• Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and hot water and dry them before handling food and after handling raw meat, going to the toilet, blowing your nose or touching animals.
• Wash worktops before and after preparing food, particularly after they’ve been touched by raw meat, including poultry or raw eggs.
• Wash all raw vegetables and fruits before eating them. Peeling or cooking fruit and vegetables can also remove bacteria.
• Wash dishcloths regularly and let them dry before you use them again. Dirty, damp cloths are the perfect place for bacteria to breed.
• Use separate chopping boards for raw meat and for ready-to-eat food. Raw meat contains harmful bacteria that can spread very easily to anything it touches, including other foods, worktops, chopping boards and knives.
• Always cover raw meat and store in on the bottom shelf of the fridge where it can’t touch other foods or drip on to them.
• Cook food thoroughly and check that it is hot all the way through. Make sure poultry, pork, burgers, sausages and kebabs are cooked until it is steaming hot, with no pink meat inside.
• Keep your fridge temperature between 0oC and 5oC
• If you have cooked food that you are not going to eat straight away, cool it as quickly as possible (within 90 minutes) and store it in the fridge or freezer. Use any leftovers from the fridge within 2 days
• Don’t eat food that is past its expiry date.

These very simple tips can ensure that your stay in Jakarta be a pleasant one. However, as I mentioned previously no one is immune to food poisoning. There are many restaurants in Jakarta that claim to have pristine safety standards but are still below par. Another aspect of the culinary experience in Jakarta is the street side food vendors. Although the food is “to die for” it can actually kill you. The best way to prevent complications of food poisoning is detecting and treating it early. The most common symptoms of food poisoning are nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. People may also experience stomach cramps and abdominal pain, loss of appetite, fever, muscle pains and chills. In the German Outbreak, bloody diarrhea was the main symptom.