Worried about food safety? Five things to watch to cut your risk of illness

This is a true story. I was enjoying a sandwich that included broccoli sprouts. I’m always recommending these nutritious little sprouts for their antioxidant power. Yet while eating, and reading through the nutrition headlines of the day, I saw that broccoli sprouts had been recalled due to salmonella. Yikes. Further investigation showed the recall was primarily in Idaho, Montana and Washington state. So far this year, there have been 162 food recalls. For all of 2025, there were 320 recalls so we are tracking with last year. A food recall counts as one event, but as we saw with the lettuce and Cyclospora recall, it affected 28,000 people. So the number of recalls can be misleading. Hopefully, if there’s a significant recall, we will learn of it through the media. But to stay healthy, it is more important than ever to practice safe food handling. And this is doubly important for anyone who is immunocompromised or older. Following are five risk factors for food-borne illness: * Food from unsafe sources. Stay alert for food recalls. You can check at www.floridahealth.gov . * Failure to cook food to the correct temperature. Invest in a food thermometer to check when food is cooked to a safe temperature without being overcooked. * Contaminated equipment. How often are you washing the cutting board and are you using separate cutting boards for cooked and raw food?

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