Have you ever returned home after a family weekend, work trip, or vacation to find your digital clocks flashing incorrectly?
You soon discover that you were without electricity during your trip, but it’s very impossible to pinpoint the exact moment or duration of the outage. As a result, it is also impossible to determine how long the food in your freezer may have thawed, been ruined, and then been preserved.
Or is it?
A woman named Sheila Pulanco Russell posted a creative idea on her Facebook wall for anyone who had to flee their home during Hurricane Matthews, which hit areas of the United States in 2016.
However, knowing the trick can also help you decide if the food in your freezer is safe to consume or should be thrown out immediately if you are going to be away from home for an extended period of time.
Three basic yet useful items that everyone has at home—a mug, a penny, and some tap water—work together magically to accomplish the trick.
Sheila provides instructions in a Facebook post that immediately garnered hundreds of thousands of views and replies. She writes:
“I recently heard a fantastic advice for those of you who are leaving the shore. We refer to it as the “one cup tip.” You fill your freezer with a cup of water. After solidly freezing it, place a quarter on top of it and store it in the freezer. In this manner, you may determine whether your food went bad and was just refrozen or whether it remained frozen during your absence when you return after being evacuated.
You should discard the food if the quarter has dropped to the bottom of the cup, indicating that all of the food has defrosted. However, your food can still be fine if the quarter is in the center of the cup or on top of it. Additionally, it would be a great idea to keep this in your freezer at all times so you have it handy in case of an unexpected power outage.
Simply throw aside any meal that doesn’t make you feel good. Everyone’s safety is the most important thing. Kindly post this on your page.
Easy, efficient, and unquestionably cost-effective because you don’t have to throw out a lot of food needlessly. Please tell all of your friends about this clever trick!
