How Long Will It Keep?

By Author: pangsiyan
Total Articles: 130
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How long will those eggs keep in the fridge? Can leftover picnic foods sit out in the sun for more than an hour? Does frozen chicken have an expiration date?

Answers to burning questions like these are but a mouse click away, thanks to a clever website called StillTasty.com. The creation of a magazine writer and her food-scientist mother, StillTasty.com has information on safe storage for thousands of foods and drinks - where and how to store them, how to tell if they're safe to eat and why you occasionally might need to bite the bullet and toss them.

Janice Revell, who lives in the city, and her mother, Jeannie Revell, who hails from Canada, launched StillTasty.com in February 2009. The site logs 250,000 to 300,000 visitors per month - and more near the holidays. Viewers can type in a food or drink and receive information on how long it can be stored - and how best to store it.

For example, typing in the word "ketchup" yields the information that an open bottle will last for six months in the fridge. Sake, on the other hand, only keeps for a week.

Based on the emails the Revells receive, consumers ...
... are utterly confused by food labels. It's not hard to see why. Eggs have a sell-by date, Janice Revell explains, but that doesn't mean they have to be eaten by that date or you risk a bout of food poisoning.

"Eggs are good for three to five weeks after you buy them," Revell said. "But people see a sell-by date and mistakenly think it's a safety date, not a quality date."

Revell and her mother, who worked as a food scientist for 40 years, base their findings on information from the FDA, the USDA, and assorted state government agencies and nonprofit organizations.

Their site also explains the difference between "Best by," "Best if used by" and "Use by." These dates really just are a manufacturer's guess-timate of how long a product will stay at peak quality, not how long it will be safe to consume, points out Janice Revell.

An exception is baby food, one area where people need to err on the side of caution, she says. Consumers should always honor the date on the jar.

The Revells initially set out to write a book on the subject of food storage but decided to create a website instead. StillTasty.com is now a full-time job for both - mother and daughter receive and answer hundreds of emails a month requesting information. They make their money through the ads that appear on the site.

"Right now, there are a lot of concerns with summer food," Janice Revell said. "Someone will say, I went to buy groceries and left the eggs in the car while I went somewhere else. How long will they be good?"

Visitors to the site also frequently ask how long a particular meat can be kept in the freezer. The answer is much longer than you'd think, but only from a safety standpoint.

"From a quality perspective, you'd probably want to eat it within a year," Janice Revell said.