Wednesday, September 03, 2008
How fresh is that food in your fridge? Depends.
Lindsey Nair
Front Burner blog
Recent columns
- A taste of the Crooked Road
- Book 'em: New foodie cookbooks just in time for the holidays
- The new hometown brews
- Cookie lovers, this one's for you
Recipes
On at least a monthly basis, my husband sets his designs on some plastic storage container excavated from the Siberian depths of our refrigerator.
"You can't possibly be thinking about eating that," I say.
"It's only a week old," he exaggerates. "Besides, I have an iron stomach."
To his credit, my mate has never suffered more than a mild stomachache in the years we've been together. Conversely, I am very cautious about what goes into my mouth and have had food poisoning at least twice.
What gives?
September is National Food Safety Education Month, and in light of all the salmonella-infested jalapenos and E.coli-tainted beef, I wondered what we ought to spend our valuable time worrying about and what, quite frankly, is out of our control.
Is it really going to make a difference if we promptly throw out our eggs on the expiration date, wash our spinach or bleach our cutting boards?
For the answers to these questions, I turned to one of my favorite food scientists, Joell Eifert, who works in the Department of Food Science and Technology at Virginia Tech.
Eifert may spend her days bent over petri dishes, but she also uses "LOL" in e-mails and bursts into gales of infectious laughter when I make dumb jokes on the phone.
She also knows her stuff, so I was fascinated when she told me that a lot of those expiration dates at the grocery store are just guidelines.
"Very likely, they are related to a quality issue versus a safety issue," she said. "It is really the manufacturer trying to warn you that after this date, you might not appreciate the sensory characteristics of this product anymore."
For example, if a jug of milk is one week past its expiration date, it may taste bad and it might even give you a sour stomach, but it's not going to cause food poisoning because pasteurization killed the dangerous organisms.
For every illness-causing pathogen that exists in the world of food, Eifert said, there are countless other spoilage organisms that scientists hardly bother with at all. They're more interested in what could potentially kill us, or at least have us hunched over the toilet for several miserable days.
The Four-Step Approach to Food Safety
Clean
- Wash your hands frequently during the cooking process, particularly after you have touched raw meat or poultry.
- Sterilize your cutting boards with either a bleach solution or one of the food-safe products on the market. Or put it through the dishwasher on the sterilizing cycle. “We have been finding out that microorganisms can hide in places,” Joell Eifert of Virginia Tech said. “What looks like a little crevice to you is a giant mountain to them. They’re just hanging out in there.”
- If you use sponges, make it a routine to microwave them (be sure they’re wet first), bleach them or run them through the dishwasher. And throw them out before they get too grungy.
Separate
- Don’t cross-contaminate by cutting raw meats on a cutting board and then cutting up vegetables that you plan to eat raw. “I always advocate several cutting boards,” Eifert said.
Cook correctly
- Know and follow your cooking temperatures for eggs, ground meat, fresh beef, chicken and the like. As Eifert said, those were scientifically proven.
- What about all the raw egg batters we used to lick off the beaters as children? Eifert said they have found a low incidence of salmonella in eggs, but it can still be there. If you don’t want to risk getting sick, just don’t eat raw eggs.
Chill
I’m the queen of making a big pot of soup or a casserole and letting it sit on the counter for hours to cool down. Hey, I don’t want to overtax my refrigerator.
Eifert and Diane Woolard, of the state health department, say that is a bad idea. Leftovers should be chilled down within two hours, ideally, and within four hours tops. Some tips:
- To speed the chilling process, package big batches of leftovers in smaller containers.
- Use a thermometer to keep your fridge temperature at 40 or below; the freezer at zero or below.
- Don’t assume that your refrigerator is running at the correct temperature. If it’s an older fridge or it’s overstuffed, it could be running too warm even at the lowest setting. In some cases, it might be time to buy a new fridge.
- Don’t thaw food at room temperature. A little advance planning, some warm water or the microwave is a much safer bet.
Source: Virginia Tech Department of Food Science and Virginia Health Department
To deal with those bad bugs, Eifert and Virginia Health Department epidemiologist Diane Woolard both stress a simple, four-step approach.
Eifert said if cooks follow all of those safety procedures and wash their hands before packing leftovers in a clean container, they'll probably be OK.
Let's say we follow all of those recommendations to a T, but we unknowingly buy some salmonella-tainted jalapenos at the grocery store.
According to Eifert, every single vegetable and piece of fruit you buy, whether it be spinach or a cantaloupe, should be washed before eating. That might help, but cooking the vegetable is probably the only way to kill something such as salmonella.
In those cases, when all of the experts' guidelines are powerless against contamination, consumers begin to feel helpless about their own food safety.
Eifert wants those folks to know that's why she gets up every day and goes to work to study what she does.
"Really, what we are trying to do now as food safety specialists is keep that from happening in the first place," she said. "The food safety system isn't perfect yet, but we are definitely making leaps and bounds from the early 1900s."
What's the grossest thing you've ever found in your refrigerator? Log onto the blog to share slimy stories.
