Uncleaned knife and grater can spread bacteria for other foods

Do you use knife or grater in the kitchen to cut different eatables one after another, without washing them in between? You could be playing a role in spreading disease-causing bacteria, warns a study.

Actually, bacteria latch on to the utensils commonly found in consumers’ homes and spread to the next item.

Researchers have known that poor hygiene in a consumer’s home can lead to food-borne illnesses, but considering what practices in the kitchen are more likely to lead to contamination has not been examined extensively.

Using a knife, we would cut into things like tomatoes or cantaloupe and other types of produce to see how easily the bacteria could spread when the knife was continuously used without being cleaned.

It is found that both knives and graters can cause additional cross-contamination in the kitchen and that the pathogens were spread from produce to produce if they hadn’t washed the utensils.

The study also found that certain fruit and vegetables spread pathogens to knives to different degrees.

“For items like tomatoes, we tended to have a higher contamination of the knives than when we cut strawberries,”

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