CDC's Study On Safe Food Preparation Practices

This research paper Factors Impacting Food Workers’ and Managers’ Safe Food Preparation Practices: A Qualitative Study from the CDC states that most foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States originate from improper food preparation practices in restaurants.   This unique study collected information directly from food service workers and their managers.  Over 70 restaurant workers participated and provided an insider's look into actual on-the-job practices.

It focused on 7 very specific food preparation practices and tried to determine where corners were being cut and what policies were helping.

1. Handwashing
2. Cross contamination prevention
3. Glove use      
4. Determining food doneness 
5. Holding
6. Cooling
7. Reheating

Because of our interest in cutting boards, we found several keys points laid out in this article regarding cross contamination prevention.

Cross Contamination Problems:

1. Not enough space to keep meat preparation in a separate area from vegetable prep.
2. A few workers said that after getting one side of the cutting board dirty, they flipped the board over to its other side rather than cleaning it or getting a new one.
3. Limited number of cutting surfaces.
4. Improper use of or lack of sanitizer and proper board cleaning.

Cross Contamination Solutions:

1. Separate work areas (e.g., meat is cut in the cooler, vegetables are cut elsewhere);
2. Separate work surfaces, examples of which typically included color-coded cutting boards for use with different kinds of food (e.g., green boards for vegetables, yellow boards for chicken).  Multiple boards helped ensure that workers could get clean boards when they needed them, as opposed to reusing dirty boards, and color-coded boards helped ensure that workers used different boards for foods that needed to be kept separated.  Multiple color-coded cutting boards and separate work areas for different types of food helped prevent cross contamination.
3. Use of a sanitizer (e.g., bleach water) was a facilitator of cross-contamination prevention because it allowed them to sanitize their equipment quickly.

Our Conclusions:

The same type of practices employed in a professional setting should be used at home as well.  Fill up an empty dishwashing liquid bottle with water and a little bleach and keep it handy.  Squirt and cover cutting boards with the solution and wipe with a paper towel.  Then use warm water and soap to wash the surface clean.  Use multiple cutting boards and try to dedicate one specific board for meats.  Color-coded boards are another great product to have at home to prevent cross contamination.  Use a food-grade mineral oil on your wooden cutting boards monthly to prevent drying and splitting. Boards with splits and cracks should be replaced as they can harbor bacteria.