We’ve all had the thought: You’re tired after all that grocery shopping, you don’t want to lug everything you bought up all those steps to your fridge in the cold. Can’t you just leave them in the car overnight, deal with them tomorrow? Well, according to WTVG out of Ohio, doing so may ruin your refrigerated foods, but frozen goods should be perfectly fine.
WTVG tested things empirically by simply putting groceries in a cold car. Erin Ashley, the reporter who put the test together, split the back of a crossover in twain: On one side, refrigerated ingredients; on the other, frozen goods. WTVG doesn’t say how long the groceries were left in the sub-freezing temperatures, but it seems long enough to have had a real effect on the foods.
Every refrigerated food in the car froze. The butter, the milk, even the eggs hardened within their shell. Refrigerators can be as warm as 40 degrees and still do their job, which means that the on-screen temperature of six at WTVG headquarters is well below requirements.
Frozen goods also froze, but for them that’s a good thing. Temperatures in the car were cold enough to keep a pizza and a tub of ice cream chilled, though the ice cream didn’t bend Ashley’s spoon when she tried to scoop from it — maybe those in-car temps were warmer than my childhood freezer.
If you’ve bought groceries, just bring them inside. They’ll thank you for being kept at the proper temperatures. If you have to leave something, though, pick the ice cream and the pizza — if you want to freeze your eggs, leave that to doctors.