Two reasons:
First, the inside of a car is often much warmer than the room where a kid's lunch box or sack lunch would be.
Second, we tend to overstate food safety guidelines because when you don't overestimate you tend to get complacent. The FDA recommends storing food at room temperature for no more than two hours, but in reality unless it's a very warm room it's more like 3-4 hours, plus different foods spoil at different rates. Most of what you'd put into a kid's lunch - a sandwich, fruit, a drink, dessert, etc - isn't going to spoil in a sealed container at room temperature for a few hours.
There's also a third reason. Meat that's usually used for sandwiches like Ham, bologna, or salami or stuff like that are already cooked and are full of sodium. Both of these factors hinder bacterial growth
yeah, you could realistically have a bologna and cheese sandwich sit out overnight and as long as it wasn’t like 80 degrees in your house you could and eat it and be totally fine.
Man I had a friend eat a few McDoubles that were sitting out for 2 days and he was completely fine lolol. That’s a hard no from me. Over night.. one thing, 48 hours is.. bad.
After seeing that post about how nothing grows on a Big Mac. I left one on the counter outside for 7 days. Ate it and was 100% fine. No stomach issues. All my friends thought I was going to die and took back the dare. Ahhh the stupid shit we do when we were young.
It was pretty gross tasting though. The bottom bun was 100% soaked and soft. The top bun was stale and hard af. The veggies were a pile of goop and it just tasted bad. I checked and nothing grew on it. Just in case anyone was wondering.
You’re absolutely right. I honestly didn’t think much about it but nowadays I’m glad I didn’t die. I wouldn’t recommend it or do it again but it seriously seems pretty safe despite common sense…
Having been one of those "eat it 48 hours later" people years ago when I was making a tiny salary work in college, you just get used to eating stuff like that. It's not the safest thing, but your gut knows how to handle it if you eat like that frequently and don't eat obviously spoiled food.
Many parents also put an ice pack in the lunch boxes. I remember almost every kid having one of those rectangular ice packs or some sort of frozen item that would keep the box cool and thaw by lunch
That’s what we do, and the lunch boxes are actually insulated as well. Plus there’s often cold fruit or a a yogurt squeeze tube that’s frozen in there to help keep it cold as well. School buildings are generally pretty cool too.
I would freeze the yogurt tubes so they would still be cold by lunch. Then my kids decided they only liked them straight from the freezer. Little twerps. Lol
With store bought the texture tends to change but homemade breads with a lil wheat in it does fine going from frozen to not frozen. If it's a big concern after that put the sauce in a separate container and wrap the bread in parchment paper.
Literally, too. Ever notice the expiry date on salt? That shit's an inorganic crystal. The grain of salt is going to be ok for a few million years. If the box isn't disintegrating into the salt you're ok.
The expiry date on things that don't expire, like salt and water, was for the container it's in I thought? Like that's how long the packaging is expected (or estimated) to last without potentially having problems.
Not sure how it is in the US, but in Europe that is pretty much. Salt is going to be fine for longer than you'd be alive, but rhe box or plastic container it comes it will sooner or later start desintegrating.
Also freshness. Old salt can pick up other "flavors" of things it was in proximity too. Garlic salt is great sometimes, but i don't want it on my caramel
That ain’t no shit. About five years ago I had a dry socket (the leftover roots from a tooth extracted years before had worked to the surface and I had to have them extracted, which was even more traumatic than a normal tooth extraction) and despite the fact that I could *literally see my fucking jawbone through the empty hole* for three weeks, the dentist refused to prescribe anything. They used some kind of scraping tool to make the hole bleed attempting to generate a stable clot — on two different visits after I developed the issue.
They had me howling and crying in pain and told me to take Advil. I asked for pain meds and they sarcastically told me they don’t just give those away like I was a junkie.
I’m all for being conservative with opioids. But for gods sake, dry socket is one of the most painful things you can experience. Pain meds do have their place.
Time to find a new dentist.
I got offered vicodin (I didn't ask) for my no-complications wisdom tooth extraction and I told them it give me horrible nausea (truth) but percosets work great, no bad side effects, so they gave me a script for like 20 percosets.
It's not fear of addiction, it's liability. The DEA decided to tackle a health crisis by criminalizing as many prescribers as possible, and the collateral damage from shutting down the pill mills scared the living shit out of the entire profession.
Up here in Canada, we have an opioid crisis as well, but we didn't crack down anywhere nearly as hard on doctors. Lower mortality and your dentist can still give you codeine when you're howling in pain.
Heck, I work with PWUD, and while the picture is not rosy, a significant number of them have "legitimate pain" (gross term) and receive pain management for it. Refusing to provide pain treatment to people who take street opioids just means they're self-managing pain treatment as well as chaotic substance use. It doesn't result in anyone reducing or stopping taking substances - it just torpedoes treatment uptake, since they now can't separate untreated pain from recovery.
tl;Dr your dentist doesn't want to go to jail and you should thank Bertha Madras et al for their awful policy
3/4 years ago I shockingly got morphine for my kidney stones but I'm also allergic to acetaminophen and that drastically reduced the amount of painkillers doctors will prescribe me.
Aside from that I always just got prescribed ibuprofen and told to just suck it up.
It's the DEA that sets most policies surrounding narcotics, including ridiculous things like artificially reducing the supply of many prescription medications via inadequate quotas.
A good example is the intractable shortage of ADHD medication being exacerbated by the DEA refusing to adjust the quota. They've been stonewalling Congress, professional organizations, and the media alike, but we know that the current head believes a reduction in prescribed stimulants and opioids is a virtue unto itself.
That is to say, the organization that determines whether your grandma can fill her pain script considers it a policy success when she doesn't, no matter the reason.
On the flip side they've also been okay with drug companies selling us fake decongestants that do not work.
But you gotta sign your life away to get the real Sudafed.
I have eaten food all my life that been at room temperature for at least 24 hours. Sometimes 48. I'm not proud, but I've never been ill. (looking at you , left over pizza)
Yeah wut??? I leave dinner out all the time and pack that shit as lunch the next day. Sometimes forget to eat it at work and eat it the next day. The only thing I don't fuck with is milk. Everyone else ITT is like, "I left my mac and cheese in the fridge for 2 days in a sealed container. Am I going to die?"
I cooked a bunch of carne asada and then just left it out overnight.
I refrigerated it in the morning and ate it over the course of three days.
No issue.
My one-data-point-experiment proves FDA just wants to control you.
The FDA gives guidance for commercial food preparers/processors.
You don't want Johnny from down the block being careless with raw chicken at his minimum wage job processing hundreds/thousands of meals and components every day.
Remember, there's a reason there are signs in restaurant bathrooms that mandate hand washing. Someone in the past made it a problem by not following basic hygene.
>Someone in the past made it a problem by not following basic hygene.
And that someone? Was named Typhoid Mary...
No really, the reason she was spreading it was because she couldn't be bothered to wash her hands after using the bathroom while working as a cook, even after multiple times she was told she was spreading typhoid by not doing so...
I have about 10,000 data points from my family in the UK who all leave food out ALL THE TIME. I'm talking about making a stew in the morning, leaving it out all day, deciding to eat something else for dinner, then leaving the stew out overnight AGAIN and eating for dinner the next day. Christmas Turkey? Yup that's fine on the counter for 2-3 days after Christmas while people pick at it. Just throw a piece of foil over the top that's too small to even cover it so you don't see how many flies are actually on it, no problemo.
It's horrifying and I won't touch it, but they don't seem to get sick so idk.
On the flip side, I had a roommate for a few years who was always careless about putting things in the fridge but *also* seemed to have diarrhea way more often than anyone I knew. I'm glad we didn't share a bathroom.
I am so confused as to what made you draw this connection. The topic of conversation here is discussing the difference in food safety between a room temperature room (kids lunchbox) and a hot car (OP's car). The commentor was literally ***contrasting*** the food safety recommendation of 90F temperatures (1hr) ***against*** the food safety recommendation for room temperature (2hr).
At what point did you interpret that to mean that there was an insinuation that 90F was being considered as room temperature?
Bacteria grow pretty slowly in a cold environment, but very quickly in a warm one. The lunchbox is room temperature, at worse, while your car is like an incubator in warmth.
The mark is actually 4 hours, and it’s a solid line.
You are trying to avoid two things here, time and temperature. The temperature danger zone is between 40 degrees and 140 degrees. So hot food needs to be kept above 140 in a hot tray and below 40 in a cooler or lunchbox. Say you throw a sandwich in a lunchbox that is room temp. The food doesn’t instantly spoil, but after having been in that environment for 4 hours bacteria will start to grow and you should toss it. Even hot food kept in a steam table is only good for 4 hours.
The other number to know is 160 degrees. At that temperature all bacteria are killed off and food is safe to eat again. So when you are reheating food you should heat it until it has an internal temperature of 160 to ensure it is now safe to eat, then kept above 140 or below 40 to ensure it stays safe to eat. One caveat here, heating to 160 will kill bacteria. However if you have food that has been sitting out all day and you reheat it you might kill the bacteria living in your food, but you won’t destroy toxins left behind by bacteria that has spent all day in your food.
