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Simple experiment:

Take an empty refrigerator, cool it down for, say 24 hours. Watch the temp stabilize. For bonus points, put a recorder on the temp probe and watch it go up and down (the deadband that DamonHD is talking about).

Now, turn the power off for 5minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, several hours.

You will notice that at short time frames there will be very little temperature excursion, basically within the deadband. Certainly, longer times of no power are going to affect the temperature but no one is talking about hours of power delay - more like minutes.

Even small, 'dorm sized' refrigerators that we use for storing vaccines (and likewise have to be kept within a +/- 3C temp band and monitored to prove it) can handle 30 minute cycles (if you don't open the door). I would imagine a larger fridge would hold for at least 15 minutes even with occasional door opening. But you could certainly check it out, look at potential power savings and decide if the system did what you want.

FWIW a typical home refrigerator will hold temps within the safety range of most foods for AT LEAST 4 hours, a deep freezer for 24 to 48 hours.

As i posted below, most food we eat have to be ABOVE 145 with 160 - 165 being the average: http://www.foodsafety.gov/keep/charts/mintemp.html

This is in the "will burn you very fast" range, should we serve food below these temperatures as well knowing its NOT safe for consumption because someone might drop it on their leg and cause a burn?

Oddly enough the temperatures on your graph are also lower then the minimum safe temperates for MOST of the food we eat.

http://www.foodsafety.gov/keep/charts/mintemp.html

So, should we serve food below these temperatures as well knowing its NOT safe for consumption because someone might drop it on their leg and cause a burn?

Or rare meat. The core of the meat has to reach a high enough temperature to reliably kill the parasites. 145F for pork and fish. 165 for everything else. Note that chefs routinely go lower than these temperatures in order to avoid tough, leathery meat. I would imagine that fish tapeworms are the most common in the US since cooking fish too long will ruin it. And then of course there is sushi.

Here (Denmark, Europe) the local health authorities think freezing hard enough for long enough will render raw fish safe for eating.

Fish may be sold as safe for raw eating iff they have been frozen to below -21C for at least 24 hours.

My freezer can do -18C or - 30C, so here it's -30C for 24 hours. And I mostly use other things in stead of (raw) fish.

Or rare meat. The core of the meat has to reach a high enough temperature to reliably kill the parasites. 145F for pork and fish. 165 for everything else. Note that chefs routinely go lower than these temperatures in order to avoid tough, leathery meat. I would imagine that fish tapeworms are the most common in the US since cooking fish too long will ruin it. And then of course there is sushi.

Fresh Beef, Veal, Lamb Steaks, roasts, chops 145 3 minutes

Don't walk around bare foot.

Aren't you thinking of hookworms?

Don't eat raw vegetables from fields people or dogs poop in

Dogs? Because only dogs can have tapeworm infections? If you want to be safe you should avoid eating any raw vegetables that weren't grown somewhere protected from wild animals. Like hydroponic or greenhouse vegetables.

Don't eat raw meat.

Or rare meat. The core of the meat has to reach a high enough temperature to reliably kill the parasites. 145F for pork and fish. 165 for everything else. Note that chefs routinely go lower than these temperatures in order to avoid tough, leathery meat. I would imagine that fish tapeworms are the most common in the US since cooking fish too long will ruin it. And then of course there is sushi.

Get regular checkups, you can always ask for blood tests to see if you have blood parasites.

Blood tests are not considered reliable

Eosinophil counts are not diagnostically reliable. Eosinophilia is sporadically present and does not correlate with the severity of the infection. Eosinophil counts also do not help in monitoring treatment modalities.

Food safety experts are having fits right about now - allowing raw poultry to warm to 60 on the countertop is a huge no-no.

Acinetobacter baumannii
This drug is perhaps most well known for its presence in troops returning from Iraq, where it has infected dozens of patients and spread to others inside hospitals.

a quick defrost on the countertop (it defrosts quick, just a couple of hours) won't do any harm. the cooking process will kill most bacteria.

Not necessarily.

Doing so assumes a number of things:

1. The initial bacterial concentrations are low. For a microwave dinner, this is probably true. But for grandma's homemade spaghetti sauce or potato salad, you could be giving the bacteria the time they need to enter the log phase of their growth pattern--meaning lots of bacteria in very little time.
2. The cooking process reaches all parts of the food. Again, taking your example, with boiling water this is a good assumption. With an sliced ham or thick lasaugna, this probably isn't the case--that is unless you like your food burnt or as tough as shoe leather.
3. The bacteria don't employ endospores or enterotoxins. Even if you manage to kill all the bacterial cells in your food (which is much harder than you might think.) or if you just get the bacterial cell concentrations to acceptable levels, you're still not in the clear. Remember, food borne illness is often not an infection but rather an intoxication.
4. Your cooking process kills all bacteria equally. For instance, if you bake potatoes in aluminum foil in an oven, you indeed kill all of the cells. But let's say you make too many, so you just keep the extra potatoes in their aluminum foil inside the refrigerator. This very well could select for C. botulinum bacteria. Why? The baking drives steam from the potato out, creating an anaerobic microenvironment. Without competition from any other bacteria, the C. botulinum bacteria often have time before the food cools to generate botulinum toxin.
5. No immuno-compromised individuals are eating the food. Eating food with high bacterial concentrations is perfectly fine for a health, young slashdot reader. However, these foods could be very harmful (or even deadly) to an immuno-compromised person such as someone who is pregnant, a child, or the elderly.

Food microbiology is complicated. There's a reason why companies pay salaries in the hundreds of thousands to talented microbiologists. Because the microbiology is complicated and dependent upon so many factors, it's best that a layperson stick to a few basic rules when preparing food, even when they seem counter-intuitive. Most of them are very simple.

-Grym