TONGS. Two, Please.

The biggest barbecue holiday of the year is finally here, the Fourth of July!! Backyard grills will fire-up, burners will light-up, charcoal will heat up, and people will throw up. Throw up? Yes. The biggest barbecue day of the year is also the biggest bacteria-spreading day of the year. More people will make themselves sick, because most people don't understand how to use the tool most commonly employed to tend to food on the grill - TONGS.

First, a cooking lesson. 
Microscopic things in food, like bacteria, viruses, parasites, and toxins, which can make you sick, are called PATHOGENS. Food is cooked for the sole purpose of destroying pathogens with heat. Cooking for flavor is only a byproduct.

Different types of food carry different pathogens. Beef, pork, fish, and vegetables all carry pathogens which the human body finds less than friendly, but enough heat for a few seconds will destroy them.  Chicken, however, carries Salmonella, the most deadly, most wide spread, most difficult-to-kill "bug" in the world of food safety.

The Health Department, CDC, FDA, and USDA, all require restaurants to implement very specific procedures to deal with food-borne pathogens. The most important is to keep different types of food separated from others, and to clean and sanitize all utensils and surfaces after each food type is prepared. This reduces the possibility that pathogens from one type of food, especially chicken, will transfer or cross-contaminate to others.

Here's the problem.
People will complain and file law suits if they get sick from eating contaminated food at a restaurant. But around the Fourth of July, in their own backyard, at home, those same people will voluntarily and thoughtlessly violate every known food safety rule, and will pile every known food type onto the grill. Beef and pork and fish and vegetables will all be touching and laying over one another with raw chicken in the middle touching everything else in a veritable orgy of germiness. Then those same people will bring out food safety's greatest nemesis, the TONGS.

Tongs, used wrong, will spread germs from raw food to cooked food. Tongs are the tool that can spread Salmonella from uncooked chicken (or any poultry) to every other food on the grill, even other chicken. During the barbecue process, Tongs don't get hot enough to kill pathogens. Tongs are contaminated from the very beginning of the grilling process because they are commonly used to place most foods on the grill. Because tongs never remain in the heat, the pathogens on them never die. Then, the same contaminated tongs are used to turn and re-position everything, as it cooks. Finally, the same dirty tongs are used to remove and serve cooked food. So, the cooked food is actually re-contaminated by those nasty, filthy, germ infested, pathogen infected tongs. For some people, that's the part that can lead to throwing up.

Here's the solution.
It takes two tongs to tend grilled food safely. The first part is to start the cooking. Use the first tongs to place and turn the raw to semi-cooked food over and over on the grill. Then either switch to another set of tongs, or stop and sanitize the same tongs before continuing.

The second tongs are used to turn and position food after it's cooked but while it's getting that final bit of appetizing color. Then these second, clean tongs are used to remove the food from the grill. This way no pathogens can be transferred from uncooked food to cooked food, which means no throwing up.

Happy Fourth!

Andy Bozeman

Andy Bozeman is the founder of

www.FoodSafetyTrainingCenter.com

"The Perfect Prevention Measure"