I wonder if this is an US/the rest thing or maybe a meat eater / vegetarian thing. For exact scientific evaluation, please tell in which groups you fit in when commenting.
When the topic food is brought up here or there is always this guy saying “omg you can’t leave your food for 30 minutes on the counter because bacteria you know” (exaggerated) and I don’t get where that sentiment comes from. Many people agree and say you will get food poisoning from that.
First of all, let me tell you I am not an idiot (at least I hope so) and I know how microbiology works - bacteria is everywhere. I don’t doubt your food on the counter will get populated by bacteria, probably more than it would be in the fridge. The question is, is this bad for you?
Now, where I live (central Europe) people are not so fast with that and I wonder why this is. We have a temperate climate which could play a role, so a large portion of the year the temperature is pretty moderate, compared to let’s say south US. But apart from that I don’t really know.
I am a vegetarian, mostly vegan. I am pretty sure it’s not a good idea to leave animal parts out of the fridge, as they are already populated with bad bacteria when you buy them. But for vegetables? Pasta, soup, lasagna? To be honest, I have no shame to leave that stuff on the counter the whole day and even take a spoon from time to time without reheating. Over night I put it of course in the fridge, and in summer when we have 35°C it’s also a different thing. But in general I don’t really care. I know I cannot extrapolate on humanity, only because ai never felt bad after doing this. But honestly, am I an idiot? Or are you just a bit sensitive? Do you assume everybody eats meats?
Really interested in your ideas. Don’t forget to tell the region you are coming from and your diet preferences.
Thank you so much my respected lemmings and pie people
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Also central Europe, no special diet.
Really the fridge is only for ingredients. Only when I know that I won’t eat the food that I prepared in the next two days does it go back in the fridge. But in practice most prepared food will sit on the counter for up to two days while I slowly whittle it down.
Omnivore, Netherlands. Forty years ago my parents had only one small fridge, so most of our food was kept in the cupboard or in the cellar. The fridge was for open containers or jars, some meat, eggs and margarine. Meat was deli meat for sandwiches, meat for dinner usually came from the freezer in the morning and was thawing on the counter all day. So I’m with you on this I guess.
I though eggs on the counter was the way it was done in europe and that the eggs aren’t scrubbed of their coating like in the us. Also netherlands. I mean its not norway but how cool did the cellar stay in the summer. I feel like it could almost be a fridge.
Meat eater, cooler climate in Australia.
We generally put things in the fridge but are also pretty casual about leaving things out.
There’s a lot of variables that would effect my inclination to consume something that had been left out for whatever period of time.
Cooked Rice is almost a perfect growth medium for bacteria. My Mrs cooks a batch in the rice cooker, doesn’t refrigerate it, but consumes it all within 36 hours. That said, it has just been boiled so you’re starting with almost no bacteria.
Dairy is the worst. Letting milk get to room temperature and leaving it for a half hour or so is going to dramatically reduce it’s lifetime even if you put it back in the fridge afterwards.
Some rice cookers have an extended “keep warm” setting where the temperature remains high enough to prevent the growth of bacteria, allowing you to start a batch in the morning and use it all day or even the next day if needed.
That doesn’t sound right to me.
Rice is serious business in our house.
All rice cookers will switch to a “keep warm” setting after the normal cooking cycle.
I don’t think it’s hot enough to prevent the growth of bacteria, although I’m not sure about that.
It is hot enough for the rice to start to dry out. After a few hours it would be “tough” instead of “soft and fluffy”. After 24 hours it would be inedible.
As I said we just leave it at room temperature in the rice cooker and heat it up in the microwave as necessary. The texture and taste and… toxicity I guess, is fine for 36 hours. So if you cook it this morning then use it all before tomorrow evening.
While you’ve been fine and might continue to be fine for the rest of your life, rice is considered a high risk food when it’s cooked and left out.
For others, please don’t take this advice, especially if this hasn’t been your usual practice. People have different immune systems and can build up a tolerance to their own practices. Reheated rice is a major cause of food poisoning, to reduce the risk it should either be super hot or cold, limiting the time spent in between.
