Holiday Food Safety - Jill Roberts PhD USF

We got through Thanksgiving, and now Christmas brings another round of big holiday meals. With large meals and numerous dishes, the risk of food poisoning increases at this time of year. Not to mention the seasonal bugs being spread by guests. Gordon Byrd speaks with University of South Florida environmental health microbiology professor Jill Roberts about keeping food safe during holiday meals. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Gordon Bird here Beyond the News. We got through Thanksgiving
and now we have another round of home cooking for Christmas,
and that's a challenge for a lot of people. One
of the challenges and is making sure that the cooking
process remains healthy. Jill Roberts is a professor of Environmental
health microbiology at the University of South Florida USF in Tampa,

(00:23):
and she's here to talk with us about how to
be safe as we prepare our Christmas dinners. Jill Roberts,
thank you and joined. Thank you for joining us here
on Beyond the News.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Well, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Well, if you prepare food every day or you do
it for a living, you're familiar with concepts such as
proper cooking temperatures and cross contamination. But of course the
holidays are often a challenge for those of us who
are day and day, day and day out. Our culinary
expertise is popping a frozen dinner in the microwave. So

(01:00):
what are some of the most common mistakes that people
make when they're preparing their holiday dinner.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Yes, I think the holidays are a special time of
the year for food born illnesses, unfortunately, and the reason
that is is because we make large amounts of food
and we pretty much hold them at the absolute worst
temperatures possible, and so we see peaks and food born
illnesses around Thanksgiving and around the December holidays, mostly because

(01:28):
people make a lot of food and they tend to
leave it sitting out for long time periods. So you
think about your turkey or your goose or whatever it
is you're going to make for Christmas. You might make
a large meal, you might have some guests over leave
the food out let. People sort of pick out the
food for hours and hours on end, and during that

(01:48):
time period, all these microbes are sort of happily growing.
So ideally we would like people to take any kind
of food that has been prepared and put it in
the refrigerator within two hours of preparation. So you can
kind of see where that becomes a problem, Right, we
could have guess much longer than that. We can have
people hanging out and eating for literally hours.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Right, and it's not the first thing that's top of
mind with everything else going on on the holidays, people
going in and out of the house. So with that,
what are what are some of the dangers when you
leave that food out at room temperature. Obviously, you know,
we're told, you know, below freezing or over one forty

(02:31):
or at least below forty in a refrigerator. What are
we talking about when when we leave that food out
at room temperature?

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yeah. Sure, So when we prepare the food, sometimes we
accidentally might get a little bit of a microbe in there,
especially foods that aren't cooked. That can be a problem.
And so if there's small numbers in microbes, that's really
not a big issue, but when they are left out
to multiply, they become an issue. And so many of
our microbes can actually multiply themselves within twenty minutes, and

(03:02):
so a couple of hours is a really long time
for those microbes to start filling up. Now, we can
make it worse by just thinking about dishes that are
sitting out and they're not covered, and so anything that's
in our environment blowing around in the air now that
can land in the food. Now make it even worse.
We've got guests, right, so people are coming and they're
putting their hands in their food. In the December time

(03:25):
period is especially bad because everyone is sick, and so
some people who are ill might be coughing into the food,
so we can have airborne microbes, we can have hands
that are actually contaminating the food, and then all that
stuff just sitting out there, letting the microbes happily grow.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
So what are the essentials? What are the essentials? What
do we absolutely have to do to make sure that
our food stays as safe as possible once we've cooked
it and once we've had it out for everybody to
have their share of.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, so the best safety tips we can say is,
first of all, don't leave foods out for longer than
two hours. And so, for example, if you're gonna make
a potato salad that is enormous, just put out some
of it and if it runs out, put out some
more of it. Don't leave the whole thing sitting out
for four or five hours. That's definitely what we don't

(04:17):
want to do. Anything that you're going to make in
large amounts, just set it aside in your refrigerator, bring
it out if you need it or as you need it.
And so the other thing that can be really helpful
is think about how your guests are going to serve themselves.
What we don't want is people who might be ill
doing any of the cooking or getting any of the food. Now,

(04:40):
to prevent problems with people that we maybe don't know
that they might be ill, a good idea is to
use some sort of like a serving device, so we
don't want someone coming and just grabbing food with their
hands if you can avoid that. So you could put tongs,
you can put spoons, any kind of serving device that
prevents hand to food con is really helpful when illnesses

(05:02):
are going around.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
All good things to know, and we hope that everybody
has a healthy Christmas and healthy holidays and don't end
up with some kind of food borne illness in the aftermath.
Jill Roberts, PhD. She's a professor of environmental health microbiology
at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Thank you

(05:24):
very much for joining us on Beyond the News.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
My pleasure. Thank you,