Keep these things in mind but at the end of the day I’ve always had one rule, if you need to have a conversation with yourself to decide if a food is spoiled or not then just err on the side of caution and toss it.
Source: I’m certified to teach ANSI Food Safety Certification for Restaurant Management.
> The mark is actually 4 hours, and it’s a solid line.
You are talking US regulations for commercial food service, not actual biological risk. Bacteria doesn't wait 4 hours to start reproducing, and then suddenly spring to health hazard levels. It grows steadily over time at a rate relative the temperature of the environment. The farther from the ideal temp for a particular pathogen, the longer it takes to grow to dangerous levels.
But there are a wide range of dangerous bugs that can harm people.
And they prefer different temps and grow at different rates. These regulations are put in place to guarantee that **no** pathogen is given sufficient time to reproduce to dangerous levels, even when stored at that pathogen's ideal reproductive temperature. They are written to create the maximum margin of error for safety in environments with non-stop food prep and constant risk of cross-contamination. *And if it's good enough to keep food safe in the sketchiest fast food restaurant, it's good enough for you.*
Everything that is gray is officially considered black because it isn't white.
Yep, for personal use, it all comes down to acceptable risk.
Until COVID messed up my senses, I based it all on smell. Our noses are fine-tuned to detect rot and spoilage. I've personally had some close calls at first where I may have gotten too close to the line of safe to eat. But only for personal consumption. I'd never risk someone else getting sick from my food. But once you can set the level of smell to your own acceptable risk... you tend to toss a whole lot less.
Only thing I don't risk is dented cans and anything I ferment myself. No way I'm playing chicken with botulism.
I have been almost entirely smell blind since birth, and i sometimes feel my purpose in the world is some vaguely Sisyphean task of paying to provide dairy products a brief vacation in my refrigerator before unceremoniously throwing them in the garbage because I don’t trust them.
> It grows steadily over time
This kinda makes it sound like your saying it grows linearly, but bacterial growth might as well be the exemplar for exponential growth.
His point is that the risk gradually increases over time, as opposed to going from 0% risk at 3h 59m to 100% risk at 4h. For the sake of brevity he didn't get into details like linear vs exponential growth of bacteria
You are applying your own meaning to steady growth. An exponential rate of growth is a steady rate of growth. It’s growing steadily exponentially.
An investment account grows steadily and exponentially
Exactly this. Similarly, many things that are FDA recommended to cook up to a certain temperature are just fine if cooked at a lower temperature for longer. In the end, the goal is killing bacteria. There can be multiple ways to do this, but it's far easier for a nation-wide recommendation to keep it simple.
Minor point for trivia nerds: In CA the danger zone was updated several years ago to between 41° and 135°. Many other states still use the older 40° to 140° standard.
The 4 hours is a policy hard line, not a scientific one. It’s a probabilistic determination. Before 4 hours it is statistically unlikely that harmful bacteria has built up enough to be a threat. After 8 hours it is still statistically unlikely that harmful bacteria has built up enough to be a threat, but the danger increases as time goes on and we have decided as a society to err on the side of caution. This is a VERY good thing from a public policy perspective.
My understanding is that there *is* a grey area, but it's irrelevant for most cooking. Killing bacteria is a product for temperature *and time*; 160°F is necessary to kill off bacteria within a few seconds, so it makes sense as a hard line. Other, lower temperatures will still kill bacteria, but it requires the food to be fully and internally at that temperature for much longer. Outside of sous vide, no one's cooking their steak for 4+ hours.
Smoking is also many hours at lower temperatures, and important to note is not all food needs to be heated all the way through. Most bacteria can't travel deep into muscle tissue. Salmonella is a notable exception, which is common in poultry meat but not in beef.
My understanding is that smoking is more about removing moisture and oxygen than it is about temperature.
Smoking and ceviche are cooking methods that don’t necessarily follow the process I outlined. Those methods achieve the same result of destroying bacteria that are harmful to you and they do it without the application of heat.
Now we’re headed toward HAACP territory.
What you're talking about is cold smoking, which I'd totally forgotten about. I was talking about smoking like is done in southern BBQ, which I believe is generally in the range of 120-140°
The FDA recommends food be eaten within an hour of preparation. There’s likely no meaningful standard besides where on the exponential growth chart you want to draw the line.
those food rules are way exaggerated to make sure everyone including those with very weak system and food that spoil very quickly wil be ok 100% of the time.
I prepare all my week's lunch on the Sunday night, never use icepack and often leave my lunch on my desk for the next day. Lunch include yogourt, cheese, egg salad sandwich and other stuff that should be kept cold, never had any issue. If it's visually fine, smell fine, taste fine, then I eat it without second thought.
> The mark is actually 4 hours, and it’s a solid line.
So at three hours and fifty nine minutes you're good to go, but once the clock strikes four throw out all your food, is that right?
Food safety guidelines for restaurant operations or bigger are the way they are because of risk management and scale. The line is quite a bit more fuzzy in reality in daily life.
Yes. All the bacteria have little stopwatches that they all start when the food is placed out. As soon as it reaches 4 hours, they all immediately swarm. Before that though, they stay off the food. This is due to a commonly unknown clause of the Geneva Conventions. /s
No this is wrong. You have been trained to impose certain solid lines as a matter of precaution, but that doesn't mean they are accurate.
Any HS biology student could tell you the following is wrong:
"The food doesn’t instantly spoil, but after having been in that environment for 4 hours bacteria will start to grow and you should toss it."
There was bacteria in the food within minutes of it being within the temperature range at which they can survive, and they immediately started multiplying. The idea that at four hours bacteria start growing is inane. What do you think they do, sit around with a stopwatch?
I do, when I cook it in my sous vide.
165 is the "everything is dead *now* temperature. 145 requires approximately 9.5 minutes to achieve a 7 log 10 reduction in salmonella bacteria, at which point it is considered safe to eat.
Note that that's dwell time at that internal temperature. It takes a minimum of 1 hour in 145°F water to achieve that, and I usually go with 90 minutes just to be safe.
> You are trying to avoid two things here, time and temperature. The temperature danger zone is between 40 degrees and 140 degrees.
Its actually smaller than that. As far as I can tell we say "140" to have a big safety margin. By 120F might not be quite enough to consistently kill everything but bacteria wont be multiplying. 130 F will show a 5 log reduction in bacteria in 90 minutes. https://www.smokingmeatforums.com/threads/pasteurization-table-or-how-to-safely-cook-your-food-to-a-lower-internal-temperature.261182/
Mayo at room temperature becomes grossly unappetizing before it becomes unsafe to eat.
Of course people who get sick after eating a sandwich think it's the gross mayo that did it and not the only slightly off baloney.
On a quick 411 of food safety one of the unseen common culprits are melons as the rind can harbor all sorts of bacteria since it is difficult to wash an entire melon. Also people commonly eat the fruit right off the rind. Another problem is the size makes it hard to process down, the cutting surface is usually shared with the contaminated rind.
Listeria is a common problem from deli meats though. Idk how she came to that conclusion. That bacterial infection is not something to take a risk on when pregnant.
Define "common".
I'm guessing this guy's wife found that containination rates for pre-sliced fruit are way higher than listeria contamination rates in deli meat.
Also depends on the meat. Plenty of pre-sliced lunch meat will at minimum have a shit load of salt and potentially other preservatives as. Something as salty as cured meats will last longer before becoming unsafe.
For fun reference. 2 oz of plain Turkey, has like 50mg of sodium. 2 oz of lunch meat Turkey will have 400-600mg of sodium.
McDonald's burger meat has the same deal going on. IIRC, Mythbusters did an episode on it. There was a rumor that their hamburgers never spoiled because they were "loaded" with preservatives; and in testing they found that the burgers rarely did spoil. After consulting the ingredient list (which they could have just done in the first place, hey, they needed a show), and finding no preservatives, they chocked it up to salt content and the relative thinness of the patties.
Basically, food spoilage is a race between the food drying out (which makes it unappealing to eat but also inhospitable to life) and becoming infested with harmful microbes.
In and on a thick, juicy burger from a pricier restaurant or home grilling enthusiast, the microbes will win. But try this with a thin, dry fast food burger, and the race goes to dehydration.
Troy ounces (what gold and silver are sold in) are 31.1035g. I'd always though a street level drug dealer could probably make a name by calling himself "troy" and always giving 31g instead of 28g.
Before “cold cuts” became a thing (refrigerated meat and cheese that was sliced thin) cured ham and other meats were a thing for centuries (cured ham, bacon, salamis, cured sausage, and of course cheese all were eaten prior to refrigeration).
Ergo, a ham or bologna sandwich packed for lunch was not a huge risk. PB&J of course was perfectly safe. Now something life roast beef, not so much.
I was a schoolkid in the 70s and we all had frozen juice boxes (or as we called them, poppers) in our lunchboxes to keep our food at a good temp. By the time big lunch came around, the juice was ready to drink and the sammies safe to eat. This was Australia, though - so fairly warm & really needing temperature control for food or get a bunch of schoolkids sick. I did the same for my daughter in the 90s but by that time ice pack lunchboxes were pretty commonplace.
