’t forget to disinfect your hands again so you don’t track germs onto the steering wheel!
3. Quarantine incoming food
I try to “quarantine” as much of my food as I can. Pantry items that I can live without for three days go in the garage, where I leave them untouched.
If you have an extra fridge and/or freezer, you could devote it to housing new items for a few days while any germs they contain hopefully die off.
How to clean groceries
Disinfect the items you simply can’t wait to use. You can use soapy water or a mixture of hand sanitizer with more than 70 percent alcohol and water. Do this before placing new and potentially contaminated items into your pantry or fridge, where they may contaminate older goods as well.
Although most experts agree that groceries are not a major mode of transmission, it’s best to be on the safe side. If someone with coronavirus did sneeze on your can of beans, it should die in a couple of days, but if you happen to use it before that time has passed and then touch your face, it’s technically possible to get the virus.
It’s also worth noting that it lives longer in cold temperatures, like your fridge or freezer, which is why virus samples and test specimens often have to be refrigerated. Wash your hands thoroughly after handling these items.
4. Clean vegetables and fruit safely
Washing produce is a topic that comes up even when the world isn’t battling a pandemic, but it’s especially relevant now. After all, you don’t know how many people handled that pear you’re about to bite into before it made its way to your home.
But what you don’t want to do is skip eating produce out of fear of contracting the virus. It’s especially important right now to eat lots of immunity-boosting fruits and vegetables so your body stands a fighting chance against coronavirus and other illnesses.
I’ve seen people soaking their veggies in soapy water, perhaps figuring that what works for our hands must work for our produce.
But hands aren’t porous. Fruits and vegetables are, which means the soap – and in some cases, people are even using bleach – will go right into the produce you’re eating!
Can the virus live on fruits and vegetables?
In theory, yes. It’s unlikely to survive the acid in your stomach, which means eating fruit someone coughed on may not infect you, but experts say you could well get it by touching fruit someone sneezed on and then touching your face.
So you do want to clean your produce, not only because of viruses but also because of pesticides. While even eating pesticide-laden produce is better than skipping fruits and vegetables altogether, it just makes sense to rinse off as much of it as you can before you eat it.
How to wash vegetables and fruits
I’ve long used a combination of baking soda and vinegar to rinse off pesticides, but the official recommendation for reducing viruses is to soak your produce in water or place it under running water. Washing produce can remove as much as 90 percent of contamination on it; cooking vegetables will kill the virus.
Even fruit with a peel, like bananas, should be washed first because you could contaminate your hands with the peel and then infect yourself when you touch and eat the fruit inside.
What about takeout food?
Given how difficult it can be to get groceries these days, you might be wondering how risky it is to get takeout.
Experts have confirmed coronavirus isn’t a foodborne pathogen, but if someone with the virus handled your food after it was prepared with dirty hands or happened to cough or sneeze on it, they could have well transferred the virus onto your food. Yuck!
To combat this, they suggest reheating takeout or leftovers to an internal temperature of 165 degrees – use a thermometer to be sure.
If you can’t resist the urge to order takeout, be sure to transfer the food from its packaging, without touching it, to a clean receptacle, then wash your hands and reheat the food before eating it.
5. Follow general food safety practices
Even if you’re confident that whatever you’re cooking or eating is unlikely to infect you with coronavirus, it’s still important to remember that it’s a bad time to contract any type of foodborne illness, as it could require a doctor or hospital trip that could put you right in the path of infected people.
Therefore, you must follow general food safety measures, such as keeping any raw meat you might eat separate from other food, keeping perishable items refrigerated, and cooking your food to the proper temperature.
The bottom line
Now more than ever, it’s essential to follow proper food safety and hygiene practices. As long as you stick to the guidelines, you should have nothing to worry about and can enjoy healthy, safe meals with your family.
If you’re wondering how you can fit more nutrients into your meals these days, be sure to get my free immunity-boosting guide, which includes 10 delicious recipes designed to help your body stand up to whatever life throws at it.