My electric was out for less than 48 hours. Should I pitch all of my food?

If you kept the refrigerator door closed, I would keep the eggs and condiments. Keep the acidic things like orange juice and tomato sauce.

Discard the meat, fish, poultry and dairy.

If the stuff that was in the freezer didn’t fully thaw out it should still be good, but I would use it up within a week. If it was fully thawed I would probably discard it.

We were home for the first two days of our outage, so were able to keep an eye on things. Pretty much just around the 48 hour mark, all of it went bad. Even the fresh lemonade that I purchased refrigerated was off-taste by that point. We pitched it all but the ketchup and such.

If the electricity was back on by the time you got back, probably the freezer stuff is ruined, because it thawed and refroze. It probably has extra ice around the food. For instance a bag of peas or corn instead of feeling like a bag of each pea is frozen and easy to break apart by barely pushing on the bag is probably now a solid mass inside. It won’t be good. Meats I would be wary about, probably have to ditch everything in the fridge and freezer with 48 to be safe, except maybe condiments that are safe at room temperature and fruits and veg that look fine.

If you arrived home when the electricity was still out and the freezer food was still cold just not frozen, you can move it to the fridge when it comes on and eat the food during the week. Throw out the current fridge food. But, it sounds like you arrived when the electricity was already back on.

If you have homeowners insurance you probably have coverage for food lost from an electrical outage, especially if it was caused by a storm.

Your potential saving grace is you weren’t there, so you never opened the Fridge to see how everything was doing. Things in the freezer likely wee still plenty cold by the time the power came back on.

I’ve defrosted and refrozen meat with no loss. But then I have a sense of smell almost like a bloodhound. I can smell my coffee and tell whether it has sugar in it or not, because I can smell the sugar even over the heady aroma of the coffee. So I trust my sniffer to warn me when meats and dairy products are on their way to being poisons. Unless you are certain you can sniff out bad meat, don’t take the chance. I sure don’t want to be visiting you in the ER explaining why I gave you dangerously poor advice.

Ok, I’ll just clean out everything. I don’t want to make @ETpro come all the way to WV to visit me in a hospital.

You could cook the fornerly frozen stuff, but the frig stuff? Yea, pitch it.

Frozen veggies that still have ice crystals can be refrozen. Any meat that thawed should be thrown out. If you didn’t put ice in the refrigerator then I would throw everything out—if you were in a hot zone. I would even discard condiments—I mean they are too cheap to take a risk. I’ve had many major power outages and have had to get rid of food. I feel for you.