How to Cook and Store Food Safely on Thanksgiving (and Beyond)

Your biggest dilemma on Thanksgiving should be whether to go for one last slice of pumpkin or apple pie. (Easy: Choose both.) 

But imagine the cook forgot to wash the veggies in that harvest salad. Or didn’t start thawing the turkey soon enough. Or didn’t change utensils between handling raw and cooked meat. 

“Do you want to take the risk and eat it?” asked Shauna Henley, a family and consumer sciences senior agent with the University of Maryland Extension, affiliated with the Department of Nutrition & Food Science. 

She’s working across the state to make sure that risk never emerges in the first place (and even hosting a live Q&A today; see sidebar for details). From leading a cooking club for elementary school students in College Park to training farmers about produce safety and teaching consumers about canning and food preservation, Henley teaches food safety widely. 

As family and friends gather for holiday feasts, Henley explained how to stay safe from foodborne illness and get the most out of your groceries:

Wash your hands: You might start your meal prep with a 20-second soapy scrub, but that’s not enough, said Henley. Make sure you wash throughout. For example, “we’re touching our phones, our tablets to scroll for recipes,” and those devices are covered in germs. 

But not your chicken (or turkey!): To get the slime off your poultry, use a clean paper towel—don’t run it under the tap. “You can get aerosolized spray of bacteria” like salmonella or campylobacter, which can cause diarrhea and vomiting. As a doctoral student, Henley led the original “Don’t Wash Your Chicken” marketing campaign more than a decade ago, but said there’s still plenty of room for improvement. 

Use a food thermometer: “People only pull it out for Thanksgiving, but you should use it any time you’re cooking proteins or even heating leftovers,” she said. Know the safe internal minimum temperatures, especially for items like pork and poultry that must be fully cooked. 

Quickly store and consume leftovers: Don’t let dishes languish more than an hour (two at most) before getting them into the refrigerator, because bacteria can grow rapidly. “My food safety twitch is that I’ll start putting food away at a party if it’s sitting out too long,” Henley said. If you have salsa, for example, portion it into smaller bowls and swap it out each hour. And eat or freeze that pot of curry or vat of spaghetti within three or four days, before foodborne pathogens can start to grow. 

Expiration and best-by dates aren’t set in stone: Other than infant formula, the printed dates, even for dairy and eggs, are recommendations for the retailer for how long to keep the food on the shelf for peak freshness, said Henley. “It’s not a true food safety date.”