From: John De Armond Newsgroups: rec.outdoors.rv-travel Subject: Re: fridge coldness Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 14:19:48 -0400 Robert Bourke wrote: > > i have a small temp gauge in the fridge. when fridge is cold it reads > 40 degrees. we don't travel with propane on, and after trips home of 3 > to 6 hours, the temp gauge reads 60 degrees. my question is this; are > hot dogs or lunch meat and that sort of thing still safe to eat? i keep > throwing it away, but don't want to if its still good to eat. anyone > know? TIA kathie To truly know, you have to know both the temperature and time at temperature. this is because bacteria need a certain amount of time to multiply after reaching a hospitable temperature. The federal restaurant rules require that perishable food be held below 45 degrees (soon to be 40) at all times. As a restaurant owner who has a heightened awareness of food-borne pathogens, I religiously adhere to that. I actually keep all my coolers, including the one in the RV, right above freezing. This gives me some added safety margin if someone leaves something sitting out too long. I would personally not touch any meat or dairy product that has been at more than 45 deg for any length of time at all. Not worth the risk. Especially on a trip where it would be less than enjoyable to be sick. I have had a number of mostly older workers in my restaurant who poo-poo the new standards. A few have had to go out the door because they won't change. I usually get something to the effect "well ma mother thawed chicken at room temperature all day and I'm going to too." Problem is, things have changed. At the top of the list is the mutant strain of E. Coli that has been in the news for the past few years. Now E. Coli is ubiquitous - we all have it in our gut. The difference is that somewhere, some time, a colony mutated and turned virulent. It still propagates and thrives just like the harmless strains but unlike the older strains, it can sicken and kill the weak. ANY fecal contamination (inevitable in a slaughterhouse) can bear this bacteria. Another factor is the widespread abuse of antibiotics, both by farmers as a growth enhancing agent and by most people who insist on an antibiotic for a sore throat and then don't take it all, has bred drug resistant strains of other common food-borne pathogens. This stuff is a BUNCH more virulent than even 20 years ago. The factory farms are another problem. Whereas when a chick is raised as nature intended, it receives a load of beneficial bacteria from its mother. In a factory chicken house, this doesn't happen. Salmonella opportunistically takes up residence instead. I've seen some government estimates that as much as 70% of the commercial flock harbors (or did) salmonella. Recently it was discovered that chicks in the factory house could be inoculated with the harmless bacteria. Some houses now spray these harmless bacteria on the chicks. Since this is not now a widespread practice, one must treat raw chicken as a hazardous substance. I have a separate area in my restaurant along with dedicated utensils to process chicken. The sheer volume of food produced each day in a modern food plant means that if some contamination reaches the plant or worse, a colony of pathogen sets up camp in the machinery, it can get spread across the country in days. I worked for M&M Mars for a few years as a process engineer. Mars went far above and beyond the norm for food safety. Every single lot of product (100 metric tons a shift) was quarantined for the 14 day cycle necessary to culture for salmonella. Easy enough to do for candy bars; hard to do for perishable meat product. So the problem is, you may have purchased the meat and have it in your fridge before can be known whether it is contaminated or not. After having worked in the food industry for awhile, I no longer eat meat, dairy or egg product that I cannot know for sure was cooked safely. That means I eat no cold cuts that I don't prepare myself. If you DO eat cold cuts, at LEAST keep them as cold as you can. what you are doing in turning off the refrigerator is trading, at most, a theoretical risk from running the propane while underway for a very real risk of illness from contaminated food. If you really are so phobic of propane that you wont' run it while underway, perhaps you could consider getting one of the compressor-based refrigerators that will run on 12 volts. John -- John De Armond johngdSPAMNOT@bellsouth.net http://personal.bellsouth.net/~johngd/ Neon John's Custom Neon Cleveland, TN "Bendin' Glass 'n Passin' Gas" From: John De Armond Newsgroups: rec.outdoors.rv-travel Subject: Re: fridge coldness Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 22:04:53 -0400 GS wrote: > > Neon John wrote: > > > > > > To truly know, you have to know both the temperature and time at > > temperature. this is because bacteria need a certain amount of time > > to multiply after reaching a hospitable temperature. > > > > The federal restaurant rules require that perishable food be held > > below 45 degrees (soon to be 40) at all times. As a restaurant > > owner who has a heightened awareness of food-borne pathogens, I > > religiously adhere to that. I actually keep all my coolers, > > including the one in the RV, right above freezing. This gives me > > some added safety margin if someone leaves something sitting out too > > long. > > OUTSTANDING Post, John. > > The food industry (both growing and processing) is truly > terrifying to me today. It's a major calamity just waiting > to happen. I hate