#Or: The Time Several People Poisoned The Student Body And Faculty With Raw Chicken

[nephyria]

I didn’t wanna put it on that football field length clusterfuck of a post, because this is looking like it’s getting there all by itself, but preheating your shit before cooking/baking/grilling is so important. It’s also not something that’s really.....taught. Heck, it’s easy to overlook when you ARE taught, because people don’t think to teach routine food safety when they’re teaching the Actual Making of The Thing. It’s assumed that most people know to do that, because “Of COURSE you preheat the oven, everyone knows that!”

Looking back, it turns I only know ANY food safety stuff because mom subtly drilled that shit into me before I was ten (via baking participation), and LONG before I was ever allowed to cook things with the potential to be dangerous when raw or with multiple elements (meat, vegetables, etc). It’s all oral tradition, and it’s all good until someone three generations in slips up on teaching the prep.

So most of my food safety shit started early as five years old (which was about when I began to reach countertops), with mom strong-arming me to the sink to wash my hands with hot soapy water if I touched anything that touched the raw chicken she was making. The chicken, the pan, the cutting board, the countertop--it she hadn’t washed it with strong dish soap/a bleach solution, and I touched it, I was immediately pulled over to the sink to decontaminate everything up to the elbow.

The whole time she’d be telling me that I touched germs that could make me sick, and that I couldn’t touch anything else or put my hands near my mouth until they were clean (I had a nail-biting habit that still hasn’t completely gone away, so I guess she knew if anyone was gonna die from food poisoning, it was gonna be me). I hated it, but she let me help wash the countertops later, which was fun and soothing, so it was fine.

Maybe a year later she indoctrinated me into baking by getting me to realize that if I helped to make the peanut butter cookies (and we all still use the same recipe, it’s Superior to all others), biscuits, cake, and bread, I’d get first dibs on the results. That meant getting boosted up to help set the oven preheat, prewashing any working surfaces, measuring things (and learning the order in which to measure them and when to wash in between, bc it turns out if you use a 1/4 measuring cup for milk, you cannot later use it for anything dry), mixing until the arms were too tired (which was when it was handed off to someone else), powdering surfaces, rolling stuff out/shaping dough, and cleaning up while everything baked. I didn’t really get why we (me and my siblings) weren’t allowed to lick spoons (because what the fuck is a salmonella) but we coped okay.

Somewhere in between this I realized that some days meat would be in the fridge but it wouldn’t be used until a day or two later. When I asked mom about it, she said it had to defrost, or it’d be frozen in the middle and it wouldn’t cook. Sounded legit.

Later (maybe when I was twelve), she gave me a quick rundown on The Making of the Egg. Preheat the pan, melt the butter, when the butter is white instead of clear you can crack the egg, cook it until the bottom is solid and stable to flip (edges somewhat crispy), flip it over (I never learned how to make sunny side up eggs, they’ve always been over medium), cook it for about half a minute to a minute more, and if the yolk breaks you’ll still get a tasty sandwich from it. It was the first thing I learned to cook on my own. The only failed eggs I’ve ever done are poached and hard boiled; poached because I just sort of TRIED making them with no instructions, and hard boiled because mom’s method is “just boil the hell outta them” and I somehow always fall just short of that.

Somewhere in between, when she started letting us cut and peel things (mostly potatoes and carrots and celery and corn on the cob), she brought out the whole method. Preheat the oven, then begin prepping the food. Scrub the outsides, rinse before after peeling, you can’t use a knife that’s been used to cut raw meat unless you’ve washed it with soap in between, same thing for cutting boards, and everything gets washed with soap or bleach water while the thing is in the over. For poultry it was even stricter. You rinse the outside of the bird. You rinse the inside of the bird. You wash your hands after touching the bird. You don’t reuse anything that has touched the bird. It all goes in the sink. The whole kitchen got power washed, courtesy of many human arms.

I started getting asked to make major parts of meals in my mid to late teens, because at that point mom had taught me the putting-stove-fires-out-with-baking-soda trick and determined that if I set anything on fire I could handle it, and eventually I worked my way up to making whole meals with some measure of success (time management is very tricky and I hate making multiple things at once. she put me in charge of doing The Whole Thanksgiving last year as a surprise and I nearly had a nervous breakdown. my sisters saved my goddamn life).

I thought that whole “x parent is such a bad cook that the whole family gets food poisoning and has to go to the hospital” trope was just like. a film gimmick. It couldn’t actually HAPPEN to people. Like, you obviously wouldn’t eat raw food, right? Right?!

And then. College.

What you need to know about my college: It was involved in a huge lawsuit, which I found out about too late to get a refund on my tuition and/or get student loan forgiveness (yeah. it’s bad and it sucks.), and its two main majors were fashion design and culinary arts.

I was in a classroom that was mostly empty because most of the students had stepped out for lunch, and my teacher and a teacher on break were talking to each other. I was in the classroom because I wasn’t blessed with the good sense god gave a squirrel and I was last-minute rushing an assignment. And one of the other students (not working, just chillin’), asked them:

“Hey, we’re right next to the culinary classroom, right? What do they do with the food when they’re finished making it? Can WE eat it?”

(I privately agreed. It smelled really good and I wanted some.)

