Cleanliness - Don

Just today when I went for dinner at Changi Village hawker center, I noticed that there was a stall where by the front part of the stall where all the cooked food are placed on food trays and given to the customers was very dirty. There were stains of soy sauce, little bits of trimming of raw cabbage and even chilli on the counter top. This shows that the stall isn't very particular on their cleanliness which is not only unsightly but also it poses a lot of health issues,

Firstly, the trimming of raw cabbage. The raw cabbage might not have been washed and in the industry most vegetables are sprayed with insecticides or pesticides to increase and prevent crops from getting damaged by pest. If the raw cabbage trimming found on the counter top had not been washed, it might still be laced with nitrate/nitrite which are found in fertilizers used on vegetables, if a consumer were to ingest that, the consumer might get food intoxication due to the chemical hazard.

Second, the soy sauce stains. Even though there isn't a lot of soy sauce that are on the counter top, but because soy sauce contains a lot of proteins and moisture, it is a breeding ground for many bacteria for example Listeria, Staphylococcus aureus, E. coli etc. Many people have the misconception that if a spot has bacteria, and we do not place our food at that exact spot, it is impossible for the bacteria to contaminate our food. But that is actually not true, because bacteria cannot be seen with the naked eye, even if we think that the area near the contaminated spot is clean, we might be wrong and that the bacteria might have just contaminated that whole area. In this case, the soy sauce stain on the counter top might have bred enough bacteria to have contaminated the whole area that the food trays are place.

All this are health issues and they can easily cause food borne illnesses which are dangerous because in severe cases, it can cause death if one's immune system is weak. However for this specific situation, the stall owners can prevent any cases from happening by just simply doing 1 simple action. That is to keep their counter top clean, they do not need to sanitize it to the extend of once every hour, but just by keeping the counter top clean, and wiping away any stains or discarding any sort of food crumbs/trimmings/spills they can prevent bacteria from growing out of proportion which will harm humans.