that you feel that way and I hope I didn't contribute to it. I certainly don't agree that there's any calamity about to happen. Indeed, I consider the food supply to be the safest it's ever been. The new bugs are bad, of course, but the science is more than offsetting that. Consider, for example, the new genetically engineered test kits that can detect the actual protein of pathogen contamination of food in minutes. I can take a swab of suspected meat and see instantly whether it is contaminated. More sophisticated versions of this are being deployed in the meat processing plants even as I type. Tragically, the only thing the mass media could report on this topic was to bemoan the government actually letting the evil meat industry monitor itself. Contrast this with the government inspection technique of (literally) yesterday - look and sniff. Or consider the much lamented (by the media and some idiots, at least) food irradiation. Irradiation kills bacteria by exposing it to nuclear radiation. The luddites such as Nader have risen up out of the ooze to protest meat irradiation because it involves something "nuclear" (and some idiots have gone along.) but the fact is, dry goods have been being irradiated for years to great success. Nader & company's twisted logic is that irradiation will allow contamination in the meat. Er, wrong. A certain level of contamination is ALREADY INEVITABLY in meat and always has been. All irradiation does is kill what is already there. I buy irradiated food whenever I can. Still not easy - my distributors are skittish of potential bad publicity. All it takes is one of these local TV twits with an IQ hovering around room temperature to do a slash and burn story on irradiation to scare them off. Me, I don't care. I'm willing to take some personal risk to serve safer food. The really, really funny/sad part of food irradiation is that the industry realized that the public is too stupid to know what it actually involves. They've repackaged the process as "cold sterilization" that uses "electrons" (beta radiation) produced in a particle accelerator so that the word "nuclear" can be avoided and everyone, even the Luddites, are happy as clams. The "energetic electrons", of course, generate Bremsstrahlung X-rays when they strike the food and that's what does the sterilizing. Amazing, huh? Another example, consider Cryropacking. This is the process of saturating the meat with nitrogen gas and then vacuum sealing. The nitrogen inhibits the growth of aerobic bacteria and the vacuum sealing keeps it that way. Unfrozen cryropacked meat will stay fresh a month or better. This is just a part of the conversion to box meats. It was only a few years ago when meat was butchered in the grocery store's own butcher shop. Sides of beef and pork were shipped open, unwrapped in refrigerated trucks to the grocery store where it was handled and butchered under conditions that ranged from fair to horrid. Nowadays, grocery stores receive meat in boxes, usually with the actual pieces cryropacked inside the box. The box itself protects the meat from contamination AND provides insulation in case the box is left out of the refrigerator too long. Another fairly recent development in food safety is the time-temperature tattletales that are being deployed on a widespread basis. This device is typically a cardboard thingie about the size of a postage stamp that contains some bio-engineered enzymes and a color indicator. It responds to time-at-temperature quite similar to how bacteria does. When the time-at-temperature has been exceeded, the color changes to warn the recipient that the contents probably are not safe. These things are cheap enough that they're being packed in ever case of meat. This is being driven by the biggest grocery retailer in the world - Wal*Mart. Everyone should remember this as they cuss Wal*Mart for "putting the little guys out of business." When I receive a box of meat and the tattletale has not fired, I KNOW that the meat has been stored properly and has not sat in the sun on some dock while some lazy dock worker takes a lunch break. Just think about how it was, say 20 or 30 years ago. I recall it vividly because I was driving 70 miles one way to work and it seemed like the food poisoning would invariably hit me while in the car :-( I can recall several bouts a year. Nowadays, food poisoning is so rare that the dullards in the media can lumber over to cover individual cases. Yes, the huge factories and distribution networks do cause a given attack to affect more people but the occurrence is so rare that I'm perfectly happy to make the tradeoff. Even the problem with salmonella in chicken I see as a positive in the big picture. It has always been there to some extent but the increase caused by factory farms has made (most) everyone pay attention to raw chicken and handle it properly. If I'd been in the restaurant business 20 years ago, I probably would have thought nothing of thawing chicken at room temperature or processing it with the same utensils used for other food. Now I know better and everyone is safer as the result. Contrary to the fear mongered by the media, today's food has never been safer as long as one follows the simple safety rules. Such as avoiding precooked meat product, at least until irradiation catches on. Such as LEAVING THE DAMN PROPANE ON!!!! :-) John -- John De Armond johngdSPAMNOT@bellsouth.net http://personal.bellsouth.net/~johngd/ Neon John's Custom Neon Cleveland, TN "Bendin' Glass 'n Passin' Gas" |
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