Cross my word...it's cross contamination

Walk into any Hotel or Restaurant kitchen and look out for coloured cutting boards. Chances are that you will very rarely come across them. It’s like encountering the hotel manager in the hotel’s lobby nowadays.

So what’s the big deal on coloured cutting boards? For starters, it would indicate that many of our chefs care little on preventing cross-contamination. Cross contamination is a fancy term for transferring bacteria thru direct contact, and, in the world of cookery this can occur via a knife, cutting board or from food itself. This form of transference is not just limited to bacteria – it could be a virus (from sneezing), or a toxin or even residual cleaning material. Whichever it is, when it comes into contact with ready to eat food it’s cross contamination and when contaminated food is eaten it makes the diner sick – from food poisoning.

That is why we read about an outbreak of food poisoning at a large function, the occasional product recalls, sudden restaurant closures and the like. These are the ones that get reported but what about the several incidents that are not highlighted in the public domain?  Unfortunately, there's not much you can do to protect yourself at that level, other than keeping track of the news, reading about it on social media and using good sense in deciding where to eat out.

Preventing Cross Contamination

In nearly all cases, cross contamination is going to be caused either by the  kitchen knife,  cutting board, or the hands that cook; and, once it gets on to the hands , it simply is on everything else from there onwards. Say the cooks wash their hands regularly and thoroughly, even then, the two major culprits are the cutting board and the knife – after all, a big part of cooking is cutting up food on the cutting board. If you prep a raw chicken on the cutting board and use the same cutting board later, least of all without washing it first, to slice tomatoes – that’s a sure receipe for disaster! In many cases of cross-contamination, cutting boards are a prime culprit.

Using Color-Coded Cutting Boards

Using separate, color-coded cutting boards for different ingredients is a hygienic measure to prevent or minimise cross-contamination.

Here are the different cutting board colors and what they are used for when cutting food:

• Green:Fruits & Vegetables                                
• Yellow:Raw Poultry
• Tan:Cooked Food
• White:Dairy Products
• Blue:Fish & Seafood
• Red:Raw Meat

The colours help you keep track of which cutting boards are reserved for which types of foods, so that you're less likely to cut salad leaves on the same board you just used for prepping raw chicken. Sound complicated? Not when one associates the cutting board colours to the colour of the food. Red for raw meats, Blue for the water where fish and seafood are found, White for dairy products, Tan for food that first changes to that colour when cooked and yellow for chickens.

Even having one separate, distinctively colored cutting board that's reserved just for raw meat is a step in the right direction — one that will go a long way toward avoiding  a food-related illness.

Shafeek Wahab - Editor Hospitality Sri Lanka

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