There is like a long process of keeping a safe space for a meal to be healthy enough for consumption. You would have to make sure the ingredients bought from the market are cleaned, the kitchen to prepare the meals is tidy, the water to be used is cleaned and the whole process is done with no dirt finding it's way to the meal.
Sometimes I do ask if it's possible to have a prepared meal that is free of dirt or any unhealthy substance? Because even our environment (the air) is dirty and they find their way into our homes and to the kitchen when we cook. No matter how hard we try to make sure of cleanliness while we cook, some unseen dirts find their way into them.
Food safety is one of the courses I had to study while I was in the university as a microbiology student, it was quite an interesting course considering the amount of knowledge I gained in my personal cooking habits. For real, a lot of people are ignorant about how to keep their food safe right from the preparation to time of eating.
Every food have their different kind of ways to be cleaned during preparation and I learnt so much about what the consequences are when we ignore these things and eat these foods anyways. If we want to keep healthy with less illnesses to treat, keeping our meals clean is definitely one way to do it and it is assuring when we succeed.
I spent some time with a lady who I thought was too obsessed with cleanliness, she would wash almost anything that's going into her pot with salt. Salt is a good cleansing agent, if you don't know yet. I watched her prepare her meals while making sure that even her kitchen napkin is clean and she doesn't say a single word till she's done.
I can't say I'm the clean freak when I cook but I do have enough good knowledge to not cook my meals unsafely, I take note of a lot of things before I start to cook but whenever I cook a meal with someone new, I learn something new on cleanliness and I think that's an interesting adventure. It has improved my food safety a lot.
When it comes to food safety, I'll say it's a very intentional act that every person have to put in habit for every meal they prepare. You can't use same safety precautions you used in boiling rice to prepare soup. For every meal, you have to change methods on how you keep them safe from contamination as you change ingredients.
To have a safe bite, it totally relies on how intentional you were during the whole process. It's why I admire people who dare not eat out but would rather go through the stress of preparing every meal they decide to eat, it brings the contamination risk to bare minimum as no one wants to see dirt go into a meal they want to eat.
Images are AI generated.