People love home-delivery meal kits because they make it so easy for us. We can come home from work and have a package waiting with everything we need to cook a healthy meal, without having to hustle to the supermarket and get it all. But new research shows those convenient kits might not be so healthy for us after all.
Rutgers University human ecology professor Bill Hallman recently warned about the dangers of some of the ready-to-cook packages at the 2017 Food Safety Summit. He and a team of researchers studied 169 kits, interviewed 1,000 customers who use them, and reviewed over 400 food delivery sites, and they found some unsettling stuff.
It turns out, most of the kits are left outside for more than eight hours before they’re opened or put in the fridge, which means they get hot waiting around. Kits the researchers tested arrived in temps ranging from minus 23-degrees to a toasty 75-degrees - way too warm for food safety, especially for meat. They found 47% of the kits were too warm to safely eat! And a lot of the packages had “microbial loads that were off the charts.”
So if you’re a fan of the ease of the home-delivery meal kits, don’t cancel your subscription, just make sure the one you’re using is sticking to the highest packaging and delivery standards. And that they provide accurate food safety information online. Better safe than sorry when it comes to what you’re eating!
Source: Food and Wine