Where you place your food in the fridge does matter | Hacker News Reader

Where you place your food in the fridge does matter

electrafixbc.ca

90 pointsmulletator60 comments

I like how all the pictures show these idyllic refrigerators with three items per shelf.

All this advice is well and good, but our fridge is usually so full that the ideal place for something is "wherever you can find a space".

And ergo the milk ends up in the door because it fits perfectly there. Milk consumption is so fast in my house that we could probably skip the fridge all together!

One nitpick: "While there is some debate about the ideal storage for eggs..."

There really isn't a debate. There is a difference, due to whether or not the eggs have been washed. If washed (like in the USA), they need to be refrigerated. If not washed (like in Europe, or on farms who raise their own), they can be left out.

There is a debate though (a debate that perhaps shouldn't exist...)

The fact that you say that unwashed eggs can be left out leaves it open for debate. It's the lack of a must that gives rise to it.

For context: I'm in the UK, and I store eggs in the fridge.

edit: clarification: What I do is not necessarily correct, just providing context and data.

Apparently you should not do that

Without the cuticle, eggs must be refrigerated to combat bacterial infection from inside. In Europe, it's illegal to wash eggs and instead, farms vaccinate chickens against salmonella. With the cuticle intact, refrigeration could cause mildew growth and contamination

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/why-eur...

Genuinely interesting! I was brought up storing them in the fridge and have never (knowingly) had an issue.

I will do a little more reading - thanks for the link!

Last time I was reading about this I also saw that refrigerating eggs that still had the cuticle could draw the cuticle through the shell which would also pull in the bacteria and other stuff that had been trapped.

No idea if that part is true, I couldn't find a source either way and I live in the US so it doesn't impact me.

"which can cause mildew growth and bacterial contamination should the eggs sweat as they come back to room temps"

If you keep them in the fridge until cooking, that's an incredibly small window for anything to grow though.

It also seems to shorten shelf life. Whether it is the drier air inside the fridge I am not sure, but unwashed eggs left out last longer. Always far longer than the insanely short printed date which I think is 2 or 3 weeks. A good few months is nearer the mark.

You're braver than me I'm very squeamish about certain foods and would never trust them beyond their use by dates, meat, milk, butter and eggs being the main ones

I thought milk and butter are highly unlikely to cause any harm or distress that you wouldn't notice from spoiled taste.

Meat as well but you have to be accustomed to how raw meat is supposed to smell which may be more pungent than you think.

Trust your nose. The date isn't a guarantee. I have had food within the expiry date that seemed off, I ate anyway, and it made me sick.

Meat in the US is highly processed. It generally receives colorants, shaping, or processing depending upon the meat and where you buy it from. Deli meats for example are shaped loaves of meat for easier cutting and different flavorings. A butcher is generally the best bet for getting actual meat and they typically cut the meat the same day as you get it for maximum freshness.

Butter is best before. Honestly can't remember which date type eggs have - we've entirely ignored them for decades. Never yet encountered an off egg, but they do thicken texture a little if you use the months old box you find at the back of the cupboard. It was an experiment, k? :)

Use by we respect - but even then only ish. Mainly as there is a lot of slack built in that date to allow for people with a too warm fridge, or it sitting in their nice warm car for 2 hrs first.

Generally we just go the traditional route to gauge: Smell, texture, separating, colour change, etc. Milk that's turned is super easy to detect. Was even easier before homogenisation.

Use by date, at least in the US, is a completely arbitrary date assigned by the producer as to the date after which peak taste is no longer guaranteed. It has nothing to do with spoilage.

We have two days in France : best by which means nothing and use by which does not mean much either.

U.S. grocery store washed eggs also last far longer than the printed sell-by date, in the fridge, a good few months also. I have eaten em many times.

I dunno if one eggs storage method lasts longer than the other, but they both last an awful long time, apparently.

I have heard the water content/texture does change after a long time, making them unsuitable for baking applications where the composition matters. I'm not a baker, I dunno. They taste fine and are indistinguishable scrambled or fried.

You may pinpoint the major flaw in my feeling - they last so long the elapsed time wasn't precisely measured. :)

Let enough months pass and they seem to thicken up some - still edible, but definitely past their best. None of the box we misplaced at the back of the store cupboard were off.

Eggs have a protective layer on them. This is handy because it stops bad stuff getting into the eggs and killing the embryo.

In the US the farming practices result in eggs which are dirty. So they need to be washed. This washing damaged the protective layer, which means bad stuff can now get into the egg.

