Thursday, May 1, 2008
After drinking half a can of pop and eating half a bowl of food, you decide to save the rest of your meal for later. You will probably put your leftovers in the refrigerator until you want them again. However, if you don’t cover the can and the bowl, you might come back to a meal that contains more than you bargained for.
Annabel Hecht, author of The Unwelcome Dinner Guest: Preventing Food-Borne Illness, says that keeping open containers in your fridge can produce a lot of bacteria within the food. Cross-contamination can occur between foods that have not been covered, meaning that one container may harbor several kinds of bacteria that it picked up from other open containers in your fridge. One bacterium can multiply into four million bacteria in fewer than eight hours given the right conditions, Hecht says. Because of the cold temperature, bacteria grow at a slower rate in refrigerators, but last night’s dinner can easily have more than one million new ingredients by dinnertime today if it’s left in an open container. If you eat or drink anything that has been left open and has a large amount of bacteria in it, you have a good chance of becoming sick, Hecht says. She recommends keeping all containers, both food and beverage, sealed tightly in your fridge. She also says it’s good to have air circulating inside your fridge, so don’t pack containers in too close together.
Not only will covering your containers keep you from getting sick, but it will also keep your refrigerator lasting longer. Open beverages increase the amount of moisture deposited onto the cooling coil in your fridge, says Donald Grummet, author of Steps to Help Refrigerators Live Longer. Grummet says the extra moisture can cause the compressor in your fridge to run about four hours longer than it normally would each day. If your compressor works harder than it’s supposed to, it stops working much sooner than expected.
So, keep your body and your fridge healthy: Cover those containers.
VERDICT: BAD FOR YOU
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