Here’s the Safety Reason Why You Should Avoid This Fridgescaping Trend

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If you like to cook, there’s a good chance that your refrigerator is one of the centerpieces of your home. Ours is perpetually stuffed to the brim, and it can honestly be stressful trying to paw through condiment jars, bottles of hot sauce, and the produce we’re trying to use up before it goes bad, just to find that one item we need for a recipe. That’s why we’ve been so enchanted by the idea of Fridgescaping. Fridgescaping focuses on keeping the fridge organized, but also seeks to make it aesthetically pleasing. But if you never managed to turn your fridge into a front page-worthy, fridgescaped masterpiece (same!), you can breathe a sigh of relief, because it turns out one of the aesthetic fridge organization trends could be a hazard to your health.

One of the most eye-catching fridge organization trends we’ve seen is storing produce submerged in water in glass jars, where strawberries glow like rubies and mandarin orange segments look like wedges of pure sunshine. But it turns out that you might be better off just leaving your produce in disarray. As Ellen Shumaker, Ph.D., shared with Food & Wine, storing produce submerged in water is a food safety risk. “If there is even a small amount of bacterial contamination on a piece of produce, being submerged in water could allow this bacteria to multiply and grow to a much larger amount,” she explained. That includes bacteria like Listeria, which can thrive in cool temperatures, and which causes listeriosis.

But tightly sealing produce in un-filled jars isn’t the solution, either. An anaerobic environment provides the ideal growing conditions for Clostridium botulinum, which can cause botulism, and if gasses build up in a tightly sealed glass jar, it could explode, covering your food in glass.

So if you can’t store your produce in those cute mason jars you’ve been stocking up on, what can you do to control the mayhem? For one thing, you can make your fridge easier to clean on a regular basis by using shelf liners that are easy to take out to wash and disinfect. And there are a variety of space-saving fridge organizers that can help you keep your various jars, bottles, pouches, and other ingredients tidy. As for your produce, you can follow this guide to keeping fruits and veggies fresher for longer, and remember to always wash your produce before you start cooking.

Before you go, check out these chic cookware brands that give Le Creuset a run for its money: