Sometimes, food doesn’t travel the natural pipeline through the body. Each year the US sees 9.4m illnesses due to bacteria and viruses in our food, but only a tiny fraction of those get examined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and classified as part of official foodborne disease outbreaks. Those cases help us to better understand which foods make us sick and why.
Chicken and pork top the list of foods linked to these outbreaks, but as a long-time vegetarian, I was surprised that seeded vegetables, eggs and fruit were not far behind. Some of this is merely a reflection of the foods that are most commonly eaten in the US, but if you’re unfamiliar with prepping a particular ingredient, you might be more likely to mishandle it. Presumably turkey ranks a lot higher than crustaceans (1,675 illnesses compared to just 74) because people only cook it a couple of times a year and those big birds can be easy to get wrong.
In fact, your home can be a risky place when it comes to food preparation. The CDC reported that over 8,000 illnesses from foodborne disease outbreaks originated in private homes between 2009 and 2015. That’s far fewer than the 25,000 foodborne illnesses that resulted from food preparation in sit-down dining facilities but it’s also a lot more than those that occurred in schools (2,000), prisons or jails (5,000) or hospitals (178).
