Final answer:
To ensure food safety, a customer should reheat a delivered hot meal thoroughly before consumption to prevent foodborne diseases. Regular handwashing, using a cooking thermometer to check food temperatures, and proper refrigeration practices are crucial to food safety.
Step-by-step explanation:
When a catered, ready-to-eat hot meal is delivered, the instructions to a customer to ensure food safety would be to reheat the meal thoroughly before consumption. This is because perishable foods left at a temperature between 4 and 60 degrees C (40 and 140 degrees F) for more than two hours should be thrown out to prevent the risk of foodborne diseases. Therefore, if you store cooked leftovers at room temperature for more than two hours, they are not safe to eat even if you heat them up well first, due to the potential rapid multiplication of bacteria.
Regular handwashing, using a cooking thermometer to ensure a high enough temperature, and preemptively keeping your refrigerator at or Below 4 degrees C (40 degrees F) are all critical practices for food safety. Remember to rinse fresh produce before eating, even if you don't plan to eat the rind, as microbes or toxins on the surface can contaminate the inside when the food is cut or peeled.
To reduce the risk of foodborne diseases, leftovers should be rapidly cooled, such as by placing a pot of homemade soup in an ice water bath before refrigerating. This helps prevent the food from staying in the temperature danger zone that allows bacterial growth and ensures quicker temperature reduction, preserving food safety and quality.