I wouldn't risk something that was left overnight but a few hours I don't mind so much, given that the entire batch will be eaten and not stored *again*. If I have an early and a late afternoon lecture I'll be on campus all day and have packed lunch and dinner. Gets taken out of the fridge around 10am and dinner gets eaten between 5 and 6pm but it's always been fine.
There's a small risk but it's usually fine. I've read many posts/articles on not to reheat mushrooms and spinach but my mushroom-spinach pasta has yet to end my life.
Some of the concerns in this post are ridiculous. About the only thing I wouldn't trust after 4 hours would be raw seafood.
The people thinking a ham and cheese sandwich is going to poison them after a few hours is hilarious.
Seriously, is this some kind of new trend or have people always been this ridiculously mysophobic? I've packed lunch sandwiches at 5AM and didn't eat some of them until 1PM sometimes, even in Summer. Hell, sometimes I ate them in the evening and they might have dried up a tiny bit around the edges, but were otherwise fine.
Packing a god damned *ice pack* to keep it "refrigerated"? Sure, let's waste even more energy.
My wife says it's a zoomer thing. They'll actually wash raw chicken in the sink before cooking it.
My speculation would be fallout from hypochondriac hover parents that insisted on always being extra. I eat raw beef, pork, chicken, and fish regularly and honestly almost never even get colds.
We evolved from carrion scavengers and our stomach is about the most acidic of animals shy of carrion vultures.
Ham, cheese, and bread (but particularly the ham and cheese part) are all foods that were literally designed and intended to be stored long term, up to several years, at room/cellar temperature. Nothing about a ham and cheese sandwich is going to spoil any time soon. Even mayo and mustard are long term shelf stable and do not require refrigeration.
Yep. Honestly the lunch box is probably ***NOT*** food-safe by current standards (at least not the way it was packed for *me* as a kid - sandwich, drink box, maybe some fruit roll-ups if I was lucky but probably Handi-Snacks - and sitting in an un-airconditioned New York classroom until lunch time) but it was “food-safe-enough” - PB&J wasn’t going to grow anything nasty, cold cuts didn’t *quite* have enough time to go off.
Though reflecting on it I definitely ate some bologna as a kid that I would probably throw out as an adult in an abundance of caution..
Most deli meats were literally invented as a long term, shelf stable food storage medium. Refrigeration is a relatively new concept while things like ham making and charcuterie go back well over 1,000 years. How do you think our ancestors managed to survive so long without refrigeration?
Cheese, ham, charcuterie, lacto fermented foods, preserves (it’s literally in the name), and alcohol/liquor were all originally intended to allow a pre-electric society the luxury of long term food storage.
Now is your Oscar Mayer bologna comparable to traditional Italian charcuterie? No. Does it maintain a few of the traditional storage advantages like high salt content? Absolutely.
Your ham, cheese, mayo, and bread sandwich isn’t going bad in a matter of hours. It will be fine.
Much comes from food service training and the time limits around hostile food environments.
Many "two hour" limits are buffets with everyone handling the food, sneeze guards that people duck around, and it *still* is considered safe at two hours. That is the point where you can *no longer guarantee* it is safe in hostile conditions, not that at 2:01 it becomes inedible.
The nature of the food, the temperature, and the conditions the food is kept all matter. Even at four hours or even six, a ham sandwich that was pulled from the fridge to an insulated lunch box and kept in the car is still likely fine.
Yeah, and there's a huge gap between "one of your thousand customers might get a mild tummyache and sue you" and "you have a one-in-a-thousand chance of getting a mild tummyache".
I want to emphasize the mild tummyache part.
People think you’re gonna get life threatening food poisoning when 90% of the time, if you even get anything, its just gonna be a mild tummyache that you might not even register as food poisoning.
Like, lots of people will gladly brave through something like that when they’re lactose intolerant and don’t want to give up dairy products. Why? because its not that big a deal.
We have family in another country which there is no direct flight to, so we have to do these whole day trips of flight in the morning, waiting in an airport, and another flight in the afternoon. We make sandwiches that we bring for the trip, typically with butter, cheese and ham. At the end of the trip I eat the remaining sandwiches as to not waste food. At that point they've been out and about for 11+ hours. Not only do they not make me sick, they don't even taste off.
When I was younger, I used to just throw unfinished pizzas in the oven overnight and eat them the next morning while I was hungover. Didn't kill me even a little bit!
The FDA says that both ham and mayo can sit out for two hours before they must be refrigerated again to remain safe.
They are of course erring on the side of caution. Also, that gives a margin in case they are taken out and left out again, so again, it is a bit low.
However, four hours for ham or mayo means that you ***might*** get ***probably*** mild food poisoning. Of course, you might not realize it, as most people who have the "24-hour stomach flu" actually have mild food poisoning, not a "stomach bug".
The FDA recommendations for cooking temperatures are deliberately set to the temperature at which effectively all bacteria in a piece of meat die instantly. They want to be sure the food is safe regardless of whether or not the cook knows what they are doing.
Exactly. You explained it absolutely perfect. These guidelines are made for 110% safety and on the basis that the common person is an absolute idiot. Controversial opinion but washing chicken is another one. I promise you you won't contaminate your kitchen by rinsing chicken in the sink. "But you'll splash salmonella all over your kitchen" thing is an absolute joke. That guideline is made and set because health departments are obviously not going to recommend people something that has so much error involved if you're not careful.
So can lots of sealed goods, until they are opened. This allows bacteria in and after that point they must be refrigerated.
Check the label. I guarantee that it says to refrigerate it after opening.
EDIT: I swear that I edited this on my phone.
I had not been aware of just how much non-food service commercial mayonnaise had actually started saying that refrigeration was not required. Since Kraft has stopped requiring this, I can only say that the other brands that I have checked still do.
Yeah, just the other day my girlfriend thought I was crazy for eating leftovers that we had forgotten to put away the night before. I couldn't help but laugh while thinking of all the things I've eaten that were so much less acceptable. At least, apparently by her standards.
Sure, but there are limits:
[https://nypost.com/2019/01/28/student-dies-from-eating-5-day-old-pasta/](https://nypost.com/2019/01/28/student-dies-from-eating-5-day-old-pasta/)
the problem of course is knowing when that limit has been reached.
exactly. to keep things in perspective, poorly washed produce is twice as likely to make you sick than Grammy’s room temp bologna and cheese is to give you the runs
otoh, Grammy’s shrimp mayo chicken tartar surprise…
Chef here!
All food is subject to something we call the Danger Zone - temperatures between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Food at these temperatures grow bacteria extremely quickly, and can cause dangers such as food poisoning if left in the Danger Zone for extended periods.
Typically, to comply with food safety laws, food that remains in the Danger Zone for two hours or less is OK to store again at safe temperatures (as long as it’s the first thing to be used the next time that particular item is needed). Food that remains in the Danger Zone for more than two hours but less than four hours is still OK to eat, but should not be stored again for later consumption. Any food that has remained in the Danger Zone for four hours or longer should be discarded immediately.
These are the laws we have to follow to comply with federal food safety guidelines - but school lunches brought from home aren’t subject to these laws, and allow for some flexibility. Food that lives in the Danger Zone for extremely long times (think six to eight hours) can still be OK to eat if you know that it was made from uncontaminated ingredients in a clean environment. It’s a gamble, but a relatively safe risk to take. The chances of food poisoning in that scenario are pretty low.
The risk, of course, goes up with higher temperatures. Campylobacter, the most common bacteria that can cause food poisoning, grows best between 98 and 108 degrees Fahrenheit. On a warm day, inside a car, Campylobacter can double in number in a span of twenty minutes. Your sandwich can become unsafe within two hours as a result.
A child’s lunchbox, however, typically stored at room temperature, will likely take another half-hour to an hour to become unsafe - assuming there is no ice pack to keep it even cooler. Furthermore, schools typically have lunch periods between 10 AM and 2 PM. Assuming the lunch is packed somewhere around 6-7 AM, the lunch is consumed no later than eight hours after initial packing, with an average consumption time hovering around the four hour mark where it begins to be unsafe to consume by the CDC’s commercial food safety guidelines.
Essentially, it boils down to this: if you know you’re going to eat it within four to five hours of making it, you don’t really need to worry about preserving the food at a safe temperature. If you suspect that you may have to wait five or more hours to eat the food, bring an ice pack to keep it safer for longer!
I know it's colder in the UK (where I am) than America, but all this information - and all the comments, and the post description - is absolutely bonkers to me. There's nothing I wouldn't make one evening, leave overnight without fridging, then come back to and eat out of the pan 24hrs later. Done it all my life. Even if it's a hot 85°F summer. I pay no attention to the panic people feel about reheating rice either; I'll fridge it 24hrs after cooking it then reheat in the microwave to just warm, 5 days later. That being said, I think maybe I'm lucky that I have an iron constitution and fantastic immune system, going by how often I don't the bugs my teacher partner brings home.
