Don’t wash your apples
with soap.
Amy
Schellenbaum April 11, 2020
Both the Centers for
Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration maintain that your grocery
haul is not a likely vector for the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19.
Per the FDA’s website, “The virus is thought to spread mainly
from person to person. Foodborne exposure to this virus is not known to be a
route of transmission.”
You’re more likely to be
exposed from interacting with people at the grocery store than you are from a
jar of salsa, but that doesn’t mean shoppers getting groceries for elderly
folks or people with compromised immune systems shouldn’t take a few extra
minutes to implement some precautions.
Here’s a step-by-step guide
to minimizing your risk of COVID-19 exposure from food:
Before
you leave for the grocery store:
1. Make a game plan
assuming you won’t go back to the store for a couple of weeks. Because our
health and food safety organizations say you’re more likely to get the disease
from people than potato chips, the first thing you can do to improve your
health outcome is to avoid going to the store at all. Take the time to plan
your meals, make room in your freezer, and cultivate a
list of recipes that rely on staples that last a long time, like
beans and pasta.
2. Designate a home
sanitation station. That could be your garage, your porch, your apartment
hallway, or your kitchen counter. Decide where you will put things that have
not been treated and where you will put things that have been sanitized. If
you’d like, use painter’s tape to mark off these zones to avoid
cross-contamination. Wipe down your clean area with a basic cleaning solution
and a clean rag.
If you live in an apartment
complex, it’s hard to ensure a spot in the hallway will be clean or remain so.
Instead, simply prop open your door and designate everything in the hallway as
“untreated.” Everything just over the threshold into your apartment is your
“sanitized” zone. If your entryway area is carpeted or you just don’t trust
yourself not contaminate it with your shoes, move a table over near the door to
be your clean area.
3. Put several clean rags
(or a roll of paper towels) and a spray cleaner like Lysol in your sanitation station.
4. If you’re bringing your
own bags to the store, use reusable ones that have been washed with soap and
hot water. If you don’t have reusable bags that can be thrown in the washing
machine, opt for the plastic or paper bags at the store. Some grocery locations
do not allow reusable bags at all right now, so check for that.
5. If you have a mask,
there’s no harm in wearing it. It’s not
clear that wearing a mask helps you or others—and it’s no replacement for a
good hand washing—but the New York Times is reporting that the
CDC may soon advise people to wear them. Just make sure your cloth mask has been cleaned since you last used it;
cloth masks will harbor bacteria and viruses, which could
actually up your odds of getting sick. And don’t go buying disposable paper or
surgical masks: Hospitals that need them much more than we do are in short
supply.
At the
grocery store:
6. Make sure to keep 6-10
feet between you and anyone from outside your own household. If somebody’s
standing by a place you need to be, you can kindly request that they make room,
or just go get something else on your list and try again in a few minutes.
7. Don’t touch your face.
Touching contaminated surfaces and then touching your eyes or mouth is the most
common way to contract a virus like COVID-19, and the same is true in
reverse—touching your face before touching items in the store means you could
be shedding viral cells for others to pick up.
8. Sanitize your hands and
forearms before re-entering your car, if you can. If you can’t find sanitizer
at the store, you can make your own with this
recipe.
Back at
home:
9. Drop your bags in your
unsanitized area, take your shoes off, and go wash your hands with soap for 20 seconds. You can sing
a little song to mark the time if you want.
10. If your sanitation
station is on the floor, be mindful of your feet. Don’t put dirty shoes in your
clean area.
11. Let’s start with
packaged items. A lot of things can be easily unwrapped or decanted. If you got
a big box of mini bags of pretzels, for example, take the mini bags out of the
box and place them in your clean area. Discard the box, and make sure to wash
your hands between touching the outer packaging and touching the clean items.
Disposable gloves can come in handy here, to keep things clean between steps.
Wipe down any other plastic or cardboard packages with cleaner and cloth. You
can spray sealed, plastic-wrapped items directly. Wipe cardboard items with a
cloth made damp with the cleaner.
12. Wash your hands for 20
seconds with soap.
13. Now let’s move on to
produce. You should not wash your fresh plant ingredients with soap. Soap is
not meant to be eaten, and could irritate your stomach or intestines, making
you feel nauseous and/or giving you diarrhea. Instead, just follow the FDA guidelines for cleaning produce: wash your items
thoroughly with cool water. Use a vegetable brush if you’d like, but make sure
it’s clean. Dry all of your items—microbes love moisture—with a paper towel.
Viruses don’t live long on porous surfaces like plants, so you’re more likely
to get sick from, say, eating an apple while your hands are dirty than you are
from eating an apple someone sick touched several hours ago.
That’s it! Enjoy your haul.
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