On refrigerating green onions (or not)
Why do I have to refrigerate green onions but not normal onions?
You don’t. The reason people refrigerate green onions is that they tend to dry out and get wilted. Putting them in a cold, sealed box (e.g da fridge) will slow down that process.
If you’d prefer to store them on the countertop then put your green onions in a glass with about an inch of water. They’ll last just as long and they might even keep growing. If the water starts to get discolored and smelly after a few days then replace the water (but you can keep the onions).
+++
On refrigerating ketchup
Do I have to refrigerate ketchup once it’s open?
We’ve both seen ketchup sitting out on diner countertops, so that must mean “no”. But on the other hand, those bottles probably get pounded empty and refilled with (refrigerated) ketchup every day… so maybe it’s not a perfect analogy for home-use.
Ketchup is one of those refrigerate-after-opening foods. Other foods in this group includes pickles, olives, most condiments and sauces.
These foods are sterilized during manufacturing which makes them shelf stable until they are opened. But once opened, you need to refrigerate them to slow down any bacteria that might have found its way in.
Ketchup specifically is acidic enough to ward off every illness-causing bacteria except one*. Keeping your ketchup in the pantry will definitely shorten the shelf life — it’ll probably become discolored or moldy at some point (weeks? months?) even if these things won’t make you sick.
But yeah, if you want to live on the edge or you have a very full refrigerator then ketchup can live in the pantry.
*Salmonella can technically grow in ketchup-level acidic conditions. But how on earth would Salmonella get introduced into a ketchup bottle in your home kitchen? If you can come up with an answer then you should probably refrigerate ketchup.
+++
On food recalls
There’s a food recall on onions right now. Should I throw out all of my onions?
Most people will interpret the latest onion recall to mean “I should throw out all of my onions / I must scour my public internet persona and delete all of the photos of me smiling with my arm around a shallot / Edible bulbs are dead to me.”
Chill out. No one is canceling onions. You need to stop reading just the headlines — your short attention span is literally bankrupting entire agricultural sectors.
Wherever you think you learned about this recall from the headline— please, keep reading. News websites tend to be sensational when it comes to reporting about food safety (those clicks won’t bait themselves) so I recommend the FDA website if you want to get a more straightforward take.
My take: OK, this one is actually a pretty gnarly recall. Around 600 people have been sickened by salmonella via onions. Fortunately, these onions have been traced to a single company. Unfortunately, this company distributed potentially contaminated onions to supermarkets, manufacturers and restaurants in every US state. This is a big outbreak.
A Bad Onion
But don’t start trashing your onions yet.
As it relates to the onions in our homes — there’s a specific list of brand names whose onions should be discarded. They are:
Thomson Premium, TLC Thomson International, Tender Loving Care, El Competitor, Hartley’s Best, Onions 52, Majestic, Imperial Fresh, Kroger, Utah Onions and Food Lion.*
Now that we know what’s being recalled, let’s walk through My Actual Onion Situation and then we can talk about yours:
M.A.O.S.:
- I have a sack of red onions but they are not from any of these brands.
- I also have a sack of yellow onions but they come from a local farm which wasn’t implicated in this outbreak.
Should I throw them away? No — and if you said “yes” then you have poor reading comprehension skills.
How about your onions?
If you can’t make a determination about whether they fit the scope of the recall — say, if your onions were purchased loose and don’t have any marking to indicate their origin — then throw them away! It’s not worth potential salmonella. Don’t overthink it.
And what if your onions fall outside of the scope of the recall?—in this case, keep them. It may seem “risky” but it is not. And it is economically vital. Here’s why:
This outbreak is going to seriously fuck up the onion industry. Both the FDA and the responsible company want nothing more than to track down every bad onion. If not, this Onion Incident could become a bona fide Food Scare. A Food Scare is when sensationalist media coverage overshadows official public health guidance and the terrified populace swears off onions for the indefinite future. Remember when we all stopped eating spinach? And iceberg lettuce? Those were food scares.
If a food scare emerges, onion sales will collapse and may not recover for years. Small onion farms that played no role in the outbreak will shutter as consumer demand plummets. On the verge of collapse, the remaining onion players will band together and spend millions of dollars running cheesy ad campaigns begging to win us back. They will look like this:
There’s one thing that this single fuckup of an onion company can do to avoid sinking the whole industry, which is that they must ace the recall. This means quickly recalling way more onions that are actually dangerous to eat. If they can pull this off, then fewer people will fall ill and media attention will subside and a food scare will be averted and we’ll all be eating onion rings for breakfast like we were last week. But more importantly, if your onion is explicitly outside of the stated recall then it should not be guilty by association. Eat it. Right now, I’ll watch.
