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?
In: 1789
A long time ago, people thought that mold and rot arose spontaneously within old organic material. Louis Pasteur was a French scientist who proved that if you kill microorganisms and seal a container they won’t grow inside the container. We named the process after him, and an enormous amount of food is Pasteurized for storage.
However, once you break the seal on the container microorganisms and spores in the air begin colonizing the food and it will spoil quickly unless refrigerated.
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