It’s about making it your culture not just training

We’re taught from a young age about using soap and warm water to wash our hands, to follow use-by and best-before dates, to wrap items that we’ve opened before placing it in the fridge and to cover our mouth when we cough or sneeze.

Stuart Baker - Food Hygiene Asia

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Some of the things we take for granted in the West aren’t necessarily the norm everywhere else. In Thailand as with many parts of Asia it’s common practice to buy raw and cooked foods from the market, eat at makeshift restaurants that turn up nightly by the roadside and purchase food without packaging let alone use-before or best-before dates.

The rooms in which people live, usually only have cold water with a toilet that includes a large bucket filled with water and is used in combination with a bowl to act as a shower. For food preparation a wooden chopping board bought from a door-to-door salesmen is used for everything from cutting-up chicken to cutting-up fruit and vegetables with often no more than a quick rinse under cold water between tasks. One multipurpose knife is normally used for slicing and dicing all types of produce and the end result is served on plates, bowls and cups with chips and cracks.

These are some of the living conditions and common practices of the staff manning the kitchens across Bangkok and throughout Thailand.

Most of them have never stayed in a hotel or eaten in a restaurant that abides by International standards of service, health & safety, hygiene, and safe food practices.

And yet these are the people with the task of preparing the food in all kinds of eateries from small family run restaurants to the top 5 star hotels and restaurants across Bangkok and the whole of Thailand.

Let’s look at five important areas where culturally acquired practices could easily produce its consumers to suffer from any number of food borne illnesses.

Preparation of food:

The wooden cutting boards in use for the preparation of all food types are often quite old and aligned with severe groves. Cleaning and sanitizing of these boards between tasks is almost unheard of.

Plastic boards aren’t any better if they too have major cut marks and are not replaced on a regular basis or cleaned and sanitized between tasks.

Hand washing:

Only having cold water at home and having it stored outside in large water urns for days, and weeks exposed to the elements is the norm at most households in the countryside. This water is used for washing hands, showering, washing-up and almost everything else.

Storing and labelling food:

Foods aren’t covered by the use of foil or Clingfilm and the separation of raw and cooked foods is not carried out or misunderstood. And why label?

Thawing of food:

Most food used to be bought fresh from the market to be consumed on the same day. But with the introduction of fridges and freezers nowadays meat is being stored to keep for longer periods. However, without understanding how to correctly defrost, food is almost always being left in a bowl of warm water or at room temperature for several hours. On many occasions bowls or plates contain both chicken, beef and pork with their blood and juices mixing.

Reheating:

Food is often produced in volume so a family can reheat it several times throughout the day or over a period of several days and is left on the stove or on the table exposed to the elements. When reheated, it is barely warmed through.

And we haven’t even mentioned pets and pests, cleaning cloths, refrigerators and stock rotation; the list goes on.

Businesses need to adopt simpler, better and more stringent food hygiene and food safety training, as well as procedures and regular on-the-job checks.

There need to be government initiatives to teach the young during their school years of the implications and benefits of good food safety. Advertising campaigns showing the difference between poor and good food safety practices would help in educating the masses and programs to support hotels, restaurants and businesses through training and reinforcement would safeguard more stringent compliance with universal hygienic policies.

The establishments that are training their staff on food hygiene and food safety are few and far between and are battling against culturally acquired ways of working. To effectively embed new ways of working, these restaurants need to instill a deep understanding of correct practices and implications of poor practices in their staff’s minds.

It is hard to make someone do something in one way at work when they perform this same task in a completely different way at home.