How food causes illness and how food gets contaminated can occur both directly and indirectly. Take a look at the picture to your right.

Direct Contamination may involve food to food contact. For example, the juices of raw meat directly touch a carrot intended to be used, raw, in salad.

Indirect Contamination will often involve a third medium. For example, you use a cutting board to process raw meat. Immediately after, you use that same cutting board to process carrots intended to be eaten raw. The cutting board is not cleaned and sanitized between tasks, and now becomes an indirect means by which the carrot gets contaminated, and illness spread. A cloth sits on the cutting board and absorbs the juice from the chicken. It is then used to wipe the table where food is chopped, contaminating the table and anything else that gets placed on top.

Food is a messy business!