Had a conversation with my wife today about the unopened mayo we had sitting in the pantry and it made me think – how does it make sense for a food (for instance mayo) to sit in a 65-70 degree pantry for months and be perfectly fine, but as soon as it’s opened it needs to be refrigerated. In my mind, if something needs to be refrigerated at any point, wouldn’t it always need to be refrigerated? The seal on the unopened product keeps the item safe, and the refrigerator does that when the seal is off? How do those two things relate?
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foods go bad from microbes, enzymes and oxyge. packaged stuff have long shelf lives because these factors have been eliminated during the manufacturing process and the packaging is good at keeping external sources of these out. once you open the box, you reintroduce them from the air, your spoon, saliva, etc and it starts to spoil again, albeit not as fast as the fresh stuff because it starts at zero and probably still has active preservatives.
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