3. Cooking and Preparing Foods
When we are cooking food, we have to strike a balance between keeping the nutritional quality and safety of the food material. Because it has been said that you should avoid boiling your vegetables to avoid loss of nutrients, some people just wash in water and and heat for a short period with a ready-made pepper stew. This is not ideal.
We have to make sure that we, at lest cook our food materials to a safe internal temperature before we eat them. This will ensure the destruction of spoilage and pathogenic organisms. Frying, even though should be avoided or minimized, destroys even the vegetative spores of microorganisms — making the food highly safe.
Let us also make sure the water we use for cooking is clean and safe. Water could contain E. coli which has an virulent enterohaemorrhagic serotype named O157:H7. It could cause conditions as mild as diarrhea and as severe as bloody diarrhea and kidney failure.
It could also be present in intestines of cattle and this could be hard to detect as cattle could just be carrier and not be affected by this organisms. So, let us cook our meat very well too — bird flu and Ebola virus disease should have taught us some lessons in that aspect.
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