What is the most important major appliance in your house? Most people would probably say their refrigerator and I would probably agree, but do we really keep them clean as often as we should..? The fact is that refrigerators are not kept as clean by busy families as they should be in order to keep a healthy household. Leftovers are put in the fridge and often get left there for days or something even weeks at a time before finally being thrown away after they have gotten spoiled. Liquids get spilled, frozen foods are left to thaw on the shelves, and just general mess gets left everywhere. A refrigerator might be cleaned out once every 4 or 5 months by a busy family, but if you keep a watch on the items in your refrigerator and the messes plaguing its shelves, you will not have to do this very often.
Look around in your refrigerator and figure out what is outdated and spoiled. If you keep jelly or jam, you probably know that these get molded after a while, either on the top of the food itself or on the inside of the lids. These soft items and other things like yogurt, sour cream, soft cheeses, individually sliced cheeses, and just generally anything with a high moisture content need to be thrown away. The entirety of the food will probably be completely contaminated with mold even though it might only appear to be on the surface of the food.
If you bring fruit or vegetables home from the grocery store and just chuck the plastic bags they’re inside into your produce drawer like that, you’ll probably end up with some moldy and rotted fruit not too long after. What happens in this situation is that condensation builds up inside the bag and mold starts to grow on anything inside it. Just take the fruits and vegetables out of the bags and make sure that none of the fruit already have mold growing on them. If they do, throw them out and wash anything that was in close proximity to it.
If you see any eggs that are cracked in the carton, these need to be thrown away, too. Bacteria growing on the outside of the egg will get inside and contaminate it.
If mold starts growing on a block of cheese, what you should do is take a knife and cut around and under the moldy spot on the block and remove it. Don’t touch the knife to other parts of the cheese to avoid cross-contamination.
Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of quality
Connecticut Mold Remediation services and
flood and water damage cleanup companies across the united states.
