How safe is the food in your fridge after load shedding?

With load shedding part of our lives for the foreseeable future, consumers may have some doubts about how safe the food in their fridges is after extended bouts without power.

If the cold chain is interrupted, it can potentially affect the safety of food in your refrigerator and cause illness when your family eats it.

Load shedding is frustrating – with traffic jams, damage to appliances and loss of productivity, while it also affects the growth of the economy. It also poses a health risk especially in the hottest time of the year when food spoils because it is not kept cold enough.

Spoiled food can be very dangerous for your family, which is why the US Department of Agriculture says all perishable food, such as raw meat, fruit, and vegetables must be refrigerated or frozen within two hours after you bought it.

When these foods are exposed to room temperature from 4.44 to 60°C, it moves into the danger zone where bacteria can grow that can make you sick.

Food safety expert, prof Lucia Anelich, says that refrigerated food should be safe as long as the power is out for no more than 4 hours, the refrigerator door is kept shut, and the fridge was running at 4°C at the time of load shedding. 

Perishable foods, such as fresh meat, fresh poultry, fresh fish, milk and soft cheeses are the most susceptible to spoilage and food safety concerns. Leftovers could also be a problem, depending on how long it was in the fridge before load shedding.

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Food safety in your fridge during load shedding

Anelich says fridges should run at no higher than 4°C, but we know most consumer fridges run at higher temperatures in South Africa. “Therefore, the 4-hour time period may be even shorter in such cases.”

Her advice is to discard perishable foods if the outage is longer than 2 hours and where the fridge temperature is higher than 4°C. She says the only way to know whether desirable fridge temperatures have been exceeded is to keep a thermometer in the refrigerator.

“Different bacteria start growing at different minimum temperatures, but for every 1-degree Celsius increase above that minimum growth temperature, bacteria in food grow by doubling themselves faster. It is, therefore, essential to keep the door closed to ensure that the temperature stays as low as possible during the power outage.”

Anelich says frozen foods will remain frozen for about 48 hours, again if the freezer door is kept closed. “If any perishable foods start to thaw for whatever reason, do not refreeze them and cook them as soon as possible.”

She also warns that consumers must never taste these foods to determine whether they are safe to possibly keep them.

“Considering the cost of food, you may be hesitant to throw it away, but remember that you cannot taste or smell when a food is unsafe. When food smells off it usually means it is spoiled and should not be eaten. However, unsafe food may still smell and taste perfectly fine.”

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Prepare for load shedding

If you know the load shedding schedule, you can prepare for it by:

• Ensuring the refrigerator runs at 4°C or as close as possible to that.
• Freeze refrigerated items that can be frozen, such as milk, leftovers, fresh meat, poultry and fish that you may not need immediately.
• If you do not have a freezer, buy smaller quantities of fresh food, cook and consume them quickly, rather than buying in bulk and refrigerating those items for long periods of time.
• Consider buying long-life products, such as sterile or UHT milk and canned goods, which all have a long shelf-life outside the refrigerator while unopened. However, once opened, they must also be refrigerated.
• You can also use frozen ice packs packed around perishable foods in the refrigerator to keep them cold for as long as possible during load shedding.
• Cook food that must be cooked before eating thoroughly, even when there is no load shedding.

It is also very important to keep thoroughly cooked foods refrigerated for a maximum of a few days, but cooked foods can also be potentially dangerous under certain circumstances, such as when food is not prepared under hygienic conditions creating a potential for certain heat resistant bacterial toxins to be produced in the food.

In this case, cooking may destroy the bacterial cells, but not necessarily the toxins, which may then make you ill, or if the food was contaminated after cooking and not reheated thoroughly before eating it.

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Food safety and your freezer

Keeping food in a freezer below 0°C is a good option, because it slows down or stops the growth of bacteria.

It is important to remember that freezing kills bacteria completely, but above freezing point bacterial growth just slows down. This means that the food can still spoil, especially when items in the freezer thaw slightly due to load shedding.

Load shedding can subject fresh produce to up to five hours of room temperature at a time, but you can plan by keeping your fridge in the best possible condition, using extra ice, and planning meals as Anelich advises.

Keeping bottles of water to freeze in the freezer and ensuring good hygiene when you prepare food also helps.

Ensure your fridge is in proper working condition, because it will remain at the correct temperature for longer during load shedding. If your freezer is in good working order, it should be able to keep its temperature for about 48 hours.

You can also put food items such as dairy and meat closest to the freezer compartment to keep them cold for longer. Also make ice in your freezer when the power is on to use to keep food cool when load shedding hits.

While some large supermarkets have generators, they might still not be able to keep to the required temperature in the fridges and freezers, and this could cause food to spoil. Rather go shopping later when the power is on if you get there during load shedding.

It is also important to reduce the time the food is in your car and, therefore, it is better to go straight home after shopping for food and place it in the fridge or freezer as soon as possible. You can also keep a cooler bag with ice bricks in the car to ensure you keep up the cold chain for meat, dairy and frozen food.

ALSO READ: Load shedding: Tonnes of food rotting as both producers and NGO’s battle to feed SA

How do you know you have food poisoning?

If you suspect you may have food poisoning even after you took these precautions, do not ignore it. Food poisoning can be very dangerous, especially for young children, people over 65, pregnant women, new-born babies and people with compromised immune systems.

The Ombudsman for Consumer Goods and Services says this means that people living with HIV/AIDS or who are under-nourished, undergoing cancer treatment, had an organ transplant and are on immuno-suppressive drugs to avoid the body rejecting the organ, are particularly vulnerable.

How do you know you have food poisoning?

According to the ombudsman and prof Anelich, the most common symptoms are vomiting, stomach cramps, diarrhoea, nausea, fever, headache, muscle aches, shivering and tiredness or fatigue. You can even have more than one symptom at the same time in some cases.

In the case of the norovirus, also known as stomach flu, you can vomit and have diarrhoea at the same time, with some shivering and tiredness.

However, it is important to remember that a number of other illnesses have the same symptoms, which makes it difficult to say you definitely have food poisoning if you show these symptoms.

A good indication is usually whether people who ate the same food at the same time as you from the same source are showing similar symptoms.