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Super Bowl food safety: Expert tips on how to not get sick from your party platters
The Super Bowl is Sunday, which means two things: football and food! But when some snacks sit out for a long time, they can become a safety hazard.
More than 100 million Americans are expected to throw or attend a Super Bowl party this year, and foodborne illness is no joke. It can cause digestive trouble or even lead to hospitalization or death.
About 1 in 6 Americans get sick each year from foodborne diseases and about 3,000 die, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
The best defense? A good offense.
“Keep your hot foods hot and your cold foods cold,” says Meredith Carothers, food safety specialist at the United States Department of Agriculture. “Your dips, you could put on an icebath. You can put meatballs or other things in a slow-cooker to keep them hot. That’ll help keep those foods at a safe temperature where bacteria can’t grow and multiply.”
Food can go foul faster than you think. The USDA says if you can’t control the temperature, there’s a 2-hour limit. After that, it needs to go back in the fridge or oven.
“You could put a smaller bowl of something out first, and then you could rotate that out after your 2 hour timeframe,” Carothers says. “When you rotate things out, you also have to rotate out or clean the utensil that it’s in.”
She suggests setting a 2-hour timer on your phone to remind you and to use a food thermometer to make sure food reaches a safe internal temperature.
Another tip? Place a bottle of hand sanitizer by the buffet, since so many favorites are finger foods.
“Helps at least get some of the germs taken care of,” Carothers says.
And when the party’s over, be sure to put leftovers in the fridge quickly.
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The Pentagon freed two prisoners Wednesday from Guantánamo Bay, marking the second and third releases this week from the notorious wartime detention camp.
Mohammed Farik bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir bin Lep were repatriated to Malaysia, where both are nationals, according to the United States Department of Defense. The men had been held by the U.S. since 2003 and imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay since 2006, for their ties to al Qaeda and an Indonesian extremist group called Jemaah Islamiyah.
The repatriation of Amin and Lep came as part of a plea deal and an agreement with the government of Malaysia, Defense officials said. Each pleaded guilty before a U.S. military commission to various war crimes, including murder, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, conspiracy and destruction of property. They also provided deposition testimony that can be used against a different prisoner, Encep Nurjaman, who is believed to be the “mastermind” responsible for al Qaeda attacks in Bali and Jakarta between 2002 and 2003.
Their conditions for release from Guantánamo Bay call for an additional five-year period of confinement for each prisoner, to be served either in the country where they are repatriated or a third-party sovereign nation.
Amin and Lep’s releases were announced one day after the Pentagon said another prisoner, Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, was freed from incarceration at Guantánamo Bay and repatriated to Kenya. Detained by the U.S. for 18 years without criminal charges, Bajabu was the first prisoner freed from the camp in roughly a year. U.S. defense officials said a review board determined in December 2021 that detaining Bajabu “was no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the national security of the United States.” The board recommended with that determination that Bajabu be transferred out of Guantánamo Bay.
“The United States appreciates the support to ongoing U.S. efforts toward a deliberate and thorough process focused on responsibly reducing the detainee population and ultimately closing the Guantanamo Bay facility,” the Defense Department said in statements on the releases of all three prisoners.
The latest repatriation efforts leave 27 prisoners still detained at Guantánamo Bay. Of them, 15 are eligible for transfer, three are eligible for evaluation by the review board, and seven are being tried through the military commissions process. Only the final two prisoners have been convicted and sentenced by military commissions, according to the Pentagon.