Food preservation: costly and unhealthy mistakes

Food preservation is considered one of the ways to help maintain shelf life and minimize the deterioration of food quality. But a few daily habits turn into serious mistakes that significantly affect the quality of food and the health of family members.
Mistakes when preserving food can cause food to be degraded, and can even produce many harmful bacteria to the body. Therefore, preserving food properly helps protect your health and avoid many risks when eating.
Food is the main source of nutrition for the human body. This source of nutrients is responsible for nourishing the body and maintaining energy for life activities.

However, many people still make mistakes when preserving food. If food is not handled and preserved properly, it will accidentally produce many harmful toxins, becoming pathogens, affecting health. Here are the mistakes when storing food in the refrigerator collected by Huttonscon that you should read and pay attention to.

1. Keeping food in the fridge for too long

The refrigerator is an extremely useful invention, responsible for preserving food. Besides, it also helps to partially prevent the growth of microorganisms inside the food. This is also the main cause of food spoilage.

The mistake when preserving food is keeping food in the refrigerator for too long. This causes them to gradually lose their inherent nutrients. Along with that, the amount of beneficial microorganisms also decreases and creates conditions for the growth of bacteria, causing food degradation.

According to the advice of nutritionists, food should only be kept in the refrigerator for no more than 5 days. Even frozen foods such as seafood, meats, etc. should not be stored for too long. For green vegetables or fruits, you should only keep them in the refrigerator for 4 to 5 days.

In addition to the storage time of food, people also need to pay attention to the temperature of the refrigerator. The weather in our country in recent years is often high during Tet holidays. This temperature will have a huge effect on food, creating conditions for bacteria to grow faster. That leads to food that is more perishable even if it is kept in the refrigerator.

The ideal temperature to store food in the cooler is below 4 degrees Celsius. For the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, you should maintain it below -18 degrees Celsius.

2. Do not close the lid of the box when storing food in the refrigerator

Another mistake when preserving food is not closing the lid on cooked food after putting it in the refrigerator. In fact, many people have and are having this wrong and dangerous habit. It not only makes food quickly degrade, causing a bad smells but also one of the causes that will lead to digestive tract diseases.

Failing to cover food in the refrigerator will make food susceptible to parasitic bacteria that can spread from other foods in the refrigerator.

You should choose specialized containers to store food in the refrigerator. Avoid the use of single-use plastic containers. Especially foods that are stored in the freezer need to be more careful when storing. Because, the material of the container, if not guaranteed, will also have a great impact on health.

Failure to close the lid or cover the food before putting it in the refrigerator will cause the food to spoil quickly. Moreover, it is very susceptible to infection from other foods. This increases the risk of food poisoning for you and other family members.

Read more: 10 tips to effectively preserve frozen food

3. Do not pre-wash fresh meat before storing it in the freezer

A mistake when preserving food that many housewives make is buying meat from the market and putting it in the freezer to freeze. At this time, the meat is still containing a lot of bacteria, putting it in the refrigerator just makes the meat dirtier and causes the unhygienic in the freezer.

Besides, some people often put unhygienic and clean meat in the refrigerator because they are afraid that after washing, the meat will be pale. This is also a misunderstanding in food preservation that is quite harmful.

Meat bought anywhere needs to be cleaned carefully. Then you let it dry or pat dry and then put it in a box to store in the freezer. This process is to minimize the growth of bacteria inside the food.

4. Freeze frozen foods once

After the meat is defrosted once, the amount of cells in the meat has been broken down more or less. They are not as fresh as they were when they were not frozen. However, some women, due to busy work, often make the mistake of preserving food that is after continuing to keep defrosted food in the refrigerator.

As recommended by nutritionists, this is not recommended because it will create favorable conditions for bacteria to multiply in food. To ensure safety, it is best to divide the food you buy into small bags after you buy it. Each bag is enough for one use per day to avoid the case that it is not used up and kept in the refrigerator.

After occasions like Tet holiday, almost every family has a lot of unused food left over. The only way to preserve them is to keep them in the refrigerator. Therefore, it is inevitable to avoid making mistakes when preserving the foods above. However, with the sharing in this article, you will have more experience to minimize these mistakes. Because food directly affects health and you need to be careful.

5. Putting food in the wrong place in the refrigerator

It can be said that this is one of the most common mistakes of many housewives when storing food in the refrigerator.

Placing food in the wrong place increases the risk of bacterial cross-contamination between foods. This can lead to some health problems when eating contaminated food.

For example, if you store raw beef on top of or in the same place as raw vegetables, water from the beef can drip or contaminate the vegetables. When you eat raw vegetables contaminated with bacteria, you can get food poisoning. The easiest way to prevent this is to put the beef in a food storage container with a lid or place the beef underneath raw vegetables.

When storing food in the refrigerator, be careful to place foods that do not need to be cooked or have less cooking time on top. Food that needs to be cooked thoroughly should be at the bottom. This way, bacteria that have cross-contaminated (if any) will also be killed during the cooking process.

