open food good for how long?

[plah831]

what was bad about using open cans of flake food that are older than a few months old? does the nutritional value decrease, and if so how?

how about frozen food? how long are those little cubes in the foil pockets (like gum or pills) OK for?

i feed so many different kinds of foods, that i rarely go through any one of them in less than a year. i have snails, but certainly not enough to feed them all my old food.

 

[Ghost_knife]

I keep my flake food in the fridge...if this helps or not i dont know. but it seems to help. I dont know about nutritional content...some of the ingredients are off the wall ash for instance. I would say age would have no effect..just dont have it more then a year I think.

 

[travis]

just dont buy a big container of the stuff and you'll probably be fine. thats what i do. usually i get the smallest available size. that way you'll run out before it goes bad. if youre feeding 6 zebra danios with a pound of flake food, its bound to go bad before you run out.

 

[plah831]

thanks, guys. i do buy the smallest cans (1 oz if they make it) but I still keep them around for over a year because I feed 15 (count 'em, 15) different varieties of foods. This includes flakes, pellets, wafers, fresh veggies, frozen, freeze-dried Daphnia, herbivore foods, live foods. So any given can of food only gets used once a week at most!

call me compulsive, but I believe variety is healthier and my fishies certainly appreciate it.

I'll start putting them in the fridge, as per Northstar's suggestions, but I really need to get my own mini-fridge for my fish because my boyfriend is getting tired of opening it up to a tub of writhing worms
Ahh, the joys of living with a fish dork...

 

[Ghost_knife]

I got a mini fridge under my 100G community tank..I keep almost everything in there

 

[plah831]

I got a mini fridge under my 100G community tank..I keep almost everything in there

yeah, like i would put all my plant ferts in there, too. it's looking like i need to do that more and more, but my aquarium room is all out of outlets! eh, i'll put it in the garage

thanks!