The washing of hands and produce goes without saying.

I keep my fridge at 38 degrees.

I don't wash bottles, etc. but I do take cheese out of any plastic wrap and wrap it in parchment paper (it keeps longer that way.)

Regardless of where I've been I wash my hands as soon as I come home especially if I've been grocery shopping. If I've been putting away groceries I wash them after as well.

I put leftovers in the fridge right after dinner and only keep them a max of two days. I store things in glass dishes and never plastic.

I scrub my sinks constantly.

I have a separate cutting board for chicken and wash it and that sink immediately when finished.

I don't know if this is relevant but I air dry any dishes that I have hand-washed.

Oh, for sure wash hands as soon as returning home.

I will try putting cheese in parchment paper. But, how do you recognized what cheese is what? Cut and paste the label? Write the details?

We keep our fridge cold ~38 deg.

We put button mushrooms in a paper lunch bag, leaving the top a bit loose.

True, blfenton, I thinks it’s important to be careful with raw chicken (especially).

I don’t give myself a migraine over this sort of thing, but I am aware. My parents were neat and clean and pragmatic. Every now and then my father would say something like ”You don’t know where that’s been.”

We are likely immune to a lot of everyday pathogens and ”cooties” — many people seem to subscribe to the “peck of dirt“ philosophy. Okay, but I want to have some say over what peck of dirt. No brain worms :)

🔸 Handbags are definitely not allowed on the kitchen counters or tables.

When it comes to washing things like fruit people forget about vinegar. It works the same way bleach does. Bleach is a base and fungus and bacteria have relatively narrow zones of ph. Vinegar-an acid-does the same thing in changing the ph and has the merit of being totally safe to use. I wash strawberries with vinegar solution and they keep twice as long.

I cut up meat on a standing cutting board set down in my very large porcelain sink. It contains any splatter or mess. I clean the cutting block with first soap and a scrub and then salt and vinegar. Then I can just disinfect my sink when I am done. We are told to not wash poultry but I am not interested in eating cooked chicken poop.

For those of us who do home canning, there are specific rules as outlined in places like the NCHFP so that the food we can is safe.

For everyday safety, I am mindful of how many days items have been in the refrigerator and mindful of how long perishable food items or cooked food have been left at room temperature. After specified times they are disposed of.

" I do take cheese out of any plastic wrap and wrap it in parchment paper (it keeps longer that way.) "

Unless you have a way of using the parchment paper in a way to make it air tight, I wouldn't think this to be a good idea.

Stuff like cheese that spends some time in a fridge will give off and or absorb odors present in the fridge. I think removing the the wrap it comes with is fine but what can be used to be certain of being airtight is well-sealed plastic wrap or even plastic bags. Even both.

Unless you have a way of using the parchment paper in a way to make it air tight, I wouldn't think this to be a good idea.

Cheese needs to breathe, so to speak: https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/dont-wrap-your-cheese-in-plastic-heres-the-proper-way-to-store-it/

One of the two main goals when wrapping and storing cheese is to allow a little bit of airflow so that your fancy cheese can still breathe. "The main idea here is you don't want to wrap it in plastic," says Montez, "There are a lot of active microorganisms in cheese and you want to keep them alive by the time you're going to eat it."

If you're wondering why then, was the wedge of precut cheese you bought from the grocer or cheese store wrapped in plastic, presumably by cheese professionals, the answer is marketing. "It's mostly for display purposes," says Montez, since you're not likely to buy what you can't see. "There are cheese shops where they exclusively wrap in paper, but that's rare. If you're a big shop that moves a lot of product, it's not a problem if you know if the cheese is wrapped in plastic for a couple of days, but beyond that, it can be bad for the cheese.

ETA: I write the name of the cheese in marker on the paper.

petalique, I think it's good that you've found steps and practices that make you feel more comfortable with what you consume. Some of which may perhaps be a bit extreme. Stuff that others may not be willing to follow, but what works for you, works for you.

I'm as disgusted or more so than most about the ever-present while avoidable levels of contamination in the US food supply. Some of it is benign, though.