6. Keeping too much food in the fridge

In today’s chaotic life, many people have the habit of going to the market once to buy enough food for a week. Then all these foods will be kept in the refrigerator.

However, this is a mistake when preserving food you need to change. Because storing too much food will make the cabinet always in a state of overload. The cooling system is overworked, thereby reducing efficiency and cooling capacity.

If this phenomenon takes place for a long time and continuously, the life of the cabinet will be reduced, frequent breakdowns, and no longer achieve the same performance as before. In addition, if the refrigerator’s cooling system is overloaded, it will not be able to provide enough cold air for the food in the refrigerator, causing them to spoil faster and deteriorate more quickly.

Read more: How to properly store food in the refrigerator

7. Mistakes when preserving food: putting food in the refrigerator while it is still hot

Before storing food in the refrigerator, make sure it has cooled down completely. Then, you put the food in each individual box with a lid for long-term preservation.

Food storage temperature in the refrigerator should be set at about 5-10 degrees Celsius (in the refrigerator). If the food storage temperature is too high or too low, the food can quickly spoil or stagnate.

8. Ignore the expiration date of food

Have you ever had to throw away food in the refrigerator because it was “forgotten” for too long? More or less, this is a waste.

The easy way to fix this situation is to put the newly purchased food items (with a long shelf life) behind the old dishes (of the same type). This will help you automatically prioritize using the oldest foods before they expire.

This is also the way to store food used by commercial kitchens to avoid food waste.

9. Incorrect product cooling

The food storage temperature of each type is not the same. That means not all foods should be refrigerated. Accordingly, you should never put tomatoes, onions, potatoes and citrus fruits in the refrigerator. Low temperatures will affect their inherent flavor and nutritional content.

However, other fruits such as avocados, pears, sapoche, apples should be refrigerated until they are ripe. Cold air will prevent them from overcooking or ripening all at once.

10. Store food in the refrigerator door

Many housewives take advantage of the refrigerator door to store eggs, meat, milk or many other foods. Meanwhile, the refrigerator door is the place where the temperature fluctuates the most due to opening and closing operations every day. This affects the quality and shelf life of food.

To fix it, keep eggs, meat, and milk fixed inside the refrigerator to preserve their quality and freshness.

11. Do not adjust the refrigerator temperature

A mistake that we often encounter is not adjusting the refrigerator temperature, often when we buy a refrigerator, we think that the manufacturer has defaulted the temperature so we just use it.

But you need to know that each refrigerator compartment needs to have an appropriate temperature, if you leave the common temperature for the compartments, the foods will not be cooled in the best way, and if the temperature is too high, it will waste electricity. Food is easily frozen.

The most suitable temperature for the refrigerator is – 18 degrees C to 0 degrees for the freezer compartment, 1.7 – 5 degrees C for the freezer compartment, 0 – 4 degrees C for the fresh food compartment, about 0 degrees C for the freezer compartment. cool.

12. Frozen fresh fish meat in the freezer for too long

Do not store fish meat in the refrigerator for too long because it will cause harmful bacteria to enter the food, eat away the nutrients and smell of fish meat.
Ideally, you should only freeze for 1-week raw fish meat for, if processed, only 3-5 days.

13. Place raw meat with other foods

Buy meat but temporarily not cooked, so many people often put meat in the storage compartment with many other foods. This increases the risk of spreading harmful bacteria to the body, especially Campylobacter bacteria, which causes symptoms such as abdominal pain, fever and diarrhea.

14. Don’t wash vegetables before putting them in the fridge

Some vegetables can contain E.coli bacteria which is the main cause of diarrhea. If you buy vegetables without washing them, it will cause bacteria from vegetables to spread to other foods.

So to be safe when buying vegetables, remember to wash them before putting them in the refrigerator.

15. Vegetables and fruits are kept close together

You should choose a different location to put fruits and vegetables because each type has different gas, if placed near it, it can make them decompose quickly.

16. Reheat cooked food that has been put in the fridge over and over

Nutritionists recommend storing only cooked foods to keep in the refrigerator for about 2 hours outside. Note that cooked food should be divided into small portions enough for the next time, should not take out leftovers from the refrigerator and then put them back in the refrigerator, the heat change will have a bad effect on the structure. of food produces substances that cause cancer. This is probably a mistake many housewives make because thriftiness often ignores and tries to reheat over and over again.

17. Use poor-quality plastic containers when storing food in the refrigerator

Today, plastic containers are being used quite commonly on the market with many different uses, the most prominent one is still used to store food in the refrigerator. Not only can we store processed food, but we also often use plastic containers to store dry and fresh products…

Although plastic containers are really convenient when preserving food, if you use poor quality containers, the freshness and nutrient content of the food will be affected. Because the smell of plastic will haunt the food, making them no longer retain the original taste. This can affect the family’s taste, or even have to throw away those portions of food.

In general, in daily life, food preservation is inevitable. However, just avoiding the above mistakes will help the food stay fresh and not degraded. Food is closely related to health, so you need to be careful.