by Maxwell Payne

Created on: April 05, 2007   Last Updated: January 20, 2012

A clean cutting board is not only important it is crucial to safely preparing and later enjoying your food. Not only is a clean cutting board important when preparing various food so as not to keep various flavors of one food from interfering with the other, but when preparing any kind of meat, fish, or poultry it can literally be a difference between being healthy or falling very ill.

Bacteria is everywhere and it thrives on many locations including your kitchen. Juices and pieces of raw meat that you just cut on the board remain there and bacteria such as salmonella may be present on that raw meat. Once cooked most harmful bacteria is removed making the meat safe to eat, but the residue left on the board is never cooked and thus allows the harmful bacteria to thrive on the cutting board.

In order to prevent contaminating other food with bacteria on the cutting board make sure you clean or use a different cutting board after cutting any kind of raw meat, raw fish, or raw poultry. Say you want to cut bread or tomatoes on that board after cutting raw meat, it is essential that you clean the board down with antibacterial soap and water. Make sure you rinse the board after cleaning to remove and cleaning supply residue as well. You also want to take care to never let raw meat touch serving plates or utensils that cooked food will be eaten off of. You also want to use a clean cutting knife if you are switching from raw meat to other food materials. The plate or tray you use to hold raw meat should also never come in contact with cooked meat or other food to be consumed. In other words nothing that touches raw meat should touch any cooked food or any surface, plate, utensil or otherwise that will be used later during a meal or for storing cooked food.

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