Food handling in the home

Despite rapidly changing lifestyle, work and commuting patterns, and increasing levels of out-of-home food consumption (Warde et al., 2007; Cheng et al., 2007), our homes continue to act as central sites for food provisioning (Holm et al., 2016). Who we live with; the design, size, and layout of our domestic spaces; the things, technologies, and appliances we fill them with; what we use our homes for; and the amount of time we spend there all influence, directly and indirectly, how, what, for whom, where, and when we provision food at home. Central to domestic food provisioning are universally performed food handling practices associated with the storage (including refrigeration), preparation, cooking, eating, and disposal of food such as filling the refrigerator, handling raw meat, chopping vegetables, weighing out ingredients, frying food, plating up meals, and composting leftovers. Such practices involve differing degrees of human–food interaction, can act as pathways for foodborne pathogen growth, may speed up microbial spoilage of food, and contribute to, and/or cause, domestic originated foodborne illness.