In Europe the farming practices are stricter which results in eggs which are clean enough not to need washing. The protective layer remains intact and the eggs can be stored at room temperature.

You remain free to store your eggs in the fridge. I know some people who do this to ensure consistent boiling times - the fridge temperature is less variable than room temperature.

Just to clarify - I wasn't wanting to state that what I do is correct. Rather I wished to illustrate that there is some debate around it, regardless of right and wrong.

Your comments around farming practices are great! Thanks for sharing!

There is still benefit of keeping unwashed eggs in the fridge. They last until forever and then three days more.

Well there's that, ketchup, apples, bananas, plantain, pears, squash, sweet potato, citrus.

Which don't particularly need putting in the fridge either.

Apples and bananas definitely should not be kept in an enclosed space as the gases will cause faster ripening. When apples are stored professionally they are stored in a nitrogen environment with CO2 scrubbers which can make them last for months. Bananas typically come in plastic bags unripened so that they last longer on store shelves. Tubers can generally last a very long time in a dry cool place, which the fridge is not. It's why people used to have root cellars.

I'm in Europe. Eggs from supermarkets are not washed. I do store them in a fridge anyway. They get spoiled after a few weeks or months regardless. So much for "There really isn't a debate."

You keep eggs for months?

Eggs last a deceptively long time. I've had eggs for a month after the expiration date. I always do the "sink or float" test and then make sure they don't smell like sulfur once I crack them

I sometimes keep U.S. grocery store eggs for months, in the fridge (I'm a bachelor living alone and don't eat eggs regularly) -- they totally last for months without going bad, all the time. Like I've kept eggs 2-4 months multiple times, months past the "sell by" date, in the fridge as we do in the U.S. -- have NEVER experienced a bad one.

Doesn't matter if they float either, that just means there's more air under the shell, which does mean they're older, but it doesn't mean they've gone bad.

It's slightly more complicated than that.

If unwashed eggs have been refrigerated, they should be kept in refrigerated until use, as the bloom can be degraded just by the condensation that occurs when refrigerated eggs return to room temperature.

A particularly pernicious practice here in Australia, where regulations dictate that eggs are not washed, but grocery stores and supermarkets are frequently found to be keeping their eggs refrigerated during 'back room' storage, but returning them to non-refrigerated aisle shelves prior to selling them.

Talking to staff at various markets, it seems no one understands why this is bad (for the consumer). I expect we'll see a gradual increase in food poisoning incidents that will be hard to track down root cause.

Unless the rate at which eggs are being treated like this is changing, why would the increase in food poisoning manifest slowly over time? Why aren't we seeing it right now?

Maybe if people aren't actually getting sick at the predicted rate, there's a problem with the theory.

> Unless the rate at which eggs are being treated like this is changing, why would the increase in food poisoning manifest slowly over time? Why aren't we seeing it right now?

I suspect the rate at which eggs are being treated like this is in fact changing.

Other complicating factors include - various consumption rates and that earlier-consumed eggs are less likely to cause a problem, the difficulty of tracking back root cause on fungible items like eggs, where people typically discard the original container (with manufacturer, batch number, BB/UB dates, etc) and relocate into the egg compartment, the fact that in Australia most people put eggs in the fridge in any case, which will partially mediate the problem of condensation causing bloom damage for the day or two prior to them buying the eggs, and so on.

> Maybe if people aren't actually getting sick at the predicted rate, there's a problem with the theory.

More a hypothesis than a theory.

Identifying incident rates in an urban population for mild food poisoning is tricky, as there's no convenient way to acquire that data, further the lack of reporting, self-assessment / diagnosis shortcomings, centralised knowledge repository, confounding correlations, let alone then trying to identify what item actually caused the problem in any given person.

It's only about twenty years ago that people in Sydney AU had to boil their water for several months as there were two parasites - cryptosporidium and giardia - that were discovered to be rampant within the supply here. Prior to actual detection, over a good length of time, plenty of people were suffering stomach problems, often geographically grouped (I believe I heard at the time) just a lack of regulatory testing and difficulty in obtaining, let alone correlating data, hid the problem for a long time.

My hypothesis is based on the fact that those same two problems manifest in this case.

Have you ever left US eggs out? They smell and taste fine, even after a couple weeks.

If it smells like an egg, it's probably not a rotten egg.

My unwashed European eggs have a "refrigerate after' date on the box. I refrigerate from day one, after having suffered from a severe salmonella food poisoning once.

It might matter at the margins but it really doesn't make a difference for the vast majority of us.

Alternatively, obtain a smarter fridge.