Last thing: should you eat onions at restaurants? Not for a few weeks. Raw ones especially. (Remember: cooking kills salmonella, the star bacteria in this outbreak). One would hope that restaurants are hip to this type of recall but...I wouldn’t bet on it.
*The FDA website even prints a picture (scroll down) of the product labels. I prefer pictures. Books with pictures are better.
+++
On countertop butter
Do I have to refrigerate butter? I prefer it soft and spreadable, but after a few days on the counter it gets a greasy rancid tinge. Is there a middle ground between rock-hard-refrigerator-brick and partly-decomposed mush?
God I love butter. That fleeting window of effortless spreadability and unspoilt, fresh taste—! With the right carb partner it can ignite disturbing behavior in yours truly. I once sat down in front of a live-streamed surf contest, unsheathed a baguette and began dipping it like a paintbrush into a dish of perfectly softened and salted butter. By the end of the contest I had polished off a second loaf of bread (I returned to the same bakery without shame ) and more than a stick of the good yellow stuff.
Marry me
But as your question points out — we aren’t always lucky enough to encounter butter in its ideal state.
Butter falls into the “refrigerate for quality” category of foods. Unrefrigerated butter will not make you sick, no matter how long you leave it out. But after too long on the countertop it will develop a foul, rancid taste.
How long is too long? This is mostly a matter of temperature. In winter, a stick of countertop butter may maintain its fresh flavor for a week or more. In summer, unrefrigerated butter might begin to sour in just a few days.
So how do you get perfect spreadable butter every time?
It’s a question of equipment. You need the right butter dish. At first glance, you may be tempted by the “butter crock”, an Etsy-chic, two-piece contraption. It suspends your butter inverted above a temperature-stabilizing water bath. The water insulates the butter and maintains an ideal temperature — always spreadable, slow to spoil. And magically, somehow, the butter never gets wet.
Yet there is a catch with this countertop conversation piece: every time you want to refill the butter crock you have to mash the new stick (which is presumably fresh out of the refrigerator and rock hard) into the exact shape of the receptacle. If you do a half-assed job then your butter will get wet. What a crock of shit.
Instead, buy a “butter boat”. Same functionality with fewer headaches. It’s basically a double-hulled butter dish — pour water into the outer hull, drop your butter stick into the inner hull and return the lid. In this climate-controlled porcelain kayak your butter will remain spreadable and unspoiled for up to three weeks! But I suspect you won’t need that kind of shelf-life for a single stick — I mean your question is literally asking for advice on how to consume butter with less effort. I like you.
+++
Chocolate with white stuff on it
I got a bar of expensive chocolate for a Christmas gift. (Christmas 2019). It looked fancy and I wanted to save it for a special occasion. However, this year has been so shitty that I gave up waiting for a special occasion.
I just opened up the chocolate and it is covered in a thin white film. Also there are small white spots in some places, almost like spores. The white stuff has no smell that I can perceive but I am not sure if I should eat the fancy chocolate or throw it away.
I hate this year.
I hate this year, too and I admire your coping mechanism of socking away treats in anticipation of darker times ahead. I bet you’ve been saving for retirement since you were eleven.
Anyhow, great thinking to use your nose as a preliminary test: It feels unsophisticated but it works! In fact, the FDA explicitly recommends smelling food as a way to discern whether or not it is edible.
This strategy has a minor flaw, which is that we can’t detect any of the pathogenic (illness-causing) bacteria by smell or taste. But we can detect foul odors emitted by other, non-harmful bacteria, which would indicate that the food is supporting *some* kind of bacterial growth. Could it also be supporting the bad kind, too? Safest to assume yes.
Think of foul food odors like a dead canary in the coal mine. I mean, the canary could have died from natural causes. Or the canary might be playing that old practical joke— “play dead and watch all of the miners trample each other as they flee in terror.” The mine foreman hates that one, but it never gets old!
While a truly dead canary doesn’t prove the mine is full of poison gases, it is a compelling indicator that you should get the fuck out of there. Ditto with stanky food — it’s not guaranteed to be poisonous, but why take the chance?
That said, your chocolate passed the smell test. The white spots are most likely “chocolate bloom.” This is a harmless process where fat and sugar molecules in chocolate rearrange themselves and migrate towards the edge of the confection, producing white patterns. It happens when chocolate is exposed to oscillating temperatures (which probably happened during its tenure in your cupboard).
