Extend your food budget by preventing food from spoiling in the refrigerator.
Each year, American households throw away about 14 percent of their food purchases, mostly due to spoilage, according to a University of Arizona study. Simple ways a family can avoid waste and retain this money in their food budget include creating weekday meal plans, eating foods in order from most likely to decay rapidly to least likely, and freezing items that may get tossed later in the week due to hectic work and travel schedules. Does this Spark an idea?
Ethylene
You can't smell it or taste it, but several types of fruits and vegetables emit ethylene, a naturally occurring gas that hastens the ripening process. Ethylene is the reason why unripened avocados will ripen if you put an apple into a bag with the avocados.
Foods that release the highest amounts of ethylene include apples, apricots, cantaloupe, figs and honeydew. When these items are stored next to other fruits and vegetables that rapidly absorb ethylene, spoilage will occur. For minimal food waste, never keep cruciferous vegetables (broccoli or cauliflower), leafy greens, eggplant or squash next to high-ethylene emitting fruits in your refrigerator or on your countertop.
Inadequate Refrigerator Temperature
Although fruits and vegetables may look perfect when you bring them home from the store, they are living organisms still in the process of decomposition from the minute they are harvested in the fields. Keeping your refrigerator in proper working order is critical for food longevity. The ideal interior temperature of a refrigerator is below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, ideally at 37. When refrigerators are kept at this temperature, the cold air can slow down naturally occurring decomposition processes of food, such as mold and bacteria. If your refrigerator is too warm, it will encourage the proliferation of microbial growth that will not only cause food to prematurely decay, but may also cause food borne illnesses such as salmonella. And if interior temperatures are too cold, they may cause fruits and vegetables to freeze, which results in cracked surfaces that leave them vulnerable to bacterial contamination and rapid decay.
Air and Oxygen
Air and oxygen are not only essential for plant growth, but because they are responsible for the cycle of life and death in all living forms, they can also be the cause of food spoilage in the refrigerator. Overexposure to oxygen will cause a loss of quality in meats and other fatty foods. It will also cause oxidation, which results in unpleasant odors and tastes. Both air and oxygen will also encourage enzymes that speed up the decomposition process when fruits and vegetables are left in the refrigerator longer than they should be. The enzymes act quickly, and can encourage bacteria populations on decaying food to double in quantity within just 20 minutes.
Proximity to Decaying Produce
Fruits and vegetables that are far into the decaying process will spread their bacteria to newer produce stored in the same area. To avoid premature spoilage, always remove rotten food from the refrigerator as soon as possible. If a head of lettuce has a few leaves with brown edges, you don't need to toss the entire head of lettuce away. Rather, just remove the spoiled outer leaves and use the rest of the lettuce within a day or two.
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