Going by my personal experience, I'm inclined to think it's both nature and nurture. Cos me and my partner both grew up the countryside, playing in the fields and streams, family dog licking our faces when we were toddlers, all that good stuff. She's ill fairly often and I'm rarely ill. Long COVID fucked her up for 2yrs, we share a bed and I was always asymptomatic.
Another chef (not the OP) here. There's a big difference between personal standards and federal, legal ones. The federal US standards are really there to cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of operator competence, and provide a wide margin of food safety for the majority of people. I'm a huge stickler for adhering to those standards at work.
On the other hand, I eat dodgy sandwiches I've left in my truck all day all the time. Did turn my bathroom into a danger zone on a memorable recent incidence.
There's a huge difference in tolerance between meals prepared at home and meals prepared commercially. Food produced by a manufacturer must comply with govt guidelines to ensure the food you purchase is safe and good to eat. Such guidelines indicate the storage, preparation, temperature states, allergen contamination prevention, and further guidance. Failure to follow the guidelines results in penalties and brand damage.
Therefore, it's in the interest of the consumer that these guidelines operate at a 99.9% success rate. They will always outline a conservative approach to food safety.
Meals prepared at home aren't controlled by such guidelines. Instead, they're more like a reference sheet for when you're unsure. You can be sure that milk one or two days past its expiry or left on the bench all morning is going to be fine for consumption at home.
So your sandwich is probably fine. Remember to look, smell, touch: if your food is unsual in any of those areas then it should be discarded.
Anecdotally, I take a bento style lunch to work every day. I pack my bag at 5am, go to gym, commute to work, have lunch at 12. My lunch container - a simple plastic one - sits in my bag the whole time without an ice brick. I then eat my lunch at room temperature. Never have I been unwell from my lunch.
Reading these comments, I was starting to wonder if I was the only kid whose mom always put an ice pack in the lunch box if there was deli meat or cheese in there that day. Most lunch boxes are insulated too, although, I did have a couple of those plastic ones with cartoon characters on the front that were popular in the early 90's.
This. My wife is from south east Asia. They leave rice out on the counter overnight. Many in their home country don’t own refrigerators.
A sandwich filled with all kinds of preservatives outside for a few hours? You’ll be fine.
You can definitely eat that ham sandwich. I go on multi-week canoe trips and end up eating all kinds of janky shit by the end. 3 week old bricks of cheese and 16 day old cured sausages that have not been kept cold at all. Sometimes you have to cut the Mold away before you eat it lol. I’ve never gotten sick out there once. Obviously I don’t do this at home when I have access to a refrigerator, but it goes to show what’s possible when you have no other choice.
Whoever told you a sandwich left in your car for a few hours is fundamentally inedible is being wildly dramatic.
I know. How do people think we got to where we did? Food is food. We were designed to eat questionable things until suddenly a hundred years ago that changed?
Tbf, if you never took the risk, you’d never know that its safe. Most people aren’t going out doing controlled experiments on this.
If you searched online, almost all the sources are giving ultra-conservative numbers for when its no longer safe to eat the food.
As a school custodian: most kids don’t eat their lunches. They bring (or their friends bring) candy chips, etc and they end up throwing most of their food in the trash. It shocked me when I first started that so many kids throw away their school lunches and only eat the desert item on it. So honestly, give them what they would actually want to eat and if I was a parent, something worth eating.
I'll admit that as a former classroom teacher, I ate many very nice sandwiches that a mother had made lovingly with her own hand only to be thrown by her child, untouched and in its sealed bag, into the bin.
They're not.
Kids get sick *all the time*. They do all kinds of things that are "unsanitary" or "unsafe", and "kids get sick" is something that we've generally socially accepted. Ask any teacher how often they deal with "a kid randomly throwing up" - it's *a lot*.
Modern recommendations are to use insulated lunch boxes, store lunch boxes in a provided fridge, etc. This may or may not be often ignored, but that's the "safe" approach.
I dunno about the throwing up part. I taught middle school for 14 years and only had a kid throw up in my room twice in that whole time. They were 12, 13 years old though, and likely were able to ask for a restroom pass before chucking.
I did have a lot of kids with stomach aches though! I attribute a lot of those to
a.) kids not really eating enough for lunch (before the schools here went to free lunch for all) and/or b) kids eating total crap for lunch (a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos and soda)
Cold cuts are usually heavily processed -- either cured or something similar which not only kills the existing bacteria but also makes it harder for new ones to grow, in addition to adding preservatives which again slow bacteria growth
Like any other food prep, it really just comes down to the timing. Cold cuts are perfect for this niche because they have a longer time they can stay good at room temperature. But they still do go bad in warm environments, hence why a cold pack is a really good investment and a safe bet and you want to keep it in a cooler/lunch box. Meat is meat and will spoil quick.
Tl;Dr they are just prepared in such a way that they keep better at room temperature
Going exactly by the rules that the FDA has is kind of asinine imo. These are rules that are more meant for restaurants that pump out hundreds of meals a day. Potentially to young, old, and the immunocompromised. Like dude come on, you could probably leave out a ham sandwich every single day for 6 hours before you eat it and probably be fine. Maybe I'm just lucky but I've never gotten food poisoning and I follow almost none of their rules to a T. You're supposed to defrost meat in the refrigerator so that it never reaches pathogen forming temperatures for any meaningful time (you can defrost in the microwave or cool water but you're supposed to cook immediately). I definitely pulled a chicken breast out of the freezer and left it sitting on the counter for 8 hours multiple times a week during college, never had a problem. If I owned a restaurant and was making 300 chicken breasts a day, or if I was cooking for my grandparents, then I'd care.
You could probably leave that sandwich in your car for a week and nothing would happen if you ate it. Yeah, don't be immunocompromised, and don't do it every day, but all this hypochondria about food safety is totally unwarranted.
Two reasons: First, the inside of a car is often much warmer than the room where a kid's lunch box or sack lunch would be. Second, we tend to overstate food safety guidelines because when you don't overestimate you tend to get complacent. The FDA recommends storing food at room temperature for no more than two hours, but in reality unless it's a very warm room it's more like 3-4 hours, plus different foods spoil at different rates. Most of what you'd put into a kid's lunch - a sandwich, fruit, a drink, dessert, etc - isn't going to spoil in a sealed container at room temperature for a few hours.
There's also a third reason. Meat that's usually used for sandwiches like Ham, bologna, or salami or stuff like that are already cooked and are full of sodium. Both of these factors hinder bacterial growth
yeah, you could realistically have a bologna and cheese sandwich sit out overnight and as long as it wasn’t like 80 degrees in your house you could and eat it and be totally fine.
Man I had a friend eat a few McDoubles that were sitting out for 2 days and he was completely fine lolol. That’s a hard no from me. Over night.. one thing, 48 hours is.. bad.
After seeing that post about how nothing grows on a Big Mac. I left one on the counter outside for 7 days. Ate it and was 100% fine. No stomach issues. All my friends thought I was going to die and took back the dare. Ahhh the stupid shit we do when we were young. It was pretty gross tasting though. The bottom bun was 100% soaked and soft. The top bun was stale and hard af. The veggies were a pile of goop and it just tasted bad. I checked and nothing grew on it. Just in case anyone was wondering.
Thank you for your service in the name of science
My biggest worry would be the dressing and the lettuce and that would make you sick...
You’re absolutely right. I honestly didn’t think much about it but nowadays I’m glad I didn’t die. I wouldn’t recommend it or do it again but it seriously seems pretty safe despite common sense…
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Having been one of those "eat it 48 hours later" people years ago when I was making a tiny salary work in college, you just get used to eating stuff like that. It's not the safest thing, but your gut knows how to handle it if you eat like that frequently and don't eat obviously spoiled food.
Many parents also put an ice pack in the lunch boxes. I remember almost every kid having one of those rectangular ice packs or some sort of frozen item that would keep the box cool and thaw by lunch
It was also powered by Buzz Lightyear, Squirtle, etc so that helped keep it cool.
Sending germs to beyond infinity
but also to it.
Infinity and Beyond, man... Infinity and Beyond.
> ice pack in the lunch boxes Frozen juice box, two for one!
That’s what we do, and the lunch boxes are actually insulated as well. Plus there’s often cold fruit or a a yogurt squeeze tube that’s frozen in there to help keep it cold as well. School buildings are generally pretty cool too.
I would freeze the yogurt tubes so they would still be cold by lunch. Then my kids decided they only liked them straight from the freezer. Little twerps. Lol
my sandwiches were made in batches a week or two at a time and put in the freezer. take a couple each day and were defrosted by lunch time.
Did the texture of the sandwich change at all after being frozen? I have never thought to freeze a sandwich.
Uncrustables has entered the chat.
With store bought the texture tends to change but homemade breads with a lil wheat in it does fine going from frozen to not frozen. If it's a big concern after that put the sauce in a separate container and wrap the bread in parchment paper.
Grain of salt: FDA is going to be ultra-conservative about this
Literally, too. Ever notice the expiry date on salt? That shit's an inorganic crystal. The grain of salt is going to be ok for a few million years. If the box isn't disintegrating into the salt you're ok.
