This photo was taken with an iPhone 5 (this is a tech blog, after all).

This was the view in a local Target, yesterday.

You are looking at one row of freezers. There about 5 rows of freezers and they all looked like this.

Empty.

The power was off for a while, and food spoils.

Grocery stores, school districts, restaurants and individual families are all finding themselves in the awful situation of trashing mass quantities of food in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.

It is tempting to hold on to some things. But there is no “maybe”. Better to be safe than sorry. Toss it!!!

Personally I don’t think I’ll be eating in a restaurant for a little while, making sure that when I do I won’t be served any “we kept this because we thought it might be ok” kind of food.

I decided to test Siri and see how good she would be at finding such important information.

I asked Siri “what food can I keep when the electricity goes out?”

She gave me a surprisingly good number of websites to explore.

I asked her in several other ways, sometimes specifying a particular type of food, and each time she delivered slightly different results. All quite good and relevant to the question.

You don’t have to participate in a Superstorm to have power-outage troubles. Probably everyone experiences this at one time or another.

Here is a link to a very thorough list for Food Safety. There are clear instructions on what you can save and what you have to toss.

Slide down the page for detailed “When to Save and When to Throw It Out”

Great information for us all!