7 ways to optimize your fridge

As crazy as it sounds, your fridge‘s job is not to keep wine cold. It should slow the growth of bacteria in the products you put inside.

Bacteria such as d-coli, salmonella and botulinum in food.

Avoid these 7 common mistakes and reduce your chance of falling victim to food poisoning.

1. Placing raw meat on a high shelf

The next time you defrost meat, don’t put it in the highest places in your fridge. Thawed meat often drips and contaminates the food below it, and often in refrigerators the higher part is warmer, which is not a good thing when it comes to thawed meat.

2. Overflow

For some, an overflowing fridge is a sign of wealth. But to a microbiologist, it’s diarrhea waiting to be unlocked. The reason? Cold air needs to move to keep food chilled and protected from bacteria, and that can’t happen in a crowded fridge.

Also, in this kind of refrigerator, it will be very difficult for you to judge what is fresh and what is not, because you cannot judge which product you have stored for how long.

3. Temperature maintenance

When was the last time you checked the temperature in your fridge? In case you don’t know, you better find out if you don’t want your fridge to become a breeding ground for bacteria. You need to maintain a low temperature in these areas, and in the freezer to 2-3 degrees below zero. This way you will be completely protected from pests.

4. The separation of fruits and vegetables

There are some things that cannot be changed (the flow of bacteria for example), but there are also things that can! For starters, stop washing fruits and vegetables before putting them in the fridge, and only when you’re ready to cook them into a dish or just eat them.

This is due to the fact that bacteria love moisture. The other trick is to separate fruits from vegetables in different drawers, because fruits, for example, emit ethylene gas, which in turn causes vegetables to spoil.

5. Storing eggs on the refrigerator door

As tempting as it may seem, stop and get rid of this harmful habit. Experts prove that the most inappropriate place to store eggs is the door of the refrigerator, because it is too warm there. Better put them together with the crust at the bottom of the fridge, on a lower shelf!

6. Be careful with milk

People often pour a half-full glass of milk back into the container after giving up drinking it. This is wrong because the returned milk already has a lot of bacteria and agents going back into the carton and so quite unknowingly a family member could get food poisoning or diarrhea.

7. Clean the fridge

If possible not once a year. True, it’s annoying and we all put it off, but we have to. There is a lot of bacteria on the cap of the ketchup, the boxes where the meat is kept are also breeding grounds, not to mention all the jars and cans.

If you can, clean your refrigerator once a week, with warm water and soap or a mixture of vinegar and water.