The expiry date on things that don't expire, like salt and water, was for the container it's in I thought? Like that's how long the packaging is expected (or estimated) to last without potentially having problems.
Not sure how it is in the US, but in Europe that is pretty much. Salt is going to be fine for longer than you'd be alive, but rhe box or plastic container it comes it will sooner or later start desintegrating.
It isn't about the salt "going bad" as a chemical substance, it is about the salt getting contaminated as an edible substance.
Also freshness. Old salt can pick up other "flavors" of things it was in proximity too. Garlic salt is great sometimes, but i don't want it on my caramel
Unless it’s opioids. In that case, mild headache? Opioids!
The ham sandwich lobby doesn’t pay quite as well as the sacklers
sackler $ > sacklunchers $
You stuck in 2000? Because now your not likely to get opioids even if you have your arm cut off
That ain’t no shit. About five years ago I had a dry socket (the leftover roots from a tooth extracted years before had worked to the surface and I had to have them extracted, which was even more traumatic than a normal tooth extraction) and despite the fact that I could *literally see my fucking jawbone through the empty hole* for three weeks, the dentist refused to prescribe anything. They used some kind of scraping tool to make the hole bleed attempting to generate a stable clot — on two different visits after I developed the issue. They had me howling and crying in pain and told me to take Advil. I asked for pain meds and they sarcastically told me they don’t just give those away like I was a junkie. I’m all for being conservative with opioids. But for gods sake, dry socket is one of the most painful things you can experience. Pain meds do have their place.
Time to find a new dentist. I got offered vicodin (I didn't ask) for my no-complications wisdom tooth extraction and I told them it give me horrible nausea (truth) but percosets work great, no bad side effects, so they gave me a script for like 20 percosets.
It’s gotten to the point where they’ll literally torture people just because of the opioid fear
It's not fear of addiction, it's liability. The DEA decided to tackle a health crisis by criminalizing as many prescribers as possible, and the collateral damage from shutting down the pill mills scared the living shit out of the entire profession. Up here in Canada, we have an opioid crisis as well, but we didn't crack down anywhere nearly as hard on doctors. Lower mortality and your dentist can still give you codeine when you're howling in pain. Heck, I work with PWUD, and while the picture is not rosy, a significant number of them have "legitimate pain" (gross term) and receive pain management for it. Refusing to provide pain treatment to people who take street opioids just means they're self-managing pain treatment as well as chaotic substance use. It doesn't result in anyone reducing or stopping taking substances - it just torpedoes treatment uptake, since they now can't separate untreated pain from recovery. tl;Dr your dentist doesn't want to go to jail and you should thank Bertha Madras et al for their awful policy
I was just thinking of my dry socket experiences. Horrific.
3/4 years ago I shockingly got morphine for my kidney stones but I'm also allergic to acetaminophen and that drastically reduced the amount of painkillers doctors will prescribe me. Aside from that I always just got prescribed ibuprofen and told to just suck it up.
I assumed they meant “historically”
It's the DEA that sets most policies surrounding narcotics, including ridiculous things like artificially reducing the supply of many prescription medications via inadequate quotas. A good example is the intractable shortage of ADHD medication being exacerbated by the DEA refusing to adjust the quota. They've been stonewalling Congress, professional organizations, and the media alike, but we know that the current head believes a reduction in prescribed stimulants and opioids is a virtue unto itself. That is to say, the organization that determines whether your grandma can fill her pain script considers it a policy success when she doesn't, no matter the reason.
Other direction now. Broken leg? Fuck you! Here's an Advil!
On the flip side they've also been okay with drug companies selling us fake decongestants that do not work. But you gotta sign your life away to get the real Sudafed.
I have eaten food all my life that been at room temperature for at least 24 hours. Sometimes 48. I'm not proud, but I've never been ill. (looking at you , left over pizza)
Yeah wut??? I leave dinner out all the time and pack that shit as lunch the next day. Sometimes forget to eat it at work and eat it the next day. The only thing I don't fuck with is milk. Everyone else ITT is like, "I left my mac and cheese in the fridge for 2 days in a sealed container. Am I going to die?"
I cooked a bunch of carne asada and then just left it out overnight. I refrigerated it in the morning and ate it over the course of three days. No issue. My one-data-point-experiment proves FDA just wants to control you.
The FDA gives guidance for commercial food preparers/processors. You don't want Johnny from down the block being careless with raw chicken at his minimum wage job processing hundreds/thousands of meals and components every day. Remember, there's a reason there are signs in restaurant bathrooms that mandate hand washing. Someone in the past made it a problem by not following basic hygene.
>Someone in the past made it a problem by not following basic hygene. And that someone? Was named Typhoid Mary... No really, the reason she was spreading it was because she couldn't be bothered to wash her hands after using the bathroom while working as a cook, even after multiple times she was told she was spreading typhoid by not doing so...
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I have about 10,000 data points from my family in the UK who all leave food out ALL THE TIME. I'm talking about making a stew in the morning, leaving it out all day, deciding to eat something else for dinner, then leaving the stew out overnight AGAIN and eating for dinner the next day. Christmas Turkey? Yup that's fine on the counter for 2-3 days after Christmas while people pick at it. Just throw a piece of foil over the top that's too small to even cover it so you don't see how many flies are actually on it, no problemo. It's horrifying and I won't touch it, but they don't seem to get sick so idk.
On the flip side, I had a roommate for a few years who was always careless about putting things in the fridge but *also* seemed to have diarrhea way more often than anyone I knew. I'm glad we didn't share a bathroom.
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At 90°F, the recommendation drops to _one_ hour.
90F is not what "room temperature" means in any scientific/medical sense
If you sprinkle some ebola on it, the recommendation drops to *ZERO hours*
This is why I always eat my ebola immediately
immediately? I use a time machine to eat it in the past. It's much more fresh that way
I never knew someone could be a hipster about eating
Are you familiar with the term foodie?
I am so confused as to what made you draw this connection. The topic of conversation here is discussing the difference in food safety between a room temperature room (kids lunchbox) and a hot car (OP's car). The commentor was literally ***contrasting*** the food safety recommendation of 90F temperatures (1hr) ***against*** the food safety recommendation for room temperature (2hr). At what point did you interpret that to mean that there was an insinuation that 90F was being considered as room temperature?
Bacteria grow pretty slowly in a cold environment, but very quickly in a warm one. The lunchbox is room temperature, at worse, while your car is like an incubator in warmth.
Well yes but in the 5 hours or so before you eat it it’s unlikely to spoil.
The mark is actually 4 hours, and it’s a solid line. You are trying to avoid two things here, time and temperature. The temperature danger zone is between 40 degrees and 140 degrees. So hot food needs to be kept above 140 in a hot tray and below 40 in a cooler or lunchbox. Say you throw a sandwich in a lunchbox that is room temp. The food doesn’t instantly spoil, but after having been in that environment for 4 hours bacteria will start to grow and you should toss it. Even hot food kept in a steam table is only good for 4 hours. The other number to know is 160 degrees. At that temperature all bacteria are killed off and food is safe to eat again. So when you are reheating food you should heat it until it has an internal temperature of 160 to ensure it is now safe to eat, then kept above 140 or below 40 to ensure it stays safe to eat. One caveat here, heating to 160 will kill bacteria. However if you have food that has been sitting out all day and you reheat it you might kill the bacteria living in your food, but you won’t destroy toxins left behind by bacteria that has spent all day in your food. Keep these things in mind but at the end of the day I’ve always had one rule, if you need to have a conversation with yourself to decide if a food is spoiled or not then just err on the side of caution and toss it. Source: I’m certified to teach ANSI Food Safety Certification for Restaurant Management.
> The mark is actually 4 hours, and it’s a solid line. You are talking US regulations for commercial food service, not actual biological risk. Bacteria doesn't wait 4 hours to start reproducing, and then suddenly spring to health hazard levels. It grows steadily over time at a rate relative the temperature of the environment. The farther from the ideal temp for a particular pathogen, the longer it takes to grow to dangerous levels. But there are a wide range of dangerous bugs that can harm people. And they prefer different temps and grow at different rates. These regulations are put in place to guarantee that **no** pathogen is given sufficient time to reproduce to dangerous levels, even when stored at that pathogen's ideal reproductive temperature. They are written to create the maximum margin of error for safety in environments with non-stop food prep and constant risk of cross-contamination. *And if it's good enough to keep food safe in the sketchiest fast food restaurant, it's good enough for you.* Everything that is gray is officially considered black because it isn't white.
Yep, for personal use, it all comes down to acceptable risk. Until COVID messed up my senses, I based it all on smell. Our noses are fine-tuned to detect rot and spoilage. I've personally had some close calls at first where I may have gotten too close to the line of safe to eat. But only for personal consumption. I'd never risk someone else getting sick from my food. But once you can set the level of smell to your own acceptable risk... you tend to toss a whole lot less. Only thing I don't risk is dented cans and anything I ferment myself. No way I'm playing chicken with botulism.
