Etiquette concerning food that has gone bad in fridges at work

Question

We have a fridge for employees at every floor that gets completely emptied and cleaned once a year (between Christmas and the new year). The rest of the year, it is the employees' job to keep the fridge clean and usable - that is, up to the individual.

While I would never touch a coworkers' food to eat it, I wondered if it is acceptable to throw away food from those shared fridges that has obviously gone bad (e.g. moldy). As food theft (luckily) isn't an issue, none of the things are labeled, so asking a specific person to throw out their food themselves is not an option. And personally I am also not a big fan of passive-aggressive notes on the fridge door addressing the general public to please keep the fridge cleaner and to get rid of spoilt stuff.

With a lot of people working from home much more than before and people being in quarantine for weeks at a time, having food that has gone bad in the fridge is happening more often (because I guess people are bad planners or simply forgot that they still have food and on return a couple of days later it already has gone bad).

So the question is: is it OK to throw out spoilt food or do I just have to live with the moldy stuff and wait until the owners do it themselves? If the food is in a reusable container I would put it in the dishwasher and the cleaning people emptying out the dishwasher would put them on the counter where the remain until someone takes them home. If they are in single use container (e.g. yoghurt cup) I would dispose of both container and contents.

Answer 1

Unfortunately their are a surprising amount of idiots who cannot behave like adults and keep track of their own food.

Setting rules and posting guideline doesn't help. The idiots will simply ignore them.

it OK to throw out spoilt food

Yes.

or do I just have to live with the moldy stuff and wait until the owners do it themselves?

No. The best way is to engage facilities or HR on this.

In my experience, the only way to prevent a shared company fridge from becoming a gross mess is to set clear rules and STRICTLY enforce them.

Here is one that actually worked:

All items in a fridge must be labelled clearly with a name and an expiration date. Facilities will check fridges every Friday starting at 3pm. All items that are not labelled properly or past their expiration date will be discarded.

There may be some grumblings for the first few weeks, but after seeing it in action almost all people will appreciate it. As soon as the idiots are forced to behave, the fridges will stay nice and clean and the actual incremental work for facilities is minimal, maybe 5min per fridge.

Answer 2

Throwing out bad food is Ok, but that won’t stop people from complaining, and that is the real problem.

If this happens, take photos of the food that can serve as evidence. “Why did you throw out my delicious and very expensive food?” “Because it was mouldy”. “Can’t have been mouldy, it was only one day old”. You show the photo.

Answer 3

It is better to put a note on the fridge few days before cleaning it to warn that the spoilt food will be thrown a way at a certain date. Then leave the note for a couple of weeks after the clean up. In this way people will understand what happened.

Leaving the mouldy food in there is not a good idea because the mould will produce a lot of spores that might attack all the other food.

Answer 4

The people responsible for the moldy food either don't care, don't work there anymore or have legitimately forgotten about it. Because of that, there is no point in trying to play a game of "who's to blame" for this situation. At the end of the day, openly molding food is a health hazard and someone has to step up to take care of it. A company isn't likely to introduce rules for refigerator usage out of nowhere nor would anyone like to make the first step and clean up a nasty refigerator. But someone has to do it.

If the one stepping up is going to be you, you should try to make a photo of what you are going to discard. That way, if a person comes forward to start a argument with you, you can simply show pictures of the moldy things they apparently planned to eat. No sane person would pursue further conflict in such a situation.

However, I would suggest that you avoid throwing things away that are past their expiration date. It would invite a lot of pointless arguing and if it isn't openly molding, it isn't posing a health risk to anyone anyway.

Answer 5

This seems like a very reasonable thing to do, if you're unsure about how people would react, you could write a message the other people on your office asking if it's okay, but I hardly think anyone would object to this.