From: John De Armond
Newsgroups: rec.outdoors.rv-travel
Subject: Re: fridge coldness
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 14:19:48 -0400

Robert Bourke wrote:
>
> i have a small temp gauge in the fridge.  when fridge is cold it reads
> 40 degrees.  we don't travel with propane on, and after trips home of 3
> to 6 hours, the temp gauge reads 60 degrees.  my question is this;  are
> hot dogs or lunch meat and that sort of thing still safe to eat?  i keep
> throwing it away, but don't want to if its still good to eat.  anyone
> know?  TIA  kathie

To truly know, you have to know both the temperature and time at
temperature.  this is because bacteria need a certain amount of time
to multiply after reaching a hospitable temperature.

The federal restaurant rules require that perishable food be held
below 45 degrees (soon to be 40) at all times.  As a restaurant
owner who has a heightened awareness of food-borne pathogens, I
religiously adhere to that.  I actually keep all my coolers,
including the one in the RV, right above freezing.  This gives me
some added safety margin if someone leaves something sitting out too
long.

I would personally not touch any meat or dairy product that has been
at more than 45 deg for any length of time at all.  Not worth the
risk.  Especially on a trip where it would be less than enjoyable to
be sick.

I have had a number of mostly older workers in my restaurant who
poo-poo the new standards.  A few have had to go out the door
because they won't change.  I usually get something to the effect
"well ma mother thawed chicken at room temperature all day and I'm
going to too."  Problem is, things have changed.  At the top of the
list is the mutant strain of E. Coli that has been in the news for
the past few years.  Now E. Coli is ubiquitous - we all have it in
our gut.  The difference is that somewhere, some time, a colony
mutated and turned virulent.  It still propagates and thrives just
like the harmless strains but unlike the older strains, it can
sicken and kill the weak.  ANY fecal contamination (inevitable in a
slaughterhouse) can bear this bacteria.

Another factor is the widespread abuse of antibiotics, both by
farmers as a growth enhancing agent and by most people who insist on
an antibiotic for a sore throat and then don't take it all, has bred
drug resistant strains of other common food-borne pathogens.  This
stuff is a BUNCH more virulent than even 20 years ago.

The factory farms are another problem.  Whereas when a chick is
raised as nature intended, it receives a load of beneficial bacteria
from its mother.  In a factory chicken house, this doesn't happen.
Salmonella opportunistically takes up residence instead.  I've seen
some government estimates that as much as 70% of the commercial
flock harbors (or did) salmonella.  Recently it was discovered that
chicks in the factory house could be inoculated with the harmless
bacteria.  Some houses now spray these harmless bacteria on the
chicks.  Since this is not now a widespread practice, one must treat
raw chicken as a hazardous substance.  I have a separate area in my
restaurant along with dedicated utensils to process chicken.

The sheer volume of food produced each day in a modern food plant
means that if some contamination reaches the plant or worse, a
colony of pathogen sets up camp in the machinery, it can get spread
across the country in days.  I worked for M&M Mars for a few years
as a process engineer.  Mars went far above and beyond the norm for
food safety.  Every single lot of product (100 metric tons a shift)
was quarantined for the 14 day cycle necessary to culture for
salmonella.  Easy enough to do for candy bars; hard to do for
perishable meat product.  So the problem is, you may have purchased
the meat and have it in your fridge before can be known whether it
is contaminated or not.

After having worked in the food industry for awhile, I no longer eat
meat, dairy or egg product that I cannot know for sure was cooked
safely.  That means I eat no cold cuts that I don't prepare myself.
If you DO eat cold cuts, at LEAST keep them as cold as you can.
what you are doing in turning off the refrigerator is trading, at
most, a theoretical risk from running the propane while underway for
a very real risk of illness from contaminated food.  If you really
are so phobic of propane that you wont' run it while underway,
perhaps you could consider getting one of the compressor-based
refrigerators that will run on 12 volts.

John


--
John De Armond
johngdSPAMNOT@bellsouth.net
http://personal.bellsouth.net/~johngd/
Neon John's Custom Neon
Cleveland, TN
"Bendin' Glass 'n Passin' Gas"

From: John De Armond
Newsgroups: rec.outdoors.rv-travel
Subject: Re: fridge coldness
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 22:04:53 -0400

GS wrote:
>
> Neon John wrote:
> >
> >
> > To truly know, you have to know both the temperature and time at
> > temperature.  this is because bacteria need a certain amount of time
> > to multiply after reaching a hospitable temperature.
> >
> > The federal restaurant rules require that perishable food be held
> > below 45 degrees (soon to be 40) at all times.  As a restaurant
> > owner who has a heightened awareness of food-borne pathogens, I
> > religiously adhere to that.  I actually keep all my coolers,
> > including the one in the RV, right above freezing.  This gives me
> > some added safety margin if someone leaves something sitting out too
> > long.
>
> OUTSTANDING Post, John.
>
> The food industry (both growing and processing) is truly
> terrifying to me today. It's a major calamity just waiting
> to happen.

