This area in your kitchen is full of bacteria!
You might think that most of the bacteria in your kitchen are located on your towel, trash can or cutting board. And there are a lot of bacteria in those spots. But the biggest breeding ground for bacteria in your kitchen is a spot that you probably would never have guessed: your spice rack.
Research
A lot of the cases of food poisoning happen in the comfort of our own homes. That, unfortunately, is a fact. But new research shows that your spice rack might be the biggest culprit. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) executed this research. Almost four hundred people were asked to prepare a turkey pastry in their kitchen. The only assignment was that they had to use basil, pepper and salt to give the pastry some flavor. What the participants didn’t know, is that the researchers put a so-called ‘tracer’ in the turkey. If you add this to the food, you can keep track of traces of that food and how people spread them around the kitchen while preparing a dish.
Dangerous surfaces
Because of that tracer, researchers were able to see how participants touched certain surfaces and spread bacteria around the kitchen. The obvious places where bacteria were found are the counter, cutting board, sink and the knives they used. But almost half of the time the participants spend cooking, the tracer was found on the jars of spices that they had to use. And that means that your cutting board, countertop or sink aren’t the most dangerous areas in your kitchen. Your spice rack might actually be the cause of food poisoning.
Solution
Luckily, there is a solution. You just have to make sure you wash your hands and the jars of spices whenever you’re done using them. That way, bacteria won’t be able to stay put on the bottles of spices. And they won’t be able to make you sick.
Read more: Find out: this is what you can do with expired spices
Source: AD | Image: Unsplash