Our core mission is to provide the best food with care for everyone. We use only the highest quality ingredients and prepare our dishes with the utmost love to serve you the best we can.
Food With Care
- Try to keep potentially high-risk foods outside the temperature danger zone and buy hot and cold foods at the end of your shopping trip.
- Keep hot foods and cold foods separate.
- Avoid food past its use-by date and always check labels.
- Avoid food in swollen, dented, leaking or damaged cans, containers or other packaging.
- Don’t buy frozen or chilled foods that have been left out of the freezer, and only buy hot foods that are steaming hot.
- Check that serving staff use separate tongs when handling separate food types, such as meats and vegetables.
- Check that serving staff wear gloves when they handle the food, but not when they are cleaning surfaces or taking money.
- Make sure that eggs in cartons identify the supplier, and never buy cracked or dirty eggs.
- Take your shopping home quickly and store it immediately.
Handle Food with Care
Your body will know if you’ve eaten harmful bacteria, because it can make you mildly to very sick. Bacteria spread easily onto hands, cutting boards, utensils, and countertops – all things that come into contact with food. To avoid problems, cook foods to proper temperatures and follow some simple steps.
Clean: Wash your hands and surfaces often.
• Wash your hands with warm water and soap for at least 20 seconds before and after handling food or touching other surfaces.
• Wash cutting boards, dishes, utensils, and countertops with hot soapy water after preparing each food item.
• Rinse fruits and vegetables with running tap water.
Separate: Don’t cross-contaminate.
• Keep raw meat, poultry, seafood and eggs separate from other foods.
• Use one cutting board for fruits and vegetables and another for meat, poultry, seafood, or eggs.
• Never place cooked food on a plate that held raw food.
Chill: Refrigerate perishable foods.
• Refrigerate or freeze meat, poultry, eggs, and other perishables as soon as you get home from shopping for foods.
• Don’t let raw meat, poultry, eggs, cooked food, or cut fruits or vegetables sit at room temperature more than two hours.
• Defrost foods in the refrigerator or cold water. Use the microwave on the defrost setting if you are cooking the food right away.
Cook foods to proper temperatures.
Eggs: 160ºF (Scrambled eggs should not be runny; whites and yolks should be firm.)
Casseroles and leftovers: 165ºF
Ground meat and meat mixtures: 160ºF
Fresh or ground poultry: 165ºF
Fresh beef, pork, veal, and lamb: 145ºF (with a 3-minute rest time)
Fish: 145ºF
Action Step
During your next trip to the grocery store, start with foods that don’t spoil − items in boxes and bags. Then choose meats, poultry, eggs, milk, and frozen foods last to keep them from being at unsafe temperatures for too long.
6 REASONS WHY WE SHOULD CARE ABOUT WHAT WE EAT
Nowadays, it seems guaranteed that our supermarket shelves will always be filled with food and drinks. With no need to worry about food availability and access to a wide variety of products, we can become less discerning about what we eat – but doing so has consequences.
It’s important for all of us to make responsible food choices. Here are 6 key reasons why each and every one of us should value our food, and what we can do to make better choices when it comes to what we eat.
1. FOOD IS ESSENTIAL FOR OUR HEALTH
Food is essential to our survival, but some foods are more valuable than others for our health and well-being, providing us not only with energy but also with the nutrients our bodies need. A varied and balanced diet – for example, one including fruits, vegetables, pulses, nuts, whole grains, and other nutrient-dense foods – helps us to support our health and prevent diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.
2. FOOD PRODUCTION CAN DAMAGE THE ENVIRONMENT
Our current food systems are taking a major toll on the environment. These systems, including the production, processing and transport of all our food, are responsible for between 20% and 35% of greenhouse gas emissions, meaning our food system is a key driver of climate change and all its knock-on consequences.
3. OUR FUTURE FOOD SUPPLY IS UNCERTAIN
Although food production is currently a key driver of both climate change and losses in biodiversity, both issues could in turn be a threat to our future food security too. Current forecasts suggest that increasing average temperatures could reduce the productivity of food crops by up to 10%,and that a higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the air could result in those crops also producing less nutritious fruits and vegetables. Meanwhile, biodiversity loss could potentially impact our future food production as plants and animals become more vulnerable to pests and diseases, and wild pollinators like bees and butterflies are under threat.
Did you know: Our agricultural system is the largest water user worldwide, accounting for 70% of total freshwater use? This huge demand contributes to global freshwater scarcity and also makes food production more fragile to droughts and climate change.
Alongside these challenges, our food systems are faced with a rapidly growing world population, urbanization, and global changes in our consumption patterns. To meet this rising demand and provide adequate nutrition for all, we must minimise the environmental impact of food production and ensure our future food security by switching to more sustainable diets on a large scale.
4. WE WASTE TOO MUCH FOOD
Ironically, as we struggle to ensure food security, we are simultaneously wasting a huge amount of food. Each year, around 88 million tonnes of food waste are generated in the EU, wasting not only the nutritional value of the food itself but also all the energy, effort and resources (air, land, water, soil, etc.) that went into producing it. Reducing food waste is a simple way to reduce the environmental impact of our food, improve food security, and even lower the amount of money we spend on food!
More than half of this food waste is generated by households, so we can substantially reduce the amount of food wasted by making small changes in our consumer behaviour and habits. Try planning your meals, storing older food products at the front of your shelves to encourage their use, saving your leftovers, and composting food scraps to minimise your food waste.
Did you know: In the EU, up to 10% of food waste can be linked to date marking? Understanding the difference between ‘use by’ and ‘best before’ dates can help to reduce food waste in households.
5. RESPECTING PEOPLE IN THE FOOD CHAIN
Another important aspect of our food system is the social costs that might be involved in producing our food. Supply chains often involve issues related to people’s labour, such as low wages, health and safety risks, or even in some cases modern slavery.
Ethical certifications such as Fairtrade can help tackle such social issues by supporting small-scale producers to trade for better prices, holding higher ethical and environmental standards, and protecting and empowering labourers working on large-scale farms, plantations or estates.
6. RETAINING OUR CULTURE
Last but not least, food is part of our culture. Learning about and respecting the origin of our foods can help us stay connected to our traditional and cultural heritage and help maintain the bonds between cultures and people.
The history and culture of our food can also bring economic and social benefits: for example, certain EU food products are ‘protected’ to promote their unique characteristics, based on the region or town they come from or the traditional method by which they are produced. Such ‘protected’ food products help preserve traditional cultural foods and add value to the local economies that produce them.
VALUE YOUR FOOD BY EATING MORE SUSTAINABLY
By switching to a more sustainable diet, we not only contribute to securing our valuable future food supply but also minimise the impact of our diet on the environment. On an individual level, there are many ways to eat more sustainably, such as consuming less, wasting less, buying more ethically and sustainably produced products, and favouring plant-based foods over animal-based ones. But the first step is for us all to better value our food.