Is it safe to eat things like chips after a building fire?
I live in an apartment building. Another unit recently caught on fire, and the building was evacuated. Smoke was everywhere. No heat reached my part of the building. I have not seen any soot, either.
I tried googling it, but I haven't been able to find a good answer that relates to things like chip packaging. They still have air in them, and the packaging doesn't fully match the descriptions of what foods to throw away.
Are things like this ok to eat after smoke exposure, or should I throw *** every *** type of food out? Thanks in advance.
People have put worse things in their bodies. Some mildly contaminated chips won't kill you and probably won't even give you cancer.
Let's be honest, though... a standard bag of chips is already kind of bad for you -- maybe you should toss them out because you're better off without them either way? It's just a bag of chips at the end of the day.
The soot from a building fire will absolutely give you cancer. Most deaths from a building fire are caused by the contaminants in the air and not the fire itself. It's very nasty, and I wouldn't shrug it off. At the very least, it will taste nasty. At most, it will give you health complications.
I think it's a little unfair to escalate my talking about a presumably invisible and flavorless level of contamination into somehow advocating for choking down soot-blasted cancer nachos.
For the record: that's not what I meant and I think any reasonable person would not have interpeted it as such having read the context of the post. It's a sealed bag of chips -- they have functioning taste buds and eyeballs for Pete's sake!
Then to answer your initial question, I tend to buy one bag of chips with about 15 servings that I probably get about 5 servings out of every few shopping trips (maybe 1-2 times/month). I donโt eat chips every day, and donโt rely exclusively on chips for snacks, so I donโt keep multiple bags stocked.