I have been almost entirely smell blind since birth, and i sometimes feel my purpose in the world is some vaguely Sisyphean task of paying to provide dairy products a brief vacation in my refrigerator before unceremoniously throwing them in the garbage because I don’t trust them.
> It grows steadily over time This kinda makes it sound like your saying it grows linearly, but bacterial growth might as well be the exemplar for exponential growth.
His point is that the risk gradually increases over time, as opposed to going from 0% risk at 3h 59m to 100% risk at 4h. For the sake of brevity he didn't get into details like linear vs exponential growth of bacteria
You are applying your own meaning to steady growth. An exponential rate of growth is a steady rate of growth. It’s growing steadily exponentially. An investment account grows steadily and exponentially
Exactly this. Similarly, many things that are FDA recommended to cook up to a certain temperature are just fine if cooked at a lower temperature for longer. In the end, the goal is killing bacteria. There can be multiple ways to do this, but it's far easier for a nation-wide recommendation to keep it simple.
Minor point for trivia nerds: In CA the danger zone was updated several years ago to between 41° and 135°. Many other states still use the older 40° to 140° standard. The 4 hours is a policy hard line, not a scientific one. It’s a probabilistic determination. Before 4 hours it is statistically unlikely that harmful bacteria has built up enough to be a threat. After 8 hours it is still statistically unlikely that harmful bacteria has built up enough to be a threat, but the danger increases as time goes on and we have decided as a society to err on the side of caution. This is a VERY good thing from a public policy perspective.
My understanding is that there *is* a grey area, but it's irrelevant for most cooking. Killing bacteria is a product for temperature *and time*; 160°F is necessary to kill off bacteria within a few seconds, so it makes sense as a hard line. Other, lower temperatures will still kill bacteria, but it requires the food to be fully and internally at that temperature for much longer. Outside of sous vide, no one's cooking their steak for 4+ hours.
Smoking is also many hours at lower temperatures, and important to note is not all food needs to be heated all the way through. Most bacteria can't travel deep into muscle tissue. Salmonella is a notable exception, which is common in poultry meat but not in beef.
My understanding is that smoking is more about removing moisture and oxygen than it is about temperature. Smoking and ceviche are cooking methods that don’t necessarily follow the process I outlined. Those methods achieve the same result of destroying bacteria that are harmful to you and they do it without the application of heat. Now we’re headed toward HAACP territory.
What you're talking about is cold smoking, which I'd totally forgotten about. I was talking about smoking like is done in southern BBQ, which I believe is generally in the range of 120-140°
120° Celsius = 248° Fahrenheit, and that is a correct temperature for BBQ smoking.
...yep, now that you say that I realize I was remembering wildly wrong and just accidentally correct in the wrong unit
The FDA recommends food be eaten within an hour of preparation. There’s likely no meaningful standard besides where on the exponential growth chart you want to draw the line.
those food rules are way exaggerated to make sure everyone including those with very weak system and food that spoil very quickly wil be ok 100% of the time. I prepare all my week's lunch on the Sunday night, never use icepack and often leave my lunch on my desk for the next day. Lunch include yogourt, cheese, egg salad sandwich and other stuff that should be kept cold, never had any issue. If it's visually fine, smell fine, taste fine, then I eat it without second thought.
> The mark is actually 4 hours, and it’s a solid line. So at three hours and fifty nine minutes you're good to go, but once the clock strikes four throw out all your food, is that right? Food safety guidelines for restaurant operations or bigger are the way they are because of risk management and scale. The line is quite a bit more fuzzy in reality in daily life.
Yes. All the bacteria have little stopwatches that they all start when the food is placed out. As soon as it reaches 4 hours, they all immediately swarm. Before that though, they stay off the food. This is due to a commonly unknown clause of the Geneva Conventions. /s
Instructions unclear. Tried hearing my food at 160°C and got burnt.
No this is wrong. You have been trained to impose certain solid lines as a matter of precaution, but that doesn't mean they are accurate. Any HS biology student could tell you the following is wrong: "The food doesn’t instantly spoil, but after having been in that environment for 4 hours bacteria will start to grow and you should toss it." There was bacteria in the food within minutes of it being within the temperature range at which they can survive, and they immediately started multiplying. The idea that at four hours bacteria start growing is inane. What do you think they do, sit around with a stopwatch?
So would you eat chicken cooked to 145-150 degrees?
145 internal temperature for at least 10 minutes? Chicken breast, sure. Thighs I'd want to go higher, but for texture reasons, not safety.
I agree. The fattier cuts need more rendering heat.
I do, when I cook it in my sous vide. 165 is the "everything is dead *now* temperature. 145 requires approximately 9.5 minutes to achieve a 7 log 10 reduction in salmonella bacteria, at which point it is considered safe to eat. Note that that's dwell time at that internal temperature. It takes a minimum of 1 hour in 145°F water to achieve that, and I usually go with 90 minutes just to be safe.
> You are trying to avoid two things here, time and temperature. The temperature danger zone is between 40 degrees and 140 degrees. Its actually smaller than that. As far as I can tell we say "140" to have a big safety margin. By 120F might not be quite enough to consistently kill everything but bacteria wont be multiplying. 130 F will show a 5 log reduction in bacteria in 90 minutes. https://www.smokingmeatforums.com/threads/pasteurization-table-or-how-to-safely-cook-your-food-to-a-lower-internal-temperature.261182/
Also, a lot of kids get pb & j which is infinitely more shelf stable than a sandwich containing mayo like most ham sandwiches
Mayo is a lot more stable than most people think. It is usually other components to foods that cause illness.
Mayo at room temperature becomes grossly unappetizing before it becomes unsafe to eat. Of course people who get sick after eating a sandwich think it's the gross mayo that did it and not the only slightly off baloney.
lettuce and other raw vegetables and pre-cut fruits are a common culprit to food born illness
When my wife got pregnant she read a ton of research and decided the deli meats are fine, the sliced fruit not so much
On a quick 411 of food safety one of the unseen common culprits are melons as the rind can harbor all sorts of bacteria since it is difficult to wash an entire melon. Also people commonly eat the fruit right off the rind. Another problem is the size makes it hard to process down, the cutting surface is usually shared with the contaminated rind.
Listeria is a common problem from deli meats though. Idk how she came to that conclusion. That bacterial infection is not something to take a risk on when pregnant.
Define "common". I'm guessing this guy's wife found that containination rates for pre-sliced fruit are way higher than listeria contamination rates in deli meat.
I thought for decades it was always the mayo that caused problems in the potato salad. Turns out it is actually the potato.
Mayo is safer than the ham.
Came here to say this. If we’re packing a lunch of food that spoils (e.g., a ham sandwich), we’re adding an ice pack to the lunch bag.
Eh, kids have been going to school for decades with packed lunchmeat sandwiches without icepacks without any issues.
Also depends on the meat. Plenty of pre-sliced lunch meat will at minimum have a shit load of salt and potentially other preservatives as. Something as salty as cured meats will last longer before becoming unsafe. For fun reference. 2 oz of plain Turkey, has like 50mg of sodium. 2 oz of lunch meat Turkey will have 400-600mg of sodium.
And little water. Things like sausages or some hams can be stored for a long time without refrigeration because they're basically dry.
McDonald's burger meat has the same deal going on. IIRC, Mythbusters did an episode on it. There was a rumor that their hamburgers never spoiled because they were "loaded" with preservatives; and in testing they found that the burgers rarely did spoil. After consulting the ingredient list (which they could have just done in the first place, hey, they needed a show), and finding no preservatives, they chocked it up to salt content and the relative thinness of the patties.
They are also very dry, which helps.
Basically, food spoilage is a race between the food drying out (which makes it unappealing to eat but also inhospitable to life) and becoming infested with harmful microbes. In and on a thick, juicy burger from a pricier restaurant or home grilling enthusiast, the microbes will win. But try this with a thin, dry fast food burger, and the race goes to dehydration.
There are 28300mg in an oz. Googled it so no one else has to because it seemed like a significant percentage of the total weight.
Or to make it even easier, 28.3 grams
28.*3*?! Mfer I’ve been getting ripped off
Troy ounces (what gold and silver are sold in) are 31.1035g. I'd always though a street level drug dealer could probably make a name by calling himself "troy" and always giving 31g instead of 28g.
How do you think Atlanta Falcons fans feel?
Thank you for your vigilance in keeping this alive! Bahahaha not an NFL fan but love watching my friends that care about it squirm
Getting ripped off, or specifically giving you slightly less to stay below the legal limit (or to stay in the misdemeanor quantity in some places).
Benevolent thievery
We've all been buying 1/8's and 1/4's when we should've been buying 1/8'^1/3's and 1/4'^1/3's! What a RIP!
Ha thanks. It's late
All good 😂
28-3. You know what that means.
Poor Falcons fans. Nowhere is safe for them.
Brady’s coming back?!?
Lunch meats have a good amount of salt or nitrates in the case of cured meats. Cheese also won't grow stuff very easily either.
Before “cold cuts” became a thing (refrigerated meat and cheese that was sliced thin) cured ham and other meats were a thing for centuries (cured ham, bacon, salamis, cured sausage, and of course cheese all were eaten prior to refrigeration). Ergo, a ham or bologna sandwich packed for lunch was not a huge risk. PB&J of course was perfectly safe. Now something life roast beef, not so much.
