Meal Prep Essential: Food Safety

Food safety is of course one crucial part of meal prepping. Imagine you spend a few hours on Meal Prep Sunday prepping your tasty delights and by the time you’re ready to eat them, they have all gone bad. No one wants that. So, let’s look at a few basic food safety principles that help you maximize your meal preps.

The bad new is: There are no hard and fast rules for how long your food will stay fresh. It all depends on your refrigerator, how you packed your meal preps, and the type and quality of your ingredients.

A good starting point is the the FDA’s guidelines for fridge and freezer storage. It informs you how long you can store meal prep foods, and practice common sense when you pack food so it can last longer. Helpful devices include divided containers to avoid cross-contamination (or flavor contamination). Moreover, it is advisable to pack wet food separate from dry food. Always use use ice packs to keep cold dishes cold, and pre-warmed insulated containers to keep hot foods hot. It seems needless to say, but I’ll do anyway: Thoroughly clean your hands and produce before you cook.

From my experience, most meal prep meals will last between 3-5 days in the fridge. I personally don’t really trust food that sat in the fridge for 5 consecutive days no matter its smell or taste or ingredients. That’s why I either

• schedule two days a week related to meal prepping (official Meal Prep Sunday and Leftover Thursday or Friday Night) to keep food as fresh as possible.
• use my freezer for dishes to be served later in the week. Falafel are a perfect freezer-friendly dish that can go straight from the freezer into the pan and so do stews, currys and soups.

Basic rules to keep you and your food safe

Rule 1: Keep it clean

I’m sure one of the important lessons of your childhood were to wash your hands before you eat: Foodborne illnesses can be spread through contact. One part of hand hygiene is washing hands before you assemble your food such as salads, but another crucial part is periodically while you’re cooking. This holds true a lot more for a carnivore diet where potentially hazardous foods like raw meat, eggs and cheese are touched but it applies for preparing plant-based dishes just as well. Fruits and vegetables are also prone to salmonella. Salmonella is a bacteria that can cause diarrhea, fever, stomach cramps, and vomiting within 12 to 72 hours after being exposed to it. Take-away of the story: If you’re preparing an exotic salad that is topped up with spiced melon, be sure to thoroughly clean, rinse, and sanitize your hands and workstations after handling melon and before cooking veg, and again before moving on to your salad assembly (you can really never be too careful) especially when you have young children in your household.

Last but not least, here is a grandma’s life hack for your dish washing routine: The kitchen sponge host an immense number of bacteria, so once a week microwave it for two minutes on high. Make sure the sponge is damp beforehand for adequate sanitizing so that the microwave rays can penetrate the nooks and crannies of the sponge. Side note: This works better than hot water or bleach.

Rule 2: Organize

Organization is key when it comes to meal prep, knows even every beginner of meal prepping. While planning out meals, going shopping and making sure to have enough pots and pans available for your big prep day is one part of the journey, the other one is preparing foods efficiently to prevent foodborne illness from developing.

For example assess the order in which ingredients are used during the recipe process. If you’re making a coconut yogurt-based pasta salad but still need to cook and chill the pasta, don’t put your yogurt on the counter just yet, but let it sit in the refrigerator until just before you’re ready to use it.

Rule 3: Labeling

If you have ever backpacked and stayed in $10 hostels across the globe, you’ll know the drill. Label all your food with your name, room number, date of today and your departure date. “Unlabeled food will be thrown out.” -yells the warning sign pinned onto the fridge. While hostels tend to be not the number one place of sanity and cleanliness, they are right with their fridge policy.

Food rotation labels are an essential item of every commercial kitchen, so why not using them in your own home? Removable/dissolvable is all up to you. Here is a food label I like (affiliate link).

Rule 4: Storage

Check out my Meal Prep Containers FAQ and invest in some durable and easy-to-clean food storage sets, because by organizing, labeling, and dating your prepared items, you can determine your “best by” of every prep.

A general rule of thumb is three days for salads and up to five days for cooked vegetables. If you have room in your freezer, you can easily freeze most cooked meals.

When cooking a batch of food, make sure to cool it properly: Do not allow food to sit out at room temperature for many hours to let it cool down. Divide larger batches of food into smaller containers with about two to three inches in depth, and then put it in the fridge. That doesn’t imply that you should place hot food in the freezer. It will drive up your electricity bill and poses a risk to let neighboring food go bad.

Where should you arrange in your meal preps within the fridge? Cold air sinks, so it collects at the bottom and, in a fridge freezer, the bottom shelves will be coldest. But in a fridge with an ice-making compartment at the top, it will be the top. Frost-free fridges circulate the air and have much more even temperature distribution.

Rule 5: Reheat and Re-eat

If your microwave as a reheat button, I recommend using it. It helps get your food to the recommended 165-degree internal temperature for safety. If you’re not reheating a food such as a salad, just be sure you keep the item cooled and stored at the proper temperature (under 41 degrees) and discard it if it’s been exposed to higher temperatures (between 41 to 140 degrees) for longer than four hours. There is great solutions such as cooler lunch bags (affiliate link) out there to get your food safely to your office.

Last but not least

Lastly, when in doubt, throw it out! No food is worth saving if you’re unsure about its safety. But when you follow these rules, you’ll waste less food and eat more of the good stuff.