Foodborne Illnesses In America

Words: 1247
Pages: 5

The children of America love lunch time. Ask any child in America and most of their responses will be recess or lunch time. For children any break in a school day is seen as one of the highlights of the day. But what if the best part of the day wasn't actually the most benificial part of the day? Children are the dirt of society. As in the dirtiest in society. Kids will eat dirt, roll in it and even put it on their face. But what if that still isn't even the worst part? Cafeterias in America have faced small epidemics of foodborne illnesses and it doesn’t even start with the children it actually ends with the children. The food in cafeterias goes through a long process before it finally reaches the dirty hands of children. Through this process …show more content…
Many people are oblivious to these types of things but they always seem to catch my eye. Maybe it is just the cleanliness in me or the urge to try and save people one plate at a time. Throughout out my school life I have seen cockroaches scurrying across floors, employees using the restroom just to glance up at the “employees must wash hands” sign and choosing to ignoring or even the simple fact of distrubuiting food without gloves or not wearing a hairnet. While these simple tasks can be seen as unnoticeable or unreasonable, they impacted my view on the food being served in America. While to some, these skills are taught and branded into a child's mind. For others, washing hands is a waste of time. If the food could start off clean and bacteria free then the steps following could be so much easier. Many illnesses are distributed right from the farm, before the food ever leaves to go to the market to be sold. By putting in a little more money and taking more time and consideration into what is being fed to the animals and crops these illnesses can be stopped. Finding better solutions to the cure infections in animals and try to prevent the contamination of the water on crops the foodborne illnesses can stop before they even start. While people are not perfect and cant find every single problem right away, a few check steps will decrease …show more content…
Acoording to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are four major steps in this process which include production, processing, distribution and preparation. Within these steps is a single person who can create a foodborne illness. One wrong move in an step of the process increases the probability of a foodborne illness occurring. The earlier the mistake, the higher the probability. In 1997 there was an outbreak in Michigan of a foodborne illness. This illness was on account of a chef mishandling food and undercooking it and then serving it in cafeterias (Yvan). By not carefully distributing the food correctly, hepatitis A spread across Calhoun and Saginaw counties of Michigan. This is just one case of a time poor food handling caused a foodborne illness to spread. These happen more often than not and while it may not spread like it did in Michigan the “stomach bugs” that go around are an account of a foodborne illness. According to a study conducted at Kansas State University on food safety training, while they taught a course on how to correctly handle food and clean and distribute the food it still showed no changes in the specifics of food handling as in washing a thermometer before reusing it. Yet it did show an increase in personally hygiene as the employees focused on the washing of hands before and after handling food. As the