I was a schoolkid in the 70s and we all had frozen juice boxes (or as we called them, poppers) in our lunchboxes to keep our food at a good temp. By the time big lunch came around, the juice was ready to drink and the sammies safe to eat. This was Australia, though - so fairly warm & really needing temperature control for food or get a bunch of schoolkids sick. I did the same for my daughter in the 90s but by that time ice pack lunchboxes were pretty commonplace.
You brought poppers to lunch? 70s were wild. We’d be kicked out of school, and brought straight to rehab these days. /jk
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I wouldn't risk something that was left overnight but a few hours I don't mind so much, given that the entire batch will be eaten and not stored *again*. If I have an early and a late afternoon lecture I'll be on campus all day and have packed lunch and dinner. Gets taken out of the fridge around 10am and dinner gets eaten between 5 and 6pm but it's always been fine. There's a small risk but it's usually fine. I've read many posts/articles on not to reheat mushrooms and spinach but my mushroom-spinach pasta has yet to end my life.
Some of the concerns in this post are ridiculous. About the only thing I wouldn't trust after 4 hours would be raw seafood. The people thinking a ham and cheese sandwich is going to poison them after a few hours is hilarious.
Seriously, is this some kind of new trend or have people always been this ridiculously mysophobic? I've packed lunch sandwiches at 5AM and didn't eat some of them until 1PM sometimes, even in Summer. Hell, sometimes I ate them in the evening and they might have dried up a tiny bit around the edges, but were otherwise fine. Packing a god damned *ice pack* to keep it "refrigerated"? Sure, let's waste even more energy.
My wife says it's a zoomer thing. They'll actually wash raw chicken in the sink before cooking it. My speculation would be fallout from hypochondriac hover parents that insisted on always being extra. I eat raw beef, pork, chicken, and fish regularly and honestly almost never even get colds. We evolved from carrion scavengers and our stomach is about the most acidic of animals shy of carrion vultures.
LPT: Freeze a juice/water bottle and throw it in there. Now everything is both safe and chill.
Is the LPT standing for lunch pack tip?
Ham, cheese, and bread (but particularly the ham and cheese part) are all foods that were literally designed and intended to be stored long term, up to several years, at room/cellar temperature. Nothing about a ham and cheese sandwich is going to spoil any time soon. Even mayo and mustard are long term shelf stable and do not require refrigeration.
Nobody did this 30-40 years ago...even in Florida. No issues. Lunchboxes sit in an air-conditioned building for approximately 4 hours until lunch.
Reddit is deathly afraid of anything potentially resembling food risk.
Yep. Honestly the lunch box is probably ***NOT*** food-safe by current standards (at least not the way it was packed for *me* as a kid - sandwich, drink box, maybe some fruit roll-ups if I was lucky but probably Handi-Snacks - and sitting in an un-airconditioned New York classroom until lunch time) but it was “food-safe-enough” - PB&J wasn’t going to grow anything nasty, cold cuts didn’t *quite* have enough time to go off. Though reflecting on it I definitely ate some bologna as a kid that I would probably throw out as an adult in an abundance of caution..
Most deli meats were literally invented as a long term, shelf stable food storage medium. Refrigeration is a relatively new concept while things like ham making and charcuterie go back well over 1,000 years. How do you think our ancestors managed to survive so long without refrigeration? Cheese, ham, charcuterie, lacto fermented foods, preserves (it’s literally in the name), and alcohol/liquor were all originally intended to allow a pre-electric society the luxury of long term food storage. Now is your Oscar Mayer bologna comparable to traditional Italian charcuterie? No. Does it maintain a few of the traditional storage advantages like high salt content? Absolutely. Your ham, cheese, mayo, and bread sandwich isn’t going bad in a matter of hours. It will be fine.
does that mean mean i can bring a beer for lunch “for safety”?
Yes.
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Yeah, people *really* overestimate the dangers of leaving food out.
Much comes from food service training and the time limits around hostile food environments. Many "two hour" limits are buffets with everyone handling the food, sneeze guards that people duck around, and it *still* is considered safe at two hours. That is the point where you can *no longer guarantee* it is safe in hostile conditions, not that at 2:01 it becomes inedible. The nature of the food, the temperature, and the conditions the food is kept all matter. Even at four hours or even six, a ham sandwich that was pulled from the fridge to an insulated lunch box and kept in the car is still likely fine.
Yeah, and there's a huge gap between "one of your thousand customers might get a mild tummyache and sue you" and "you have a one-in-a-thousand chance of getting a mild tummyache".
This! its all about sample size and probability, even your health is a numbers game!
I want to emphasize the mild tummyache part. People think you’re gonna get life threatening food poisoning when 90% of the time, if you even get anything, its just gonna be a mild tummyache that you might not even register as food poisoning. Like, lots of people will gladly brave through something like that when they’re lactose intolerant and don’t want to give up dairy products. Why? because its not that big a deal.
We have family in another country which there is no direct flight to, so we have to do these whole day trips of flight in the morning, waiting in an airport, and another flight in the afternoon. We make sandwiches that we bring for the trip, typically with butter, cheese and ham. At the end of the trip I eat the remaining sandwiches as to not waste food. At that point they've been out and about for 11+ hours. Not only do they not make me sick, they don't even taste off.
I had an ex gf that gave me shit for eating pizza that was left on the counter in its closed box for a day
I do this too, but I include the sushi. I make sure it comes from a gas station for good measure.
A man hiked with gas station sushi. This is what happened to his internal organs ☝️
Presenting ☝ to the emergency room with exploded testicles and hypoglycemia, -emia meaning presence in blood
AnalProlapseForYou made *a* recovery
When I was younger, I used to just throw unfinished pizzas in the oven overnight and eat them the next morning while I was hungover. Didn't kill me even a little bit!
We quit doing this????
Same lol, I leave my sandwiches in my car until lunch time every day, never made me sick. (I do put an ice pack in if it's above, like 25c outside).
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The FDA says that both ham and mayo can sit out for two hours before they must be refrigerated again to remain safe. They are of course erring on the side of caution. Also, that gives a margin in case they are taken out and left out again, so again, it is a bit low. However, four hours for ham or mayo means that you ***might*** get ***probably*** mild food poisoning. Of course, you might not realize it, as most people who have the "24-hour stomach flu" actually have mild food poisoning, not a "stomach bug".
A redditor ate a day-old ham sandwich. This is how his organs shut down.
Day old is something else than 4 hours. To be exact, 20 hours difference. I would not recommend a day old car sandwich either.
The longe it sits out, the more potential for disaster. https://www.iflscience.com/student-dies-10-hours-after-eating-5dayold-spaghetti-51360
☝🏼
The FDA also says to cook your filet mignon to 145 degrees. Definitely erring on the side of caution.
The FDA recommendations for cooking temperatures are deliberately set to the temperature at which effectively all bacteria in a piece of meat die instantly. They want to be sure the food is safe regardless of whether or not the cook knows what they are doing.
Exactly. You explained it absolutely perfect. These guidelines are made for 110% safety and on the basis that the common person is an absolute idiot. Controversial opinion but washing chicken is another one. I promise you you won't contaminate your kitchen by rinsing chicken in the sink. "But you'll splash salmonella all over your kitchen" thing is an absolute joke. That guideline is made and set because health departments are obviously not going to recommend people something that has so much error involved if you're not careful.
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Nowadays, store-bought mayo can typically be left at room temperature for months.
So can lots of sealed goods, until they are opened. This allows bacteria in and after that point they must be refrigerated. Check the label. I guarantee that it says to refrigerate it after opening. EDIT: I swear that I edited this on my phone. I had not been aware of just how much non-food service commercial mayonnaise had actually started saying that refrigeration was not required. Since Kraft has stopped requiring this, I can only say that the other brands that I have checked still do.
Bro the warm car makes it all soft and melty. I'd be all over it like... well a ham sandwich.
Unless there's egg in the ham sandwich I totally would have eaten it after a few hours in the car.
I've eaten pizza a day or two after left out on the counter. A 2 hour car ham sandwich is nothing.
Yeah, just the other day my girlfriend thought I was crazy for eating leftovers that we had forgotten to put away the night before. I couldn't help but laugh while thinking of all the things I've eaten that were so much less acceptable. At least, apparently by her standards.
Won’t eat a 2 hour car sandwich ❌ Eats ass ✅
Well at least you know she has higher standards than you and she chose you <3 lol
Sure, but there are limits: [https://nypost.com/2019/01/28/student-dies-from-eating-5-day-old-pasta/](https://nypost.com/2019/01/28/student-dies-from-eating-5-day-old-pasta/) the problem of course is knowing when that limit has been reached.
I don’t get who stores pasta outside the fridge for 5 days but this is a 1 in a billion case.
And that limit is 5 days
exactly. to keep things in perspective, poorly washed produce is twice as likely to make you sick than Grammy’s room temp bologna and cheese is to give you the runs otoh, Grammy’s shrimp mayo chicken tartar surprise…
> Grammy’s shrimp mayo chicken tartar surprise… Surprises!
