Maintaining Food Safety for Children

The assignment content discusses the importance of food safety in early childhood education settings. It highlights the risks of severe health hazards if food is not handled properly and provides guidelines for maintaining food safety, including preparing food in a clean environment, serving food cleanly, storing food at the right temperature, and preventing cross-contamination. The content also identifies six conditions that facilitate the growth of foodborne pathogens: presence of nutrients, acidity, time, temperature, oxygen, and moisture.

Safety is an important aspect of the National Quality Framework and the Early Years Learning
Framework. The food safety is an important part of the overall safety for the children. If the foods,
provided to the children are not handled in the right manner, severe health hazards can arise (Pérez-
Escamilla et al., 2017). The unsafe food handling can cause food poisoning. The food safety can be
maintained in the following ways—
 Preparing the food items in clean and healthy environment
 Serving the food with cleanliness and in the proper way
 Storing the food in a clean environment at appropriate temperature
 Ensuring the bacteria spreading is stopped with cross contamination
Reference:
Pérez-Escamilla, R., Segura-Pérez, S., & Lott, M. (2017). Feeding guidelines for infants and young
toddlers: A responsive parenting approach. Nutrition Today, 52(5), 223-231.
The six conditions for growth of the food-borne pathogens are as follow—
 Food-- Presence of some nutrients in the food can enhance the growth of microorganism. The
protein-rich products such as milk, meat and eggs are at higher risk for growing pathogens
(Upadhyay et al., 2015).
 Acidity-- presence of acidity in the food products is another factor that contributes to the
growth of pathogens.
 Time-- The food should be stored for right duration.
 Temperature-- The food borne bacteria can grow at a temperature between 5 to 57 degree
Celsius.
 Oxygen—The bacteria can grow at presence of Oxygen
 Moisture-- the presence of moisture can foster growth of bacteria.
Reference:
Upadhyay, S., Hussain, A., Mishra, S., Maurya, A. P., Bhattacharjee, A., & Joshi, S. R. (2015). Genetic
environment of plasmid mediated CTX-M-15 extended spectrum beta-lactamases from clinical and food
borne bacteria in North-Eastern India. PloS one, 10(9), e0138056.