You may notice a mild difference in texture, but your fancy cacao is safe to consume.
+++
Really old spices
Could I get sick from eating old spices? I have spices in my pantry that are 5-10 years old.
Spices are a disproportionately dangerous food group. Who knew, right? But this has nothing to do with their age. Your ten-year-old spices are as safe as when you bought them.
The question is whether they were safe to begin with.
In 2012 I spent a year living in the part of Indonesia that 16th-century Europeans had dubbed “The Spice Islands.” The roads were literally lined with spices. Taking advantage of the equatorial sun and the heat-absorbing qualities of asphalt, locals would construct huge arrays of spices on the highway shoulder to dry out. This isn’t exactly a food-safe technique, since the spices were bathed in a constant plume of auto exhaust, bacteria-laded dust, and other stuff that accumulates on a highway shoulder.
So what happened to those pavement-dried spices? They were sold, aggregated into larger batches, resold, processed, resold again, and maybe exported. Herein lies the first risk associated with spices: the supply chain is global, interminable and opaque.
The spice man cometh
But that’s not the bad part. Lack of supply transparency creates the ideal environment for a more nefarious practice in the spice trade: food fraud.
It is estimated that a quarter of the food supply has been tainted by some sort of fraud. Read that again. In the case of spices, “fraud” comes in the form of a middleman diluting his product (a la your local coke dealer). Spices have been cut with dirt, twigs, rice, salt, flour, seed husks, other spices, and anything cheaper and loosely resembling the thing they’re supposed to be.
This is nothing new. Spices made irresistible targets for adulteration from the very beginning: they were both expensive (there’s your incentive) and impossible to verify (a first-time nutmeg buyer in 17th-century Holland had no idea what nutmeg was supposed to taste like). It is more likely the Dutch dude went home with an acorn dipped in shoe polish than the prized nut itself. This couldn’t possibly happen in modern times… or could it?
I’m not sure about you, but I couldn’t put a pinch of cinnamon on my tongue and approximate its purity. Is my cinnamon 90% sawdust? Maybe! I’ll never know.
Spice dealers have also been known to sneakily “enhance” the color of their product —not unlike you with those Mexico vacation photos you ‘grammed last year. In order to crank up the saturation on cayenne pepper, they might add mercury or Sudan Red Dye — a carcinogen more suitable for hair dye and smoke bombs than food.
If you haven’t sworn off spices forever, let me alarm you with one more anecdote. Spices, it turns out, are a perennial hot topic in the food-safety community, since it’s extremely difficult for epidemiologists to pinpoint spices as the cause of food poisoning. Here’s why.
Whenever there’s a virulent outbreak of foodborne illness, epidemiologists are summoned to identify the source of the trouble. If you’re one of the unlucky ones who gets a bad Chipotle order, for example, an epidemiologist might visit you in the hospital and ask questions about your food history while you vom into a pail. This is not a fun process for either party:
Epidemiologist: “You recall having eaten a burrito bowl for lunch on…”
You: [projectile vomit; the violence of the expulsion ruptures a blood vessel in your eye.]
Epidemiologist: OK, so it was Wednesday the 16th. Did that bowl continue your choice of freshly grilled chicken or did you opt for the barbacoa?
You: [whimpering softly as bile drips from your chin]
Once the epidemiologist is done with you, she will calmly continue the investigation, hunting for a common food eaten by you and the other poor souls who got sick. She will scan your credit card statements, scrutinize your supermarket receipts, and photograph the contents of your refrigerator.
When 189 people were sickened with salmonella in 2010, a common brand of salami was discovered in several of the victims’ refrigerators. This prompted a recall: 1.3 million pounds were pulled from supermarket shelves. But as the investigation continued, the meat was vindicated and a new culprit emerged: the peppercorns purchased by the salami manufacturer. Tests indicated that the spice itself was riddled with the same strain of bacteria found in the victims. The investigation shifted and 55,000 pounds of peppercorn were recalled due to contamination that had occurred at some point along the supply chain. But how much pepper had already ended up in manufactured food? How much of that tainted pepper is still sitting untouched in your pantry?
Probably none. But if you want to protect yourself from killer spices, do the following:
Resist the urge to buy loose packed spices, especially in foreign countries.
Shop at reputable markets and buy spices from reputable brands; you can trust that they’re sourcing them responsibly.
As for your old-ass spices: spices lose flavor over time, but that’s a taste issue, not a safety one. Maybe throw out the ones you brought back from your Bali trip. Otherwise you’ll be fine.
Practice Safe Spice!
+++