Food Safety and Food Borne Diseases Essays -- Exploratory Essays

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), food borne diseases cause an estimated 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. For many students, college is the first time many of you ever had to think about buying your own food or cooking for yourselves. As a result, many students are not educated in proper food safety precautions which can prevent many of these food borne diseases. Storing your food in the proper conditions is the first step in proper food safety. For meat, fish, and poultry, it is best to keep them in the coldest part of your refrigerator, which in most cases is in the drawers or the back of the bottom shelf. Storing meats on the top shelf may be more likely to leak and contaminate other foods that may be underneath. As a general rule of thumb, fresh poultry, seafood, and ground or chopped meat can be refrigerated for one to two days before cooking. Fresh red meat, cooked poultry, and meat leftovers can be refrigerated for three to five days, and lunch meats for three to seven day...