The 40-140 Rule strikes again, and, not surprisingly, a food industry giant decided it’d rather save money than follow it. According to the FDA, you should be careful when eating your budget friendly Tyson Seafood Gumbo soup.
“Tyson stored fish and crab for about 18 hours between 40 and 55 degrees. The FDA said those products should be stored below 40 degrees to keep bacteria and toxins from growing on them.. Inspectors in August also cited the company for not documenting procedures for stopping bacterial growth.”
For those of you who are not familiar with the 40-140 Rule, it states that, to avoid bacterial growth, a food product such as fish needs to be kept at either below 40 degrees F (i.e. a freezer) or above 140 degrees F (i.e. cook it).
Tyson essentially threw this Food Safety 101 rule out the window, my guess is because their energy bill would have been higher to keep a temperature below 40 degrees F rather than the we’ll-take-a-guess-and-assume-it’s-safe temperature range of 40–55 degrees F. And the window of safety in which you can leave meat, poultry, and fish above 40 degrees F is 2 hours. Glad they stuck by that one.
Tyson claims this is just a documentation error, that they simply didn’t write down that they took the necessary steps to hinder bacterial growth, and that they’re thawing procedures were within proper safety guidelines. It doesn’t take a nerdy food science undergrad to tell you that, at least the latter, can’t possibly be true. Would you leave a fillet of fish in a warm refrigerator for almost a day and then think, eh, it’s fine. Probably not.
KitchenBitchNYC 