Columbus Public Health offers food safety tips for Thanksgiving

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH)-- It’s Thanksgiving Eve and whether you are cooking, or you’re preparing your fridge for leftovers, Columbus Public Health has some advice for you.

This holiday involves a lot of food, the way it's prepared and stored can play a big role in your health. This year, Ohio has seen more than 1,200 cases of salmonella. However, there are ways to avoid getting this and other foodborne illnesses and some of them start with your fridge.

NBC4 shadowed Columbus Public Health as they pointed out red flags in two different refrigerators and how to fix them so you can stay healthy.

"You always want to make sure your raw products, your raw foods are on the bottom and your cooked foods are on the top," CPH Program Supervisor Robert Acquista said. 

Prepared food should not be kept longer than seven days.

"You want to, obviously check your products, make sure it's not spoiled," Acquista said. 

Storage order was an issue in one fridge we looked at: eggs for example should be on the bottom. Raw foods should also be on the bottom, cooked up above, so raw contaminants don’t drip onto cooked food.

Another issue with the second fridge was that it was too cold, leading to some items freezing. 

"We want our temperatures to be 41 and below. So, I recommend putting the refrigerator around 38. So, this way, if you open and close the door, it's hot, the food still has time to stay cold and stay below 41 degrees," Acquista said. 

You can get a thermometer for your fridge to monitor those temperatures. That’s not the only place you should be measuring temperature.

"You really should have a thermometer in your kitchen at home where you can take internal temperatures of products," Acquista said. 

Salmonella dies at 165 degrees so make sure you cook poultry and anything their juices get on to at least that temperature.

"Make sure you check the stuffing. So, you know, you take the turkey out and, you know, maybe the little popper on the turkey pops, it shows that it's done. I still would check the temperature, but I'd also check the stuffing inside to make sure that's 165," Acquista said.

In Ohio, the most salmonella cases were reported in July. We have not passed the number of 2023 cases yet, but we are far above the cases reported from 2020 to 2022.