8 Best Ways To Store Your Food In The Fridge

Did you know in one day, an average of 1.6m million people gets sick due to unsafe food? And that there are 200 diseases  - ranging from diarrhoea to cancers - caused by eating contaminated food? 

While we don't often think about food safety until we're bent over a toilet, it's important to be mindful of what we're eating since food-borne diseases are entirely preventable. For us as individuals, this starts with our own pantries and refrigerators. To commemorate World Food Safety Day today (June 7), here are some ways of the best ways to keep food fresh in your fridge: 

1. Never wash fruit or vegetables before you refrigerate them, unless you can wipe them thoroughly or use a salad spinner. Depending on your fridge temperature, the moisture can turn into ice beads and this then causes greens and softer fruit to turn limp and deteriorate in the fridge.

2. The greengrocers at the markets have been doing this right all these years! Wrap delicate vegetables and herbs such as parsley and spring onions in newspaper to help absorb excess moisture, which keeps them fresher for longer. But as I don’t fancy getting newspaper ink on my food, I use either torn-out magazine pages or brown paper.

3. Brown paper or brown paper bags also work well for mushrooms – not the dried variety but the fresh ones. The material helps to soak up excess moisture so your shrooms don’t spoil quickly.

4. If you want your celery and broccoli to last longer, wrap them in aluminum foil before storing in the fridge.

5. Peeling and grating ginger is one of the most tedious kitchen chores for me so I like to prep a few knobs when I have the time and keep them for later. Be sure to pat the peeled ginger dry with a paper towel before placing it in a Ziploc bag. Press out all air from the bag and put it in your bottommost drawer, never in the chiller as it will cause the root to turn hard and rough.

6. While the door of your fridge seems to be designed for storing milk cartons, it is most frequently exposed to warm outside air. Unless you finish up a one-litre carton of milk in a couple of days, it is more ideal to buy smaller cartons that can stand upright in the centre of the fridge.

7. For the same reason, if you do not cook eggs every day, do not put them in the specially designed egg compartment at the door. Leave them in their original crates and store in the centre of the fridge.

8. In most supermarkets here, tomatoes are sold in a bag of five or six. Thanks to our humidity, they don’t last well if you leave them out in the open. If the tomato is over-ripe, leave it in the fridge to stall its ripening process but eat it in a day or two. It is never advisable to refrigerate tomatoes for more than three days as the cold air makes them lose their flavour. And always remove them from the plastic bags that you bought them in to prevent moisture from being trapped between the bag and the produce.