How To Keep Food Fresh for Longer

My mother went to the farmers' market every Saturday morning and sometimes also midweek, if she could slip out of the busy shoe store she owned and managed. As a kid I enjoyed the market so much that I frequently volunteered to be her basket carrier and manager of her change. The market was four blocks from our house, and we couldn't buy anymore than we could comfortably carry.

You couldn't -- and still can't -- beat that for freshness. But today, you can't beat a supermarket for convenience. There are things you should know, and things you can do, however, to keep the food you buy at a supermarket as fresh as possible.

Food-market distributors know how to keep foods fresh -- if not by natural means, then with the help of an arsenal of chemicals. Supermarket managers know how to keep meat, produce, and fruit looking their best -- and anything with the slightest hint of degradation is mercilessly trashed.

Not that I am critical of supermarket foods: I insist on buying the freshest foods possible and still buy at the supermarket even though their foods cannot hope to approach farmers'-market quality. But how many of us can find a farmers' market, a good butcher, an artisan baker, a reliable seafood store, or a quaint little cheese shop nearby?

Supermarket foods are acceptable: unblemished, shiny, perfect fruits and vegetables are kept at ideal temperatures in misty conditions so they will stay fresh-looking for days. Then there's cherry-red meats, plump golden-yellow poultry, and bright-looking seafood sitting comfortably atop beds of ice. The dairy case groans with a mind-boggling selection of hermetically sealed containers (single servings to family size), all utterly fresh.

"Fresh," of course, is subjective.

Since 1993, "fresh" has had a federal and legal definition from the Food and Drug Admin°©istration. "Fresh" means the food has not been processed in any way, nor frozen, heated, or preserved. It means that the food is basically in its raw form. (A few exceptions exist: It's OK to spray a moisture-sealing wax coating on some fruits.) According to federal guidelines, the terms "fresh frozen" and "frozen fresh" are allowed if the food was totally fresh when it was frozen quickly.

With good storage, fresh foods can remain fresh two times, even three times longer than improperly stored food. Red meat, such as beef, lamb, and pork, has long, tightly knit muscle fibers and is slower to deteriorate under microbial attack, but because of its specific fat composition, it is susceptible to the effects of oxygen. Poultry has shorter, looser fibers that microbes penetrate more easily -- poultry spoils faster than red meat. Fish and seafood are very short-fibered and loosely woven, and microbes attack them quickly and efficiently. They are among the most perishable of all foods we eat. Keep all meats, poultry, and fish cold, but when carrying and storing fish in particular, think "ice cream." Neither fish nor ice cream should ever warm up.

Meat, poultry, fish love the cold

Store meat and poultry in the coldest part of the refrigerator, near the bottom. Keep fish on a bed of ice, as they do in market fish displays. That way, the fish or seafood stay just above freezing. If you keep draining off the melted water and replacing the ice, fish stay fresh for several days.

Don't underestimate freezing as a freshness preserver for meat. Under perfect conditions, red meat may stay fresh for millennia. A mammoth frozen in Siberian ice was as fresh as the beef in your butcher's display case when it was discovered 20,000 years later.

Vegetables and fruits generally like it cold, but not all of them. Tropical fruits, for example, shiver and suffer in refrigeration temperatures. They are best stored cool but outside the refrigerator.