It reminds me of a small anecdote described in a great book I read some time ago, Polio by Oshinsky. A Pulitzer Prize winner. In the mid-1950s, with Dr. Salk hot on the trail of an effective polio vaccine, it was decided that a widespread public test to test safety and effectiveness should first be conducted before the vaccine was pushed out to the entire population. They wanted a cross-section of American kids, from all parts of the country, to make sure regional differences in health, etc., were taken into effect when considering the effectiveness of the new vaccine.

Supplies were limited and they wanted to make sure not to waste any on test subjects that wouldn't add to the diversity and usefulness of the trial. It was known that children of impoverished rural families in the South, both black and white, had low levels of polio infections compared to kids in other parts of the country, as well as lower levels of other infectious diseases. The field of immunology was not nearly as advanced as today but it was thought that the dirty conditions such poor kids lived in exposed them to pathogens for which they developed natural immunities and robust immune systems. From strictly a testing standpoint, there was a good argument to completely exclude such kids because of their low susceptibility to contracting polio. But from a political standpoint, the public reaction to doing so might have been disasterous. The compromise they reached in planning the trial was to include a small sampling of rural Southern children and make no public comments about what regions and what kids were to be tested and why or why not.

The attitude of parents to tell their kids "Go play in the dirt" does have scientific basis.

Good practices above. 38F is a good fridge temp but sometimes it's not reliable if that reading is from a built-in fridge read-out. My SIL has a fridge like that and the readout temp on hers is the interior setting and not the actual temp inside. She noticed that something was amiss when her milk did not seem as cold as usual even though the readout was in the 30's. We use a remote thermometer inside our fridges to keep tabs on the actual temperature, and also have them in our 2 chest freezers to monitor the temp swings (typically -15 / +5F).

https://cooking.nytimes.com/article/how-to-store-cheese

NYT says 'cheese paper' or wax or parchment paper, then in a loosely sealed container or plastic bag.

Thanks, lucillle.

I remember staying with some Vermonters years ago. They would purchase a chunk of locally made Chedder at the country store and instead of refrigerating it, would leave it out on the counter, loosely covered. The cheese reached ambiant temperature, weeped a bit, but then the full flavor emerged. I sometimes do that with cheese.

I have found that zucchini keeps well storedwith a paper towel in a zip lock bag in the vegetable bin.

Comments above have exposed me to more knowledgeable cheese practices, thanks.
Those notwithstanding, as the cheeses we eat are of just a few types and tend to be stinky - aged Romano hunks, a heavenly French Camembert we can get that's as gooey and stinky as you can imagine, and Swiss gruyere or emmentaler, I'll keep them in plastic to protect them from one another and vice versa for other things in the fridge. They do breathe, each is probably out at least every other day.

I live on a farm. Lord knows I have a super varied and healthy gut biome. I wash my hands when I come back into the house from the barn or working outside. If I am fixing food for other people I wash my hands first, if it’s just myself I don’t bother. I abide by the 5 second rule. Sometimes I use the 7 or 10 second rule, depending on what hit the floor. I rarely wash produce, we’ll stand out in the garden and eat stuff right then and there. If I am fixing food for other people, I’ll wash the produce. My husband doesn’t care as other people.

Yes to checking independent thermometers in fridge and freezer, and washing rinds/peels before slicing. I don't buy pre-cut fruit. (Have you ever seen the back of a grocery store?) I also skip the grocery deli. Nothing stands out long before its refrigerated. Nothing gets rewarmed twice.

Shady -- Eating out of your own garden is different from eating stuff that's traveled miles. No way to duplicate your kind of *fresh*!

Cheese and plastic wrap (or plastic bags) don't do well together. I either put the cheese in parchment paper and then in a plastic bag, or leave it in its packaging and then in a plastic bag. I never wash fruit before peeling, never wipe down bottles or cans, but I am very careful about raw meat and the instruments I use on them (knives, tongs, cutting boards). I wear nitrile gloves when working with raw meat, and will do an antibacterial clean of my sink after I've had raw-meat-tools in there.

