I was thinking about an upcoming article on survival energy harvesting and came across some recommendations at Food Safety.gov the US federal government’s portal for all things food safety wise. One suggestion in particular caught my eye. That is to keep a small thermometer in your fridge and/or freezer. This allows you to monitor the temperatures to give you an idea as to the safety of the stored food. Basically anything at 40 degrees fahrenheit or 4.5 degrees celsius is still safe. Once temperature gets above that level, bacteria can start multiplying and the food becomes progressively less safe to eat.
Of course, it depends what kind of food we are talking about. Maybe you are keeping peanut butter in your fridge to ensure the oils don’t turn rancid, because you don’t go through a jar of peanut butter in 3-4 months. Well, you can safely take the peanut butter out of the fridge and put it on a shelf in the pantry for the above mentioned three months. Similarly eggs recently bought can happily sit on your kitchen counter for a week or more. The suggestion to throw out cooked or cut produce if it is held above 40 degrees for more than two hours seems a little extreme. Now I’m not a food safety expert, so I advise you to use your own judgement after taking in consideration the advice of professionals.
Additionally I found out that a full freezer will keep foods below 40 degrees F for four days if you only open the door once a day for a minute or two. Full being the key. A half full freezer will only last two days. And a fridge will keep food at 40 degrees F for four hours. This is a great argument for keeping plastic juice containers or two litre (64 oz.) bottles full of water in your freezer when there is space. They fill up empty space, you can take a couple of bottles out to keep your refrigerator or a large cooler cold, and you have water that is safe to drink. If you can buys frozen blocks of ice, do so. Blocks of dry ice will maintain a freezer at a safe temperature for up to four days on their own.
In addition, over top of your fridge or freezer is an excellent place to keep sleeping bags or comforters when they are not being used during a power outage. In cold winter weather, put containers of water outside overnight to freeze. You can continue to do this as long as you have freezing temperatures. Be careful about putting containers of food outside if you have wildlife nearby.
In a post I put up just the other day I talked about doing a local community inventory. I mentioned that you could have food processing plants of food warehousing establishments nearby. Even if you don’t have local food processing plants or facilities, there are lots of places that might have frozen food. Everything from retailers to your neighbours who are off vacationing in Europe when the grid goes down. Your neighbours who are home could have frozen food. Maybe you want to consolidate all of the frozen items from both refrigerators into just one to fill up space. Having a small lightweight thermometer that you can take with you to check cold storage temperatures could come in pretty handy when you are assessing available food sources. At Amazon.ca the non-digital versions start at about $3.50 for add on items and there is good choice around $8-9.00. No excuses.
Here’s a link to some search results I got for “power outages and frozen food” at the US Food Safety government site.