Salmonella Might Live in Packaged Food For Six Months

When it comes to the bacteria salmonella, it turns out that simply cooking and time does necessarily do away with the bacteria. Some new research is suggesting that salmonella can actually live in prepackaged snacks like cookies and crackers for up to six months.

This research was published in the Journal of Food Protection and tested this out by actually putting salmonella into a variety of snack foods and letting them wait it out. They put the bacteria into four different types of cookie and cracker fillings including peanut butter, cheese, vanilla, and chocolate. They then put the fillings into storage to see how long it would survive, and in some cases it stayed up to six months. Overall the salmonella seemed to survive better in the cookie fillings than it did in the cracker fillings, but there was a risk either way.

The problem with salmonella is that when it’s present in large batches of anything that is used for mass production, it spreads really easily. We’ve seen this recently with companies like Chipotle. Obviously if one container of something is contaminated and then it is shipped to a variety of restaurants or stores, a lot of people can get sick.

When you eat something contaminated by salmonella, it can cause fever, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. In the more serious cases if it gets into the bloodstream it can require treatment at the hospital. Strangely it can take up to ten days for the symptoms of salmonella to appear so it ca take some backtracking to try and figure out where it came from in some cases.

You probably grew up being told not to eat the cookie dough because it contained raw eggs which are one thing that can carry salmonella, but when it comes to eating out or buying food at the grocery store there’s not a lot that you can do.

Avoiding prepackaged snacks is always a good idea however for a variety of different reasons, so if the salmonella possibility scares people away from the cookies then that might not be the worst thing.

The best thing that you can do to avoid salmonella is to always cook meat, eggs, and poultry all the way through, clean hands after handling raw anything, and making sure to clean up the cooking space to kill germs when you’re done. (It’s really easy for the splattered raw chicken juice to get on something else and start to multiply.) Microwaving raw food is not suggested because the heat levels are different than other means of cooking and it is not considered the safest way. If you are served meat in a restaurant that doesn’t seem done to you never hesitate to send it back for a little more cooking time.

Avoid cross contamination when cooking by cooking foods separate before they are cooked and using different cutting boards and tools to prepare them.