After work I went grocery shopping and picked up a few items. On the way home, I got a call from work and had to go back. I was irritated that I had to deal with the issue and totally forgot about my groceries! I was there about 45 minutes. I didn’t remember the groceries until I got ready to cook some dinner and by then it had been about 2 hours. I have some yogurt, turkey lunchmeat and some frozen dinners that I’m worried about. I put them in the refrigerator/freezer but I’m not sure if I should just throw it away. The yogurt containers were not cold. The meat still felt cool. The dinners felt frozen (they were in a bag together). Oh, and the outside temp was probably around 85. I really hate to do it but should I just toss it all?
The yogurt should be ok, and the meat too if it felt cool. As for the TV dinners, I would go with the saying “When it doubt, throw it out.”
This is why I never load perishable groceries in my trunk.
Like nearwildheaven said, the yogurt should be fine, it’s not going to go bad in two hours, in fact, I know someone that leaves it out from the time he gets to work in the morning until lunch because he prefers it at room temp. However, it’ll probably bring the expiration date in a bit.
The meat, same deal. It should be fine. Technically by law (US Food Code), all cold foods can be above 41 degrees for 2 hours. Well technically that involves cooling them, not storing them.
Meat that starts below 41 and rises above 41 for 4 hours or less, it should be cooked (or discarded). There’s some other intricacies that go along with it, but commercially processed food generally has more leeway and I’d even be less worried if it’s prepacked (as opposed to a full serve deli which is where the problem really lies). Also, you should take into account the ambient air temp of the trunk. There’s a big difference between ‘it was like 90 in there’ and ‘it was pretty cool out there, it couldn’t have been more than 50 in the trunk’.
The TV dinners, honestly, they cook the crap out of all that stuff. Toss it in your freezer and in a few days take a look to see how freezer burnt it is. If it’s full of crystals, toss it. On top of that food (safe to begin with) is safe if reheated to 165 and left to sit for 2 minutes.
So, that’s code (more or less), my opinion. Don’t worry about the frozen food or yogurt, just eat them sooner rather than later. The raw meat, you said it was still cool, you’re going to cook it (maybe cook it more than normal)…I wouldn’t worry about it. If you’re worried, assuming it doesn’t smell rancid, cook it sooner rather than later and stick it in the freezer.
If you’re truly worried, toss it, you’ll probably be happier throwing away $20 worth of food than getting sick, but I think you’ll be fine.
It should be noted that this is unprofessional advice give to a single consumer and not advice for a food service establishment based on my professional knowledge of the food code. That would tell me, technically, to consume it now or throw it away.
All should be fine.
Thanks for the very helpful replies. I’ve never had this happen before and still can’t believe I got that distracted. I’m surprised that the yogurt should be ok. I thought that was definitely going to be a tosser. The turkey (prepackaged) is for sandwiches for lunch next week so I’ll do a smell test when I open it. I was less concerned about the dinners since they were together in the bag and didn’t feel mushy or anything but I’ll watch out for freezer burn before cooking. Aside from losing money, I really hated thinking about wasting food. It’s ingrained in me from childhood. 
To be fair, you’d be surprised at how often ‘oh, hey, that pallet of [cold product] has been out like all day’ or ‘the walk in cooler has been warm all weekend’ happens at your local supermarket. 2 hours in your trunk, provided it wasn’t really hot in there, probably won’t be an issue.
I take frozen dinners to work all the time and they sit in my bag for 6-8 hours before I heat them up. Yogurt is made at 100 degrees. All that will happen there is maybe you get a little extra beneficial bacteria. My friend makes her own yogurt by leaving the starter mixture in her pilot-lit oven (at least 100F in there all the time) overnight. Lunchmeat is preserved, you could leave it out overnight and not have a problem.
Stop worrying about your food, it is all fine, and if it’s not, that will be obvious to your senses – sight, smell, and common.
I just got back from a 5-week trip, and I’ve eaten the eggs, potatoes, milk that I left in the fridge. They were fine. The best-by date on the milk is 7/23, I put it on my cereal this morning, it was thick and curdled and sour, but perfectly healthy and delicious. Cooked some potatoes last night, they had the appearance and surface texture of old avocadoes, but firm inside and I ate them, peels and all, and they actually get better when that old. A half-loaf of unsliced bread made nice French toast.
The key is, don’t contaminate your opened food by touching it. Once you touch your bread, meat or dairy products, you contaminate them with mouth or fingertips and they will spoil quickly. But if still in the original package, they will last very well, although if once frozen, the texture of the product might be affected.
Yogurt, like cheese, is one of those food that became common because they’re a way of preserving milk. Obviously, it’s not going to keep forever but before refrigeration it was a way of keeping milk edible for longer than just a couple hours even in warm weather.
