My mom often makes a soup, keeps it in the fridge for over 10 days (it usually is left overnight on a turned off stove or crockpot before the fridge), then boils it and eats it. She insists it’s safe and has zero risk. I find it really gross because even if the bacteria are killed, they had to have made a lot of waste in the 10-15 days the soup sits and grows mold/foul right?!
But she insists its normal and I’m wrong. So can someone explain to me, someone with low biology knowledge, if it’s safe or not…and why she shouldn’t be doing this if she shouldn’t?
Every food safety guide implies you should throw soup out within 3-4 days to prevent getting ill.
Edit: I didn’t mean to be misleading with the words indefinitely either. I guess I should have used periodically boiling. She’ll do it every few days (then leave it out with no heat for at least 12 but sometimes up to 48 before a quick reboil and fridge).
In: Biology
Bacteria cosume and produce waste. A lot of that waste cannot be neutralized by simply boiling. This is why we cannot take rotten meat or seafood and boil it to safely consume.
Did you know that bacteria in wine eat sugar and poop alcohol? So bacteria are not like you and me, in many cases you want them to eat something and poop out something you want. The same goes for bread and cheese and many other items.
This means, you might actually like that they do in there as they don’t produce anything that bad.
For the fridge part- a fridge keeps food too cold for bacteria to reproduce effectively. It keeps food safe for quite a long time.
Something very close to that exists. [Perpetual Stew](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew) can last for decades.
> they had to have made a lot of waste in the 10-15 days the soup sits and grows mold/foul right?!
Right, the byproducts of bacteria and mold can still be poisonous even after the boiling has killed the organism responsible. Usually the problem with eating spoiled food is those toxins as the bacteria aren’t going to survive stomach acid and digestion.
> But she insists its normal and I’m wrong.
The normal safe holding time for soup in the refrigerator is 3 days. 5 days is pushing it, and 10 days is very dangerous. She should definitely not do that.
To answer the question in your title, you in fact can boil a soup indefinitely to keep it food safe – this is known as a [forever soup or perpetual stew](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew). The longest on record appears to have lasted over 500 years, until it had to stop due to lack of resources from World War 2.
you store food for 10 days. day 1 bugs start coming and eating and pooping on the food. you come back 10 days later and brush off the bugs. the food still has the bug poop on it
Some food borne illness results from getting a bacterial infection, so as long as you keep killing those bacteria, you won’t get sick. Some food borne illness results from stuff left behind by bacteria, so even if they’re dead, their accumulated waste products can make you sick. Keeping the food in the fridge really helps tamp down on bacterial growth, which prevents both kinds of illnesses. But that doesn’t last indefinitely.
You and your mother are both right – best practice is tossing the soup after a few days. But, for most healthy people, most of the time, boiling 2 week old refrigerated soup is enough to render it safe.
That’s exactly what the refrigerator is there for. To prolong the shelf life of perishable foods by slowing down bacteria growth. Boiling food kills bacteria. If you put it in a sterile container and immediately seal it, it will stay safe to eat just like the millions of cans of chicken soup at the grocery store. The container your mom put it in probably isn’t sterile but if it’s clean, there’s probably not that much bacteria on it and there’s bacteria in the air that can land in the soup, so *eventually* it will go bad even in the fridge, but the cold will slow it down.
Boiling food does kill the majority of the bacteria; however, many of the things that make us sick are not the bacteria themselves, but their waste (bacteria poop). The bacteria may be dead and unable to hurt you, but the waste is still there. That’s why you can’t just cook rotten food and make it safe. She may not have gotten sick yet, but eventually she’ll get a bad roll of the dice.
That being said, if you can keep the food over a certain temperature indefinitely, it keeps the bacteria from growing and producing waste. There’s something called perpetual stew, which is a medieval concept where they would keep a stew cooking over a fire for months at a time, and they would constantly be eating from it and then adding new ingredients to refill it.
Latest Answers