Can You Go Green If You “Meat the Bacteria”?

Overview

In many households, chopping boards are a staple item in their kitchen. Many of us are concerned about cleaning these items, especially after using them with meat products. The fact stands that meat products-including fish-are sterile to begin with. Contamination happens via the process to the market, even maybe at home. Without proper cleaning, the amount of bacteria will grow, causing serious food-borne illnesses. In phase one of this study, the results showed that wood chopping boards are better than plastic and dishwashing as the best cleaning method. With phase two of this project, my goal was to further investigate whether the bacteria on different food sources left on chopping boards are necessarily bad i.e. pathogenic. In addition I wanted to explore which type of hand washing(soapy water vs. hot water) is more suffice to get rid of bacteria, because wood chopping boards are not compatible with dishwashing. The experiment was carried with non-pathogenic E. coli as a positive control, along with beef, chicken, fish, and potato as the food sources. The food sources were smeared onto the chopping boards, then the smears were plated. Next, the plates were subjected to an overnight incubation at room temperature to resemble a kitchen environment. Following the incubation, the bacterial colonies were observed for morphology and subjected into a series of biochemical tests to determine the nature of the bacteria. The results showed that the nature of the bacteria is not pathogenic to humans. Through observations, clear signs showed that hot water was more effective for cleaning than soapy water. This finding confirms that dishwashing is not necessary to get rid of “dangerous” bacteria from wood chopping boards, as my findings found the bacteria to be harmless to humans.

Competition history

• AJAS 2019 Category not listed

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