Make your own fruit and veggie cleanser; learn to detect bad meat by touch.

With food safety efforts stalled, we all need to be careful about how we handle our food.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Despite tainted-food scandals that have sickened thousands of people, and even caused deaths, the U.S. hasn’t gotten any better at protecting Americans from foodborne illnesses in the last 3 years, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report. In fact, none of the government’s Healthy People 2010 targets set for reducing foodborne pathogens were met last year. “This year’s report confirms a very important concern, especially with two high-profile salmonella outbreaks in the last year,” says Robert Tauxe, MD, MPH, deputy director of CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Bacterial, and Mycotic Diseases. “We recognize that we have reached a plateau in the prevention of foodborne disease, and there must be new efforts to develop and evaluate food-safety practices from the farm to the table.”

THE DETAILS: The Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) of CDC found nearly 19,000 laboratory-confirmed cases of infection in FoodNet surveillance areas across 10 states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee), according to the report. Outbreaks associated with Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, E-coli, Listeria, Salmonella, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia foodborne illness were comparable to 3 years ago.

WHAT IT MEANS: The Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture have a ways to go when it comes to making sure our food is safe. Recalls are still trickling in after tainted peanut butter made its way into hundreds of food products earlier this year, and just last month one of the country’s largest producers of pistachios recalled its crop due to salmonella contamination. So as government agencies work to make our food system safer, we all need to do everything we can to protect ourselves from foodborne illness.

Use these food-safety tips to find safe food at the market and prepare it safely at home: