Grill for Fun, Not Food-Borne Illness

Avoid the most common meat mistakes when you cookout

The holiday weekend is here, and your grill is calling you. Americans will consume millions of hamburgers and countless tubs of salad, coleslaw, and potato salad this weekend with friends and family.

Will your weekend be memorable for fun and relaxation? Or will it be a food poisoning nightmare?

• Here’s more advice on healthy grilling
• Keep your outdoor feast light and luscious with these recipes
• Wondering how your favorite BBQ foods fit into your diet? Ask the Dietitian

Experts agree that from the farm, to the manufacturing plant, to the grocery store, your holiday foods undergo the most rigorous safety monitoring of anywhere in the world. But at the end of that food chain, it's the chefs in your kitchen and at the backyard barbecue who can make or break the weekend.

Food-borne outbreaks are as likely to be due to careless handling of food at home as they are to errors in the manufacturing and processing of foods, says George Sandler, PhD, of the Illinois Institute of Technology and the National Center for Food Safety and Technology, Chicago.

In preparing virtually every kind of food likely to be gracing picnics and barbecues, "cross-contamination" is one of the most common food safety mistakes, say food safety specialists at Kansas State University Research and Extension Service. Cross-contamination happens when potentially harmful, disease-causing organisms are transferred from one food to another. For example, by using the same knife to cut raw meat, then vegetables.

This is one of the easiest mistakes to correct. Washing hands before and after handling raw or cooked foods, using clean utensils and cutting boards for each task, and remembering to place cooked meats on a different plate than the one used for raw meat, can significantly reduce food-borne illness, they say.

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