The bacteria that live on rice create endospores and lay dormant even in dry conditions. They can survive the cooking process and once they become active, they create a toxin that can’t be eliminated at cooking temperatures.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7913059
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0882401023004515
Hah. Ok. I’d heard about rice being “super high risk” in the past, and your comment encouraged me to look into it a little more.
Firstly, obviously this, nor my earlier comment is not “advice”. I’m not sat here advising people to eat toxic rice. Everyone is responsible for their own decisions. I don’t care what everyone else is doing, I’m merely curious as to how my we manage to avoid getting food poisoning from every meal.
Now, I don’t eat rice. I’ve been following a carbohydrate restricted diet for years because I have T2D. My partner is the boss about rice in our house. Yes, she’s from south east asia. We’re team thai-grown-jasmine when it comes to rice.
We also live in a mild climate, so in our kitchen during winter it would probably be 12 degrees celsius for 12 hours or so overnight, and rarely exceed 22 degrees celsius during the day. During summer there’s an additional 4 degrees to those numbers. We don’t use any heating or cooling in our house. I feel like this is certainly relevant.
I actually just called her to check on the timeframe she would follow. It’s more nuanced than I had previously considered. She said that in winter she would still eat rice after 36 hours at room temperature. However (!) based on my own observations I think the texture has become more rubbery by that time, so while she might do that on occasion I don’t think it’s that common. I think she just naturally cooks enough for this meal and the next meal, but sometimes there’s some left over.
She also said that in summer 24 hours is probably the limit.
I’m not here to police yours or your partner’s eating habits.
I saw the statement:
The texture and taste and… toxicity I guess, is fine for 36 hours. So if you cook it this morning then use it all before tomorrow evening.
And provided a counter point. I had to train cooks and dispell so many food and hygeine myths. Maybe I get a twitch when I read that kind of thing.
Ideally, rice should be cooled down within 1-2hrs and stored in the fridge. 12°C is balmy for bacteria.
Vegetarian. Northern Europe.
I’ll leave food on the counter until it cools down. Don’t want to bring the temperature up in the fridge too much, and if the food is hot you risk breaking the glass shelves in the fridge from the temperature shock.
Never had any problems. Generally food will get reheated so that kills bacteria. Obviously spoilage produces toxins over time but that doesn’t happen that fast.
I’m generally more casual with it in the winter than in the summer as things spoil faster when it’s warm.
Mostly vege/france. I don’t mind leaving food out in the open, especially cakes, pies and cookies. I can confirm that sometimes a few days out are too much, but as long as you check for weird scent/look, you’ll be ok. My parent recently ate boiled meat over the course of a week without putting it in the fridge, leaving it in its pot and reheating each day, they threw the last bit because it smelled bad, but they had no problem before that.
Vegetarian (nearly vegan)/not doxxing myself because I piss many people off unintentionally. Flies are my most consistent concern. So long as the food was shielded from insects and extended temperatures above 25c/70f, I really don’t care to put it away urgently. Tupperware is just exhausting to use. Soup standing overnight isn’t a strange sight, but I eat my leftovers promptly
On the counter is fine for quite a while. I feel that putting warm food in the fridge will hurt the texture, so I always wait until it’s room temperature and usually a few hours longer before storing it.
So for the remainder of the day on the counter is fine in my book. Overnight it goes in the fridge.
Special case: Taco meat. I usually put the pan back in the (now cold) oven mostly to save space, and leave it there overnight. When I reheat taco meat I use enough heat to probably kill any bacteria anyway.
I’m sure you’ve heard this so many times before. It’s not necessarily the bacteria itself, but their waste products that put you at risk. I’m not sure what the salt content of taco meat is, and if your taco meat is dry or wet, but I do think you may be putting yourself in this particular instance.
This is a thing pushed by American media. It’s a Boomer-era panic over summertime picnics and somehow mayonnaise causing potato salad to immediately after 30 minutes outside a refrigerator to become fatal if consumed.
It’s also the product of misunderstandings