StillGood?
/
USDA-based guidance

Editorial policy

People make real decisions about what to eat based on the numbers we publish. This page documents how those numbers get here and how they are checked.

Sourcing hierarchy

Every storage duration on this site comes from United States federal food-safety guidance. We do not use durations from recipe blogs, content farms, brand marketing, or AI-generated summaries. When sources conflict, we resolve in this order:

Where two federal sources give different windows for the same food, we publish the more conservative number and note the discrepancy on the page. We do not average them.

What happens when guidance is silent

Federal charts do not cover every food. When there is no published duration, we have two honest options and we take them in this order: apply the documented rule for the governing category and say that is what we have done, or state plainly that no federal guidance exists.

We never fill a gap with a plausible-sounding invented number. A fabricated duration is indistinguishable from a real one to a reader, which makes it worse than no answer at all.

Safety versus quality

This distinction governs how we write every page. Refrigerator windows are safety windows: past them, bacterial growth may have reached a level that can make you ill, and the food should be discarded regardless of how it looks or smells. Freezer windows are quality windows: food held at 0°F stays safe indefinitely, and the duration we list is the point past which texture and flavor degrade noticeably.

Conflating these two is the most common error in food-storage content, and it cuts both ways — it makes people throw out perfectly good frozen food and eat unsafe refrigerated food. We label every duration with which kind it is.

Review cadence

Every food entry carries a "last reviewed" date, shown at the top and bottom of its page. That date is when the entry was last compiled or edited against the federal sources cited on it. It is a record of when the page was last worked on — not a certification that a person independently re-derived every number that day.

We are deliberately precise about this because a review date that overstates what happened is worse than no date at all. Entries are revisited when a cited source publishes an update, when a recall or guidance change is relevant, and whenever a reader reports a problem. If something changes, we change the page and move the date forward.

Corrections

If we get something wrong, we fix the page rather than quietly deleting it, and we move the review date so you can see it was touched. Because our numbers are traceable to a named public document, you can verify any duration on this site yourself — every page links its sources directly, and we would rather you check than take our word for it.

Found an error? Report it. Corrections about food safety get priority over everything else we are working on.

AI disclosure

This site is drafted with AI assistance. The explanatory prose, the guides, and the initial compilation of storage durations from federal guidance were produced using large language models, working from the public USDA, FDA, FoodSafety.gov, and CDC documents cited on each page.

We would rather tell you that plainly than let a byline imply a hand that was not there. Disclosure is not an excuse, though — it raises the obligation to be checkable, which is why every duration on this site links the specific federal document behind it. You do not have to trust our process. You can open the source.

A named human editor is accountable for what is published here and for correcting it. See who that is. Errors reported to us are checked against the primary source by a person before the page changes.

Limits of this site

StillGood? is general reference information for healthy adults cooking at home. It is not medical advice and it is not a substitute for professional guidance.

Published windows assume ordinary home conditions: a refrigerator at or below 40°F, a freezer at 0°F, food that was fresh and safely handled when stored, and no interruption in the cold chain. They do not account for power outages, groceries left in a warm car, or food already contaminated when you bought it.

If you are pregnant, immunocompromised, elderly, or feeding young children, your tolerance for a borderline call should be substantially lower than the general guidance here — those groups face higher risk from listeria and other foodborne pathogens. Talk to a healthcare provider about your situation.

Sources we cite

The complete set of primary sources referenced across this site: