post blackout food concern

[mb7o]

fat guy, i'm curious what makes your fridge different. full of wet veggies or fruit? empty, poorly insulated, full of something fermenting already? maybe your apartment was way warmer?

but yes, the warming wet sealed environment is scary. but anything bottled and normally self-preserving shouldn't be affected as much. peanut butter? how about soy sauce, they say to refridgerate that too!

Edited August 16, 2003 by mb7o (log)

[Fat Guy]

I'm only concerned about open/exposed items. I don't care if it's a soda can or a jar of jam -- I'm just rinsing those off and putting them back. But anything where the actual food was in direct contact with the environment in that fridge is gone, and any kind of fresh meat or highly perishable item like mayo is gone even if it was in a sealed container.

My apartment has lots of windows and a southern exposure, so it's usually significantly warmer than the outdoors. This is nice in winter -- I barely need to heat the place. In summer, I usually combat this phenomenon with air conditioning and blinds. But the blinds don't do the trick alone and aren't particularly desirable when there's no power available to run the lights. But my mother's fridge did the same thing as mine and she has a northern exposure and was only without power for 13 hours. Both of us have state-of-the-art refrigerators that are around 6 years old.

[Nick]

The only thing I'd toss without second thought is poultry, and maybe fish. Everything else gets the smell test. Eggs should be fine, as well as all brined stuff and dried fruit. Tamari (real soy sauce) and miso don't even need refrigeration.

I use the smell test on any kind of meat or fish, whether I've bought it at a store or thawed it from the freezer. It's never let me down.

[Smarmotron]

Hysteria.

27 hours in the fridge w/o power is fine. Especially if you verified, after opening it, that everything was cold to the touch.

As long as it is refrozen or re-refrigerated quickly, it shouldn't be a problem. If there's anything from an animal in there that you would eat without cooking, however, that should be tossed out [unless it is cheese].

Eggs can stand for days w/o refrigeration.

Cheese can stand for a day w/o refrigeration as long as it is air-tight packaged.

Berries are a no-brainer, just re-refrigerate them.

Bacon is cooked, so as long as it was cold to the touch it is okay.

Etc.

Am I the only person whose refrigerator started to collect stinky water in the bottom, with some of it coming out the seal at the bottom of the door and pooling up on the floor?

Yes. My fridge did no such thing.

If you wanted to set up a lab to breed bacteria you couldn't do much better than those conditions.

Actually you could. My fridge could hardly be called 'fancy' and yet it never rose above 50 degrees. Hardly favorable bacterial breeding ground.

And as I understand it, a single item in the refrigerator -- such as a piece of raw meat -- that starts to develop bacterial contamination can, in a moist, warm environment, contaminate every other open item in the fridge pretty quickly.

False.

Eggs are particularly vulnerable because they're so porous and they tend not to be kept in sealed containers.

False. In the vast majority of the world, eggs are kept for days at room temperature, and sold at that temp. Plus, if you cook the eggs, there's no problem.

Edited August 18, 2003 by Smarmotron (log)

[Fat Guy]

Every type of foodborne bacteria I know of can grow at temperatures above 40 degrees -- I'm not aware of anything in any literature that says 50 degrees is a magical safe temperature. Nor is refrigeration just about temperature. It is about humidity control and the circulation of cool air. This is not about whether eggs can sit on the counter for a week -- I can't believe how many times I've responded to the same argument in this one thread. This is about potential bacterial growth and cross-contamination in a non-functioning refrigerator cavity. I'm sure the government, university, and medical sources are overreacting and erring on the side of caution, but I also suspect they haven't just imagined these risks. And I'm sure they haven't imagined that people experience a range of foodborne illnesses in the real world, that most of them are minor, some of them are serious, a few result in death each year, and most are preventable.

You're all free to risk your personal health and safety, and chances are nobody is going to get hurt -- we are dealing only in risk here. But unless you are a qualified professional or someone who has done a ton of research and is willing to explain yourself and be held accountable, don't advise anybody else to take those risks. We're not talking about a complex tradeoff of happiness or quality of life here; we're talking about discarding a few perishables after a blackout.

[fresco]

I've had lunch at restaurants a couple of times since the outages, with no ill effects. But I've also noticed a couple of news stories about people suffering food poisoning after dining out post-blackout, and predictions are there will be an increase in such cases.

Some places are tossing tens of thousands of dollars worth of food, but when you are running a small, marginal place and you've already had a bad year, the temptation to try to salvage something must be enormous.

[elyse]

Smarmotron: a voice of reason.

[Jinmyo]

I've posted this article on this thread in Media.

[Ladybug]

We had a big ice storm last winter in North Carolina last year and our power was out for 3 days. It never got above about 40 during the day and froze every night - and most of my stuff was fine. I chucked the milk and a couple other things in the fridge - but everything in the freezer was still fine. A few things closer to the door of the freezer (which I opened twice) were "bendable" and we ate those right away. We didn't get sick. I just have this strong, nearly-impossible-to-repress urge to conserve. I just couldn't throw everything out, especially since it still seemed fine. I know that my personal experience is no evidence that y'all's food would be fine, but I would be very reluctant to chuck it all. Maybe I'm just a horrible, stingy miser, but it comes naturally. My Dad has even been known to cut open a tube of toothpaste to scrape out the last little smear. (I'm not quite that bad!) My Mom taped together all the little strips of paper from a spent book of checks to make a sign saying, "WASTE NOT, WANT NOT!" My Grandpa put screws and nails into the end of pencils when they got too short to hold onto so he could still use them. My Grandma saved all her scraps of bar soap and put them in a net bag to use to save a few cents. I come from a long line of cheap people.

[elyse]

Very good.