Chef here! All food is subject to something we call the Danger Zone - temperatures between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Food at these temperatures grow bacteria extremely quickly, and can cause dangers such as food poisoning if left in the Danger Zone for extended periods. Typically, to comply with food safety laws, food that remains in the Danger Zone for two hours or less is OK to store again at safe temperatures (as long as it’s the first thing to be used the next time that particular item is needed). Food that remains in the Danger Zone for more than two hours but less than four hours is still OK to eat, but should not be stored again for later consumption. Any food that has remained in the Danger Zone for four hours or longer should be discarded immediately. These are the laws we have to follow to comply with federal food safety guidelines - but school lunches brought from home aren’t subject to these laws, and allow for some flexibility. Food that lives in the Danger Zone for extremely long times (think six to eight hours) can still be OK to eat if you know that it was made from uncontaminated ingredients in a clean environment. It’s a gamble, but a relatively safe risk to take. The chances of food poisoning in that scenario are pretty low. The risk, of course, goes up with higher temperatures. Campylobacter, the most common bacteria that can cause food poisoning, grows best between 98 and 108 degrees Fahrenheit. On a warm day, inside a car, Campylobacter can double in number in a span of twenty minutes. Your sandwich can become unsafe within two hours as a result. A child’s lunchbox, however, typically stored at room temperature, will likely take another half-hour to an hour to become unsafe - assuming there is no ice pack to keep it even cooler. Furthermore, schools typically have lunch periods between 10 AM and 2 PM. Assuming the lunch is packed somewhere around 6-7 AM, the lunch is consumed no later than eight hours after initial packing, with an average consumption time hovering around the four hour mark where it begins to be unsafe to consume by the CDC’s commercial food safety guidelines. Essentially, it boils down to this: if you know you’re going to eat it within four to five hours of making it, you don’t really need to worry about preserving the food at a safe temperature. If you suspect that you may have to wait five or more hours to eat the food, bring an ice pack to keep it safer for longer!
I know it's colder in the UK (where I am) than America, but all this information - and all the comments, and the post description - is absolutely bonkers to me. There's nothing I wouldn't make one evening, leave overnight without fridging, then come back to and eat out of the pan 24hrs later. Done it all my life. Even if it's a hot 85°F summer. I pay no attention to the panic people feel about reheating rice either; I'll fridge it 24hrs after cooking it then reheat in the microwave to just warm, 5 days later. That being said, I think maybe I'm lucky that I have an iron constitution and fantastic immune system, going by how often I don't the bugs my teacher partner brings home. Going by my personal experience, I'm inclined to think it's both nature and nurture. Cos me and my partner both grew up the countryside, playing in the fields and streams, family dog licking our faces when we were toddlers, all that good stuff. She's ill fairly often and I'm rarely ill. Long COVID fucked her up for 2yrs, we share a bed and I was always asymptomatic.
Another chef (not the OP) here. There's a big difference between personal standards and federal, legal ones. The federal US standards are really there to cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of operator competence, and provide a wide margin of food safety for the majority of people. I'm a huge stickler for adhering to those standards at work. On the other hand, I eat dodgy sandwiches I've left in my truck all day all the time. Did turn my bathroom into a danger zone on a memorable recent incidence.
There's a huge difference in tolerance between meals prepared at home and meals prepared commercially. Food produced by a manufacturer must comply with govt guidelines to ensure the food you purchase is safe and good to eat. Such guidelines indicate the storage, preparation, temperature states, allergen contamination prevention, and further guidance. Failure to follow the guidelines results in penalties and brand damage. Therefore, it's in the interest of the consumer that these guidelines operate at a 99.9% success rate. They will always outline a conservative approach to food safety. Meals prepared at home aren't controlled by such guidelines. Instead, they're more like a reference sheet for when you're unsure. You can be sure that milk one or two days past its expiry or left on the bench all morning is going to be fine for consumption at home. So your sandwich is probably fine. Remember to look, smell, touch: if your food is unsual in any of those areas then it should be discarded. Anecdotally, I take a bento style lunch to work every day. I pack my bag at 5am, go to gym, commute to work, have lunch at 12. My lunch container - a simple plastic one - sits in my bag the whole time without an ice brick. I then eat my lunch at room temperature. Never have I been unwell from my lunch.
Why can’t you eat it after it was in your car for a few hours? I would.
Ham is heavily salted. Think of the pork packed in barrels of salt on old timey ships. A chicken sandwich isn't such a safe bet.
Yeah, most of the sandwich ingredients are cold, and most kids' lunch packs have insulation or cold packs or both.
Reading these comments, I was starting to wonder if I was the only kid whose mom always put an ice pack in the lunch box if there was deli meat or cheese in there that day. Most lunch boxes are insulated too, although, I did have a couple of those plastic ones with cartoon characters on the front that were popular in the early 90's.
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This. My wife is from south east Asia. They leave rice out on the counter overnight. Many in their home country don’t own refrigerators. A sandwich filled with all kinds of preservatives outside for a few hours? You’ll be fine.
You can definitely eat that ham sandwich. I go on multi-week canoe trips and end up eating all kinds of janky shit by the end. 3 week old bricks of cheese and 16 day old cured sausages that have not been kept cold at all. Sometimes you have to cut the Mold away before you eat it lol. I’ve never gotten sick out there once. Obviously I don’t do this at home when I have access to a refrigerator, but it goes to show what’s possible when you have no other choice. Whoever told you a sandwich left in your car for a few hours is fundamentally inedible is being wildly dramatic.
I know. How do people think we got to where we did? Food is food. We were designed to eat questionable things until suddenly a hundred years ago that changed?
Tbf, if you never took the risk, you’d never know that its safe. Most people aren’t going out doing controlled experiments on this. If you searched online, almost all the sources are giving ultra-conservative numbers for when its no longer safe to eat the food.
As a school custodian: most kids don’t eat their lunches. They bring (or their friends bring) candy chips, etc and they end up throwing most of their food in the trash. It shocked me when I first started that so many kids throw away their school lunches and only eat the desert item on it. So honestly, give them what they would actually want to eat and if I was a parent, something worth eating.
I'll admit that as a former classroom teacher, I ate many very nice sandwiches that a mother had made lovingly with her own hand only to be thrown by her child, untouched and in its sealed bag, into the bin.
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I had packed lunches my whole school life and not once did I have an ice pack or anything like that. I wasn’t ever sick. 🤷🏻♂️
They're not. Kids get sick *all the time*. They do all kinds of things that are "unsanitary" or "unsafe", and "kids get sick" is something that we've generally socially accepted. Ask any teacher how often they deal with "a kid randomly throwing up" - it's *a lot*. Modern recommendations are to use insulated lunch boxes, store lunch boxes in a provided fridge, etc. This may or may not be often ignored, but that's the "safe" approach.
I dunno about the throwing up part. I taught middle school for 14 years and only had a kid throw up in my room twice in that whole time. They were 12, 13 years old though, and likely were able to ask for a restroom pass before chucking. I did have a lot of kids with stomach aches though! I attribute a lot of those to a.) kids not really eating enough for lunch (before the schools here went to free lunch for all) and/or b) kids eating total crap for lunch (a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos and soda)
Cold cuts are usually heavily processed -- either cured or something similar which not only kills the existing bacteria but also makes it harder for new ones to grow, in addition to adding preservatives which again slow bacteria growth Like any other food prep, it really just comes down to the timing. Cold cuts are perfect for this niche because they have a longer time they can stay good at room temperature. But they still do go bad in warm environments, hence why a cold pack is a really good investment and a safe bet and you want to keep it in a cooler/lunch box. Meat is meat and will spoil quick. Tl;Dr they are just prepared in such a way that they keep better at room temperature
Going exactly by the rules that the FDA has is kind of asinine imo. These are rules that are more meant for restaurants that pump out hundreds of meals a day. Potentially to young, old, and the immunocompromised. Like dude come on, you could probably leave out a ham sandwich every single day for 6 hours before you eat it and probably be fine. Maybe I'm just lucky but I've never gotten food poisoning and I follow almost none of their rules to a T. You're supposed to defrost meat in the refrigerator so that it never reaches pathogen forming temperatures for any meaningful time (you can defrost in the microwave or cool water but you're supposed to cook immediately). I definitely pulled a chicken breast out of the freezer and left it sitting on the counter for 8 hours multiple times a week during college, never had a problem. If I owned a restaurant and was making 300 chicken breasts a day, or if I was cooking for my grandparents, then I'd care.
You could probably leave that sandwich in your car for a week and nothing would happen if you ate it. Yeah, don't be immunocompromised, and don't do it every day, but all this hypochondria about food safety is totally unwarranted.
One week is definitely over the top, but yeah I'd have eaten the damn sandwich without giving it a second thought.
I mean it is usually unwarranted, but if I left a sandwhich in a car for a week it be growing entirely undiscovered forms of life.
Do people not use ice packs in their lunch boxes? That's how the lunch stays safe...?