Four Types of Food Contamination

When we get sick from something we’ve consumed, it’s not difficult to imagine nasty microscopic germs crawling over the bad food. But that’s just one way food can make you sick. There are actually four ways food becomes contaminated:

1. Chemical – If food or drink comes into contact with pesticides or cleaning chemicals that’s a surefire recipe for potential contamination.
2. Physical – Ever found hair in your food? Exactly. Dirt, stones, glass fall under this category though the list of foreign objects in food could go on and on.
3. Allergen – Everyone knows someone with a food allergy, whether it’s shellfish, eggs or peanuts. But steering clear of allergic foods is not as easy as you might think.
4. Biological – Bacteria, salmonella and E. coli are examples of this kind of contamination, the most common of the four.