I hate that you feel that way and I hope I didn't contribute to it.
I certainly don't agree that there's any calamity about to happen.
Indeed, I consider the food supply to be the safest it's ever been.
The new bugs are bad, of course, but the science is more than
offsetting that.  Consider, for example, the new genetically
engineered test kits that can detect the actual protein of pathogen
contamination of food in minutes.  I can take a swab of suspected
meat and see instantly whether it is contaminated.  More
sophisticated versions of this are being deployed in the meat
processing plants even as I type.  Tragically, the only thing the
mass media could report on this topic was to bemoan the government
actually letting the evil meat industry monitor itself.  Contrast
this with the government inspection technique of (literally)
yesterday - look and sniff.

Or consider the much lamented (by the media and some idiots, at
least) food irradiation.  Irradiation kills bacteria by exposing it
to nuclear radiation.  The luddites such as Nader have risen up out
of the ooze to protest meat irradiation because it involves
something "nuclear" (and some idiots have gone along.) but the fact
is, dry goods have been being irradiated for years to great
success.  Nader & company's twisted logic is that irradiation will
allow contamination in the meat.  Er, wrong.  A certain level of
contamination is ALREADY INEVITABLY in meat and always has been.
All irradiation does is kill what is already there.  I buy
irradiated food whenever I can.  Still not easy - my distributors
are skittish of potential bad publicity.  All it takes is one of
these local TV twits with an IQ hovering around room temperature to
do a slash and burn story on irradiation to scare them off.  Me, I
don't care.  I'm willing to take some personal risk to serve safer
food.

The really, really funny/sad part of food irradiation is that the
industry realized that the public is too stupid to know what it
actually involves. They've repackaged the process as "cold
sterilization" that uses "electrons" (beta radiation) produced in a
particle accelerator so that the word "nuclear" can be avoided and
everyone, even the Luddites, are happy as clams.  The "energetic
electrons", of course, generate Bremsstrahlung X-rays when they
strike the food and that's what does the sterilizing.  Amazing, huh?

Another example, consider Cryropacking.  This is the process of
saturating the meat with nitrogen gas and then vacuum sealing.  The
nitrogen inhibits the growth of aerobic bacteria and the vacuum
sealing keeps it that way.  Unfrozen cryropacked meat will stay
fresh a month or better.  This is just a part of the conversion to
box meats.  It was only a few years ago when meat was butchered in
the grocery store's own butcher shop.  Sides of beef and pork were
shipped open, unwrapped in refrigerated trucks to the grocery store
where it was handled and butchered under conditions that ranged from
fair to horrid.  Nowadays, grocery stores receive meat in boxes,
usually with the actual pieces cryropacked inside the box.  The box
itself protects the meat from contamination AND provides insulation
in case the box is left out of the refrigerator too long.

Another fairly recent development in food safety is the
time-temperature tattletales that are being  deployed on a
widespread basis.  This device is typically a cardboard thingie
about the size of a postage stamp that contains some bio-engineered
enzymes and a color indicator.  It responds to time-at-temperature
quite similar to how bacteria does.  When the time-at-temperature
has been exceeded, the color changes to warn the recipient that the
contents probably are not safe.  These things are cheap enough that
they're being packed in ever case of meat.  This is being driven by
the biggest grocery retailer in the world - Wal*Mart. Everyone
should remember this as they cuss Wal*Mart for "putting the little
guys out of business."  When I receive a box of meat and the
tattletale has not fired, I KNOW that the meat  has been stored
properly and has not sat in the sun on some dock while some lazy
dock worker takes a lunch break.

Just think about how it was, say 20 or 30 years ago. I recall it
vividly because I was driving 70 miles one way to work and it seemed
like the food poisoning would invariably hit me while in the car
:-(  I can recall several bouts a year.  Nowadays, food poisoning is
so rare that the dullards in the media can lumber over to cover
individual cases.  Yes, the huge factories and distribution networks
do cause a given attack to affect more people but the occurrence is
so rare that I'm perfectly happy to make the tradeoff.  Even the
problem with salmonella in chicken I see as a positive in the big
picture.  It has always been there to some extent but the increase
caused by factory farms has made (most) everyone pay attention to
raw chicken and handle it properly.  If I'd been in the restaurant
business 20 years ago, I probably would have thought nothing of
thawing chicken at room temperature or processing it with the same
utensils used for other food.  Now I know better and everyone is
safer as the result.

Contrary to the fear mongered by the media, today's food has never
been safer as long as one follows the simple safety rules.  Such as
avoiding precooked meat product, at least until irradiation catches
on. Such as LEAVING THE DAMN PROPANE ON!!!!  :-)

John

--
John De Armond
johngdSPAMNOT@bellsouth.net
http://personal.bellsouth.net/~johngd/
Neon John's Custom Neon
Cleveland, TN
"Bendin' Glass 'n Passin' Gas"