Staying Healthy When Cooking and Eating Outdoors | Raccoon Valley Radio

With the warmer summer weather, many have been outside at one point or another to cook on the grill.

Guthrie County Health Services Director Jotham Arber says that over the summer, the most common call they see for health issues is actually for foodborne illnesses. He tells Raccoon Valley Radio that a lot of this stems from not storing foods properly or not cooking them properly, and how to try and avoid that.

“We want to make sure that we’re getting to temperatures of like 145 for ground meats and some other things. It might be upwards of 160. And we want to keep them there for a fair, fair amount of time to make sure that anything that might be on them, we’re killing off so that when we eat it, we’re not also ingesting things that are going to make us sick. And then once we’ve cooked them, we need to make sure that we don’t leave them out.”

Arber mentions that another part of staying healthy is to make sure that you are washing your hands after handling raw meats, as that can have some nasty bacteria that then find their way into your system. He adds that once things are cooked, especially at big cook outs or parties, it is important to make sure that foods that are sitting out stay at the correct temperature, meaning hot foods stay hot and cold foods stay cold.