CDC: 19% Of Americans Have Put Bleach On Food To Kill Coronavirus, How To Keep Food Clean

There are some simple things that you can do to stay safe. Such as look both ways before you cross the street. Don’t use a toaster while taking a bath. Oh, and don’t eat or drink bleach.

The last piece of advice should be relatively straightforward, because after all, you are not a toilet bowl. Yet, according to survey results just published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), 39% of the Americans surveyed have done high-risk things with household cleaners in attempts to stay safe from the Covid-19 coronavirus. Yeah, when people encourage you to take risks in life, this is probably not what they mean.

These high-risk activities included drinking or gargling diluted bleach solutions, soapy water, and other cleaning and disinfectant solutions, which 4% of the survey respondents said they did. It also including using household cleaning and disinfectant products on their hands or skin (18%) and misting their bodies (10%) and inhaling the vapors (6%) of such products. (A total of 502 adults were administered the Internet-based survey on May 4.) These are all no-no’s, as in “noooooo.”

But the most common high-risk thing to do was applying bleach to food items such as fruits and vegetables, which 19% did. Umm, don’t do this. Your food isn’t a bathroom tile. You can’t just apply bleach to food and then expect to wipe it off completely. Anything that you put on food could potentially seep into the food and eventually make it into your mouth, assuming that’s where you end up putting your food.

So far, there’s been no clear evidence of anyone catching the Covid-19 coronavirus from food. However, there are precautions that you can take that don’t involve putting bleach on food:

1. Wipe down food packaging. Note that this is the packing around food and not the food itself. Make sure that anything that you wipe down does not actually end up touching the food itself. Note that the skin of fruits is not considered food packaging in this case. As this tweet from Lysol emphasized, always follow the directions when using any disinfectants no matter what any public figure may happen to suggest:

2. Keep you kitchen surfaces clean and sanitized. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website recommends using either “a commercially available disinfectant product or a DIY sanitizing solution with 5 tablespoons (1/3rd cup) unscented liquid chlorine bleach to 1 gallon of water or 4 teaspoons of bleach per quart of water.” The website also includes the following warning: “Do not use this solution or other disinfecting products on food.” The word “warning” is in ALL CAPS just in case you ignore warnings in lower caps. Make sure that you don’t leave disinfectant residue on counters or other surfaces that may then seep into your food.

3. Wash your hands thoroughly before and after handling food. This can help prevent you from transferring the virus to the food or you transferring the virus from the food to your face. Lather and scrub your hands with soap for at least 20 seconds which is through the first chorus of the Divinyls song, “I Touch Myself.” Use the appropriate volume when singing this song out loud.

4. Thoroughly cook what can and should be cooked. This isn’t the time to try that raw meat-sicle. To be safe, try to get the food to at least 75 degrees Celsius, which is around 167 degrees Fahrenheit, for a sustained amount of time. This doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to cook everything (boiled bananas, anyone?) As indicated earlier, so far, there haven’t been reported cases of people getting sick with Covid-19 from food, and not everyone is boiling, deep frying, or microwaving everything that they are eating.

5. Use clean water to rinse fresh fruits and vegetables. Note the word “clean” before water, because washing your fruits and vegetables with dirty water would completely defeat the purpose. Wash your fruits and vegetables before you remove the skins and rinds so that the insides aren’t already contaminated. You can use a clean brush to help clean the fruits and vegetables if they are firm enough to tolerate such a brushing.

6. Carry and store food safely. Even though the risk of getting infected by SARS-CoV2 from eating food may not be high, don’t take unnecessary risks. Don’t put food in areas where people may cough, sneeze, or pant on it, because after all certain foods can make you pant. Use clean bags, containers, and spaces to store food. The “Used N95 Masks” bag would not be such a clean place. Refrigerate or freeze everything that needs to be refrigerated or frozen within two hours of when they were bought.

7. Use standard food safety approaches. Follow the clean, separate, cook, and chill guidelines that the FDA outlines on its website. Clean means keep everything clean. Separate means keep raw meats apart from other foods. Cook means cook foods that need to be cooked. And chill means keep stuff in the refrigerator or freezer as needed.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Covid-19 may not be your biggest worry when it comes to food. As I have previously covered for Forbes, since 2017, the number of reported foodborne illness outbreaks has jumped. These have included outbreaks of Salmonella, bad E. coli, and Listeria. So practicing good food safety techniques is always important. And before the current Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, this did not include using bleach on your food. There’s no reason to start doing that now.