How to Know What Is Still Safe to Eat and Drink: United Kingdom Food and Water (Skavinger) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

The power came back at four in the morning. Is the chicken safe?

You are standing in the dark with the fridge door in your hand and about six seconds before somebody says "just smell it".

Do not smell it. You cannot see, smell or taste the bacteria that cause food poisoning, and the Food Standards Agency says so in exactly those words. Food that is about to make your family very ill smells completely fine.

So what do you do? Most households guess. They bin a fortnight of shopping that was perfectly safe, or they eat something that was not, and there is no way to tell afterwards which mistake they made.

Here is the part that should annoy you. There is a published answer, written by the regulator, specifically for power cuts, and almost nobody in Britain knows it exists.

It is not a rule of thumb. It is a temperature and a clock, and once you have it, the decision stops being a decision.

Don't panic. That is what this book is

How to Know What Is Still Safe to Eat and Drink is a calm field manual for an ordinary British kitchen. Every claim traces to a named primary UK source, printed with the date it was checked: the Food Standards Agency, the Drinking Water Inspectorate, Water UK, the NHS and the Cabinet Office. There is a register at the back so you can check the book rather than trust it.

And it is written for here. The American alternative will teach you to can food at home, which our own regulator says is difficult to control safely in a domestic kitchen.

Inside, you will discover

• The 4am fridge decision, settled by one published temperature range, in the regulator's own words
• How long a freezer really holds, and the free trick that doubles it
• Why bottled water does not go off in six months, and the one place in your house you must never store it
• What a boil notice actually restricts, including the four things everyone forgets, and the half of it that stops the panic
• The date-label rule almost nobody knows, which turns your freezer into a pause button and stops you binning good food
• What the regulator forbids at home, and why an imported book will cheerfully tell you otherwise
• Cooking with no power, and the one thing that must never come indoors, whatever the weather
• 16 worked scenarios, from the boil notice on a school morning to the week nobody could reach a shop

Two things you are probably getting wrong

You are throwing away food you could have kept. The FSA says you can freeze food right up until midnight on the use-by date. It is not a deadline after which food is waste. It is the last moment you can press pause, and British households bin a fortune ignoring it.

Your emergency water is in the wrong place. Water UK's own guidance says store it cool, dark, and away from strong smells and fumes, and never outside. Which is a precise description of why the garage, next to the petrol and the paint, is the worst place in your house.

What to do now

Chapter 1 ends with five things that take about 20 minutes. One of them is a fridge thermometer, which costs a few pounds and turns every decision in this book from a guess into a number.

You will have the 4am decision eventually. Scroll up and start reading now, and have the answer before you need it.

Skavinger. Preparedness that knows where you live.

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