Meat Pies: Bacteria Case Study

Ready-to-eat foods can be described as the status of foods been set for instant ingestion at the point of sale, lacking any necessity for additional heat treatment as stated by Tsang in 2002. These foods are convenient and usually satisfy customers for a period ridding them of hunger for a period. Meat pies are generally made of flour, margarine, water, filling: usually minced beef or fish, vegetables and potatoes. Meat pies consist of the pie crust and filling. The crust is made of flour, salt, margarine and glazed with eggs. The filling usually made of minced meat, vegetables and potatoes. They are baked for about 30- 45 minutes and ready for consumption after. Meat pies are the most popular of all pastries, in fact they are the certified state food of the U.S. state of Louisiana (Falola et al., 2011). Owing to the make of these meat pies, they are easily perishable food with a comparatively short shelf life, as such, have need of special care and handling (Falola et al., 2011). This is as

Bacteria thrive everywhere even in food samples. Some of these bacteria are helpful and useful while others are detrimental and can cause a wide variety of life threatening diseases (Pommerville, 2011). Microorganisms are plentiful and omnipresent in nature and their role as causative agents of food borne illnesses was known way back in the 19th century (Mbah et al., 2012). It was revealed by the end of the 19th century that microorganisms were accountable for a range of food borne diseases (Mbah et al., 2012).

Gram- negative bacteria are a group of bacteria that do not retain the crystal violet stain used in Gram staining method of bacterial differentiation (Wikipedia, n.d.). They are characterised by their smaller peptidoglycan comprising about 2%- 10% of the cell wall, lack of teichoic acid, an outer membrane and a not highly cross-linked and thin peptidoglycan