Don’t Eat That: Recommendations for Food Safety After the Missoula Storm

They say there are two kinds of people (though this is a logical fallacy, and the two "kinds" can be many different kinds, but I digress): those who adhere to expiration dates, and those who do not.

But when your power has been out for days, we should all be the same kind of person--one who cares about food safety.

At my house, we lost power from Wednesday at about 9 pm until Saturday at about 10 am. We tried to get ice at the grocery store to transfer some food to a cooler, but the grocery store had run out of ice. By the time they were handing out ice at Fort Missoula on Saturday, more than 48 hours had passed and we had to throw everything out.

Depending on when your power went off and when it came back on, your food may or may not be safe to eat. The CDC has a great explainer about whether or not your food is safe to eat after a power outage that was shared by the CSKT Tribal Health Department on Facebook.

Notice that they recommend transferring food out of a refrigerator after only 4 hours and they say, "Never taste food to determine if it is safe to eat."

Another thing to keep in mind is there may be foods that you wouldn't normally refrigerate but you keep in the fridge. If that food got condensation on it during the power outage as your refrigerator or freezer returned to room temperature, that food is probably not safe to eat either.

This is what my fridge looked like as we started to replenish it after the power came back on. We've got a ways to go before we're back at full snack capacity. :-)