HEED THE HEALTH INSPECTOR

Desk lunches can be a tricky business — you cook them well ahead and they often languish on your desk till you can wolf them down.

“When you take that lunch out of the fridge in the morning, put it in an insulated lunch bag and add a frozen juice pack or frozen bottled water to keep temperatures cold,” says Jim Chan, a retired public health inspector with the city.

“It can easily be stored for up to four hours and you can drink the juice box. Don’t let it sit at room temperature for four hours.”

Chan says the key to reducing rates of food poisoning is to reduce the risks in the first place. Make sure all the cooking utensils are clean to start. When cooking meats like beef or fish, cook them all the way through, rather than leaving them half done and expecting to finish in the office microwave.

When making lunches ahead of time, let the food cool on the counter for no more than an hour before transferring to an airtight container in the fridge. If you’re batch cooking, divide the food into smaller containers so that it can cool within the hour on the counter. You’re not doing your fridge any favours by placing a big pot of hot food inside — that raises the appliance’s internal temperature and puts everything else inside at risk of bacterial growth.

Common lunch items that are prone to bacterial growth include luncheon meats (Chan says he actually stopped buying luncheon meat altogether after investigating listeria outbreaks); hummus due to unclean equipment used to pulverize the chickpeas and raw garlic that still had traces of dirt; and sauces like leftover gravy that are low in acids and are starchy and thick, — an ideal environment for bacteria.

And that office microwave? Zap the food until it’s as hot as it was when it originally came out of the oven, not until it’s just lukewarm. When in doubt, ditch the reheat and invest in a stainless steel Thermos.