Cooking with your children can be fun as well as teach them a great deal about healthy eating. It’s also important to teach them how to practice safe food handling.
The Basics
Hot temperatures usually kill bacteria, while cold temperatures prevent them from multiplying. This means when food is kept at temperatures between 4 °C and 60 °C they are most susceptible to bacteria, and should not be kept in these temperatures for more than two hours.
Teaching Your Children
When you unpack groceries with your children, teach them which foods need to be refrigerated so they can help you put them away and learn proper food safety.
Foods like shellfish, dressing, milk and milk products, cooked rice, cooked vegetables, meat, poultry, fish, gravy, processed meats, eggs and egg products, whipped creams, and puddings are just some foods that can become unsafe if not properly handled or stored.
Food Safety Tips
Wash your hands (and teach your children to do the same) before and after handling all food. Wash your hands again before and after you handle raw meat and poultry and be careful to prevent your children from handling raw meat.
In general, cooked food and raw food should not touch in the cooking process. This means that you should use different plates and utensils for raw and cooked foods, unless the ones you used for raw food have been washed and sanitized properly. You should wash dishes, cutting boards, and utensils with hot, soapy water if they have been used for preparing raw food.
It’s also important to cook meat to a safe internal temperature. As a general rule, you can cook meat until it is no longer pink on the inside. To be sure food is cooked to safe temperatures, use an internal meat thermometer and follow this guide.
When putting away leftover food, divide it into several smaller containers and put it away quickly after cooking it to prevent bacteria growth.
At Childventures, our head chef is qualified in food handling to ensure all health and safety regulations are followed.