And modern yogurt, in a hermetically-sealed package and produced in a clean environment, is going to last a heck of a lot longer than ancient yogurt did.
I just went and checked my yogurt, which I opened before I went on a trip six weeks ago. Best by date is July 30. It’s 3/4 full, and perfect, exactly as I left it. Tastes fine, nice firm consistency. No growth forming around the edges.
Yogurt should be fine, but you definitely don’t want to drink spoiled milk. Pasteurized milk does not sour, in the good sense. It spoils and can make you sick (and I’ve seen it.) Maybe if you have the immune system of an ox, fine, but as a general rule, don’t do it. You have no idea what bacteria is populating it.
In our particular supermarket chain, anyone involved in that decision would be dismissed. If non-Union, dismissed summarily. If Union then they’d get the most streamlined disciplinary process, then dismissed. We treat food safety violations as more serious than theft.
But then we are a global, giant, soul-less company, not your beloved locally owned chain with deep ties to the community.
In our case $10,000 in food loss is a cost of doing business. In their case it’s the family vacationing on the Jersey Shore instead of the Côte d’Azur.
Maybe I should change it to ‘at your local corner store’.
I always think it’s funny when I take my ServSafe class and they talk about Time And Temperature Abuse, they mention that if you don’t know how long something has been out, it has to be discarded. The video show an employee walking past a slicer and seeing half a roast beef on it, looking around and not seeing anyone, rolling his eyes and tossing it in the garbage. Technically, he’s right. It could have been out since last night or last week or for the last 6 hours, I get it. That’s where the instructor stops the video and says that as an inspector, in a case like that he’ll ask the manager how long the meat has been out, if the answer is ‘I don’t know’, he throws it away. But let’s be realistic. All the guy in the video had to do was find out who was using the slicer, not just reflexively toss $25 in the garbage because the person slicing isn’t in the room.
My pasteurized milk certainly does sour, beautifully – so perfectly that I buy my milk well ahead of time to give it a chance to sour naturally. For some uses, I prefer it that way, and I love drinking it clotted and sour. It’s just regular Vitamin D whole milk from the supermarket, cheapest store brand.
The critical thing is to be meticulous about never contaminating it, by touching the rim or the underside of the cap with fingers of lips, or introduce contaminants in any other way… If you’re careful about that, your milk will sour wonderfully. For years, I’ve been drinking my store-bought pasteurized milk well soured, jug after jug.
A point that hasn’t been made is that milk and other products cannot tolerate GETTING warm, even briefly, without drastically shortening their fresh life. You should do everything you can to keep milk cold from the store fridge to yours. If its temp spikes even briefly during a warm drive home, it will sour much faster than if it’s kept in an insulated bag for the trip.
IOW, cooling it down quickly after letting it get warm on the way home will do nothing. Don’t let it warm in the first place.
Most other things can tolerate a warm-up and cool or freeze again without more than minor degradation of consistency (frozen veggies, dinners, etc.)
A roommate of mine got sick after drinking spoilt milk from a freshly opened gallon container. Somehow he missed that it didn’t smell “sour,” but rather “off.” If it works for you, great. I’ve never had fresh milk sour–it always spoils for me. Just nasty stuff, and I like buttermilk, yogurt, kefir, all those cultured products. I can’t imagine anyone liking the taste of spoiled milk, but maybe you’re lucky or just have a gut that can handle it. I’m pretty lax in my food safety, comparatively, but not with spoiled milk.
Let me reiterate – mine does not “spoil”, it sours. It is quite like kefir. I’m careful to keep it from spoiling, and that does require care… Don’t touch bread products that you are leaving in the bag, and they won’t mold, either. I ate two-month old tortillas today.
Your gut can handle what you teach it to handle – it’s your body’s learning process, not luck. You depend on it to save your life.
I understand. I’m just surprised. Unopened gallons of milk have spoiled on me. They were not contaminated in any way by me. (I also used to work in a coffeeshop and we’d get spoiled, not soured, batches of milk from time to time which we notice right when we opened them. Not the nice kefir smell, but the funk of food gone off.) And, as I said, a roommate of mine got sick this way. I’m glad it works for you; it doesn’t for me. It’s not good general advice.
Unless it’s very warm when you finally unpack it then everything is probably ok. Get the stuff right in the fridge or freezer, something very perishable you might want to cook and eat right away, and make sure to cook thoroughly. I’d probably take the temperature of anything in question, but not everyone has an accurate thermometer handy. I’d expect the milk to go bad sooner, and like other perishables it depends on a lot of other factors though, how old was it when you bought it, how well was it kept at temperature before then, how well is it packaged.
Joey P, didn’t they tell you to check stuff that was left out with a thermometer? If it’s still cold enough in the center you know it wasn’t left out that long (subject to the particular food type we’re talking about).