“Well, they actually have to throw it out,” My teacher replied..

Well, that seemed a little extreme.

“Yeah,” Said the other one. “They used to let other students eat the practice dishes, but they banned it about a year ago.”

Excuse me?? That seems??? VERY extreme???? The fuck???????

When they were asked for the whole story, they explained that THAT year, multiple (!!!!) students hadn’t fully cooked their chicken/cross-contaminated their tools (which meant that greens were covered in RAW CHICKEN JUICE), and about A QUARTER OF THE STAFF AND STUDENT BODY HAD TO BE SENT TO THE HOSPITAL WITH SEVERE FOOD POISONING.

I COULDN’T FUCKING BELIEVE IT. I COULDN’T IMAGINE ANYONE FUCKING UP THAT BAD.

I thought it couldn’t get any worse. I really hoped it couldn’t get worse.

“Yeah, that’s why I won’t eat at the food truck,” said my teacher, about the food truck that came every Thursday, which was feeding maybe a third of my current class as we spoke.

Please explain, teacher of graphic design principles. Please assuage my building fears.

“Oh, god, I once got a chicken salad from there for lunch and all the chicken is raw in the middle,” said teacher of graphic design principles. “I mean, it’s run by school graduates, I can’t believe people eat there.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s gross,” said visiting color theory teacher. “One of my students had a fish taco from there that was mostly raw.”

Meanwhile, my entire existence was appalled and I was on the verge of hyperventilation and I was never, never going to finish the thing that was due at the end of the class, because it was the most cursed fucking thing I’d ever heard. My soul was trying to combat the horror of the situation and failing.

I had to stay after the class to finish the project because honestly, there’s no way to recover from thirty minutes of standstill due to tales of negligent food safety. Especially when you’d think you’d TEACH THAT SHIT IN A CULINARY MAJOR, WHAT THE HELL IS THIS???? WHY WOULD YOU LET PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW HOW TO COOK CHICKEN ALL THE WAY GRADUATE??????? WHAT THE FUCK.

(My college? VERY BAD.)

I mean. I know now that a lot of my food safety skills are shit they don’t teach on cooking shows (or. y’know those short little cooking/baking things they put on buzzfeed. the ones that are like a few minutes long. they put the bake temperature AFTER all the prep is done I’m PISSED at them) or in recipes. Maybe they teach them in home equity classes but as far as I know, home equity was taught in 6th grade as an elective and I entered the public school system in 8th grade. Who the fuck remembers skills from 6th grade if they don’t use them consistently? Nobody, that’s who.

And it gave me a HUGE leg up that dad was the sole breadwinner in our home for YEARS, and even when mom did start working, it was from home for about three more years. If they’d both been working, I definitely never would’ve learned anything about the process, especially if I had to figure it out on my own. I’d get out a recipe and follow all of the directions and they would all put me in danger, because no recipe tells you that using the wrong knife in the wrong order could kill you, or that not preheating the oven is dangerous, or to wash your hands after handling the raw meat before handling anything else, and to wash the surfaces and anything you might’ve touched after the stuff is in the oven. Only people and maybe youtube teach you that.

It’s also expected of and systematically taught to people who are perceived to be female (and straight. and cis). (Unless you’re from a family of professional bakers! Then you’re expected to take over the family business.) I’m almost certain that my older brothers don’t know half of the cooking/baking/food safety stuff I know, because our mom stopped at quick-mix baked goods, eggs, and mostly-safe sides with them (remember. five to eleven years old. they’re both in their thirties/forties now). My oldest brother might’ve learned some stuff from his wife. My other older brother just refuses to make anything more complicated than eggs. They both know how to grill, because that’s a Dude Thing, I guess.

Like I was definitely, definitely taught this because mom assumed that I was straight cis girl and was one day going to have a family that I would have to do those things for. 

(I’m neither of those things, and I only ever plan on cooking for my friends/in a volunteer sense, and she kind of really hates it, but at least I know how to make a fucking quiche whenever I want, I guess.)

She didn’t teach my brothers this because she assumed that they were straight cis boys who would one day have wives and families to do that for them. (She also complains constantly that bro gets fast food and won’t cook healthy food for himself.)

(Enforced gender roles suck and give people food poisoning.)

And you know what? She didn’t learn it from her mom, or her grandmother, because her single mom (with five kids) worked full time as a nurse, and her grandmother died when mom was young. She took a cooking class, which she paid for with money, when she was a single mom. She took a sewing class too. Because not only did she know that she had to know these things to survive on her own, she knew it was gonna be EXPECTED of her to do these things if she was gonna be considered marriageable. Like I’m glad she knows how to do these things, and I’m glad I know (some of) these things now too, but the reasons behind learning and teaching them are heinous and insidious as fuck.

And again: If one relative in the long line of Making Food For the Straight Family misses a prep step, or is coming from the before times of preheated ovens, someone’s gonna just. straight up poison a quarter of the student body of a college that offers culinary arts as a major. I guess. I GUESS.

Preheat your ovens, for the love of GOD. If you keep your pots and pans in there, take them out. Preheat during or before the prep, wash your knives and surfaces regularly, and PLEASE don’t poison yourself, your family, your friends, and the collective student body.