These suggestions are all geared up for the old two door design (fridge compartment @ 2-4C, freezer @ ~ -18C), with some non-sealed, non-plumbed drawers that may offer some very basic humidity control within the fridge unit.

We have a fairly average sized fridge - 574 litres - but it has five separate compartments (fridge, ice, soft freeze, proper freeze, and vegetable/fresh), with sub-compartments in the fridge for cheese, eggs, and cold cuts.

Still not using all the features yet, but the fresh fruit & veg stay usable much longer. Better flexibility around long vs short term meat storage, rapid directed cooling, smarter sensors inside, render irrelevant any advice predicated on 'doors and top of the fridge are warmer' orthodoxy.

The book "The Food Lab" by J. Kenji Lopez from Serious Eats has a section devoted to organization of refrigerators and freezers.

This is not accurate for all fridges. For example, mine vents cold air from the freezer through a door on the upper level, so my upper level is both the coldest and the widest temperature range.

Yes, but the cold will sink to the bottom. The bottom will have the most consistent cold temperature and won't supper fluctuations like the area by the vent will.

Yeah, I've had stuff freeze at the back of top shelves, never on lower ones.

Anecdotal - I switched to a much smaller refrigerator and it's lead to me wasting way less food.

A lot of Americans live alone or with a single partner, but own a 4 person family sized fridge.

> most butter companies say to keep butter refrigerated. And if we buy refrigerated, shouldn't we store refrigerated?

Sure if you don't want to ever be able to spread it...

Why would I listen to someone that puts vegetables in the fridge…?

You must not live in a warm climate.

Even in the winter, I put my vegetables and most fruits in the fridge too (bananas being my usual exception, since they're so underripe when I buy them). They just last longer that way...

I also put most of my bread in the fridge for the same reason.

As many people are probably typing this at the same time: bread goes stale faster in the fridge. If you need to preserve bread for a while, freezing is the way to go.

My goal with the bread is to keep it from molding, which is does in a couple days sitting on the counter. Usually it isn't around long enough to freeze.

What? That can’t be right. I’m aware most people put bread in the pantry or whatever, but why would the fridge make it go stale?

Because air is much dryer inside a fridge.

I still put my bread in a fridge (unless it's something that's really intended to be consumed soon) because I prefer stale to mold.

Drying is only part of staling. You can seal bread airtight and it will still go stale faster in the fridge.

https://www.seriouseats.com/2014/06/does-refrigeration-reall... Temperature causes starches to crystallize and cause it to get stale

A big part of staling is the recrystallization of starch, which happens faster at cold-but-not-freezing temperatures.

https://www.seriouseats.com/2014/06/does-refrigeration-reall...

Freezing does something to the bread that I just don't like. It's just different coming out of a freezer.

That may be true, but in my experience it takes longer to go stale in the refrigerator than it does for it to mold outside the refrigerator. So I store my bread in the fridge and everything is fine.

I've never stored my bread outside the bag in something like a breadbox though, so maybe that would make it last longer. I've never had my bread go stale in the fridge before I finished it, so I'm not too worried about changing my habits.

I also put most of my bread in the fridge for the same reason.

You might be interested in this comment I posted a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20838704

Hmm, that is interesting - never tried it that way.

Although I don't usually toast the bread - depends heavily on what it's being used for. A sandwich for lunch... probably not toasted. Would work fine for other breads though.

> I put my vegetables and most fruits in the fridge too (bananas being my usual exception, since they're so underripe when I buy them)

A few things will retain better quality being left out

- Apples will get mealy in the fridge - Tomatoes will be much better unrefrigerated - I'm not sure about alliums, I never refrigerate onions or garlic but I do refrigerate green alliums like leeks and scallions.

It all really depends how quickly you plan to consume the items.

If you're the type that shops at the market several times a week - setting all produce on the counter is likely just fine.

If you're like me and try to avoid the grocery store as much as possible... sometimes stretching 2 weeks between trips, then the fridge can be very helpful.

Or a humid climate.

Or shop at Trader Joe's.

https://www.google.com/search?q=mercato+palermo&source=lnms&...

idk if vegetables can live some days in the open in sicily they can live on a shelf long enough to be eaten, unless someone has not enough time to shop weekly.

I favor storing chilled any produce that's chilled when sold, which includes most green vegetables, at least around here. Plus berries because I'm desperate to keep them from going moldy inside 48hrs, assuming they aren't already moldy when I get them home.

Fruit, not so much. That pile of apples in the drawer is just a waste of fridge space.

The real secret: put them in the freezer!

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