A report by Business Insider that has been posted online notes that the current trend for LED lighting in fridges and fridge freezers may not be good and could cause food to spoil faster.
The report, although brief without a whole lot of detail in it suggests that study carried out by scientists at Cornell has should that whilst the LED lighting may use less energy it can degrade the taste of milk faster.
We would point out that, LED lighting in a fridge, for all the time that it should ever be on is pretty much a waste of time from a practical standpoint but that’s just our opinion.
However there is a move to LED lighting in display cabinets used in stores to reduce energy use as they run all day long. So, it could be an issue more there than in a domestic fridge.
Scientists exposed samples of what they call skimmed and 2% milk (we think that’s semi-skimmed in UK-speak) to various forms of lighting to try to determine if there was any difference under different lighting.
After this they ended up with 304 samples that they gave to taste testers to rate.
The surprising bit is that the majority of testers didn’t like the milk that was exposed to LED lights preferring the taste of what they call two week old “shielded milk”, as in not exposed to LED lighting. And, get this, even as little as four hours exposure to LED lighting is said to make a significant difference to the taste which is quite astonishing in many ways.
“For some reason we love to look across the store and see this glowing case of milk that’s shining bright,” said Robin Dando, senior author on the paper and assistant professor in the Department of Food Science. “It’s attractive to look at, but we might actually be damaging the quality of the product.”
It is well known that light can affect food, this isn’t news, as there is riboflavin and other photosensitive stuff in milk however it seems the lighting used where it’s being stored is important.
The taste has been described like that of cardboard or plastic in this experiment.
“We found that without LED exposure, most pasteurised milk remains at high quality for 14 days; importantly this study now provides new information that can be used to further improve the quality of milk, for example through light shielding packaging,” said co-author Martin Wiedmann, the Gellert Family Professor in Food Safety.
So there you have it, if your milk goes off sooner than it should do, maybe you should perhaps not blame the fridge after all, it may be a result of what lights it happened to be exposed to in the shop you bought it from.
Here’s the video on the topic:
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