My sibs and friends eat raw oysters, sushi.

I don’t care to eat raw or live animals. No kibbeh or meat either. A lot of people do.

Anyone here shun sprouts but eat raw fish or meat?

I shun bean sprouts because I don't like them......I love sushi and sashimi, and have been known to eat beef or tuna tartar occasionally. I'm careful about where I eat raw foods from, though, and try to judge if they do things safely. I admit it's a gamble.

I draw the line at live animals, though.

" Anyone here shun sprouts but eat raw fish or meat? "

We stopped buying sprouts to eat at home in salads and to add to other dishes long ago, and with what I learned from some of the cites above, I plan to stop throwing them into pho, as previously mentioned.

I really enjoy both sushi/sashimi and poke and try to be careful about choosing up-market rather than down-market places to eat them in, those more likely to handle the raw food properly. To some extent, I admit I can't be sure but in decades of eating such foods, no problems. Sushi grade fish is treated by freezing to lower than normal temps to treat parasites but I accept that some risk is involved. I don't like oysters, one of the few seafood types I don't try to eat regularly. (Speaking of which, we had mussels for dinner a few nights ago. Cooked of course. Delish!)

I also really like steak tartare but eat it only on what's now become less frequent than before visits to Continental Europe. Food handling and food purity there are at much higher standards than here.

Years ago before I retired I'd join my co-workers for sushi lunches and did like the raw tuna sushi. But now I skip the raw dishes and stick to the cooked menu (shrimp, crab, veggie). The raw dishes were good but I see no need to take a chance on inviting a worm into my brain ;-)

Basically, if it smells or feels off, we don’t eat it.

Vg, you could be missing out on a leadership job down the line. 😄

If that doesn’t work out there’s always a deli meat position.

Nyuk Roxsol ;-).....btw, below are pics of one of our deep freezer remote themometers. It's best to use a corded one for the freezers to keep the battery on the outside. I like seeing the temp without opening up the door. For fridges the wireless remote themometer keeps you posted on the temp inside when the power fails, also without opening up the door...

The tiny sensor on the other end of the wire easliy slips thru the freezer gasket.

Good idea, VgKg. We do this for our fridge sometimes. Also when roasting items.

I used a Bluetooth temperature monitor for my stand-alone freezer (before I got a standby generator) - you place it in the fridge or freezer, and can check the temperature with an app on your phone if you're in Bluetooth range.

It stores the temperature in between times you download......For instance, if you've been away and want to check the temperature while you've been gone, you download it to your phone once you're back and in range, and it will give you the last however many weeks or months of data since you last downloaded it. We use them at work now too. These are the ones I use - inexpensive and very useful: https://inkbird.com/products/bluetooth-hygrometer-thermometer-ibs-th2-series

I draw the line at live animals, though.

Gagh, a delicacy for the Star Trek universe's martial Klingon race, is a glob of worms, usually served live and wriggling.

bpath, my LG fridge shows the temperature of the fridge and freezer compartments. It's an LG French door bottom freezer unit, but it was here when I moved in so I don't know the model number.

EDIT: I'm wrong - it shows the set temperature, not the actual temperature. Sorry.

No need to go intergalactic —- Japanese, SE Asia. ;)

I’m too provincial. Back in the 1960s, when some underutilized species (sea cucumber, say) arrived with the crabs and lobsters in a trap or on the dock, local would exclaim, don’t toss it back. The Japanese will eat it.

Indeed, now a lot of these critters are enjoyed by Americans — sea cucumbers, sea , urchins, kelp — lots of marine life and plants.

PS I have a pantry full of Asian condiments — fish and oyster sauce, shrimp paste (funky when concentrated), essential for making Thai and Vietnamese curry pastes.

I wash all produce immediately except avocados and I wash my hands continuously all day long but immediately when I get home from the stores. I wipe down the counters and butcherblock a few times a day and never let food sit out of refrigeration. But I did set the table tonight and came back in and found Willy sitting on my plate. Of course, I immediately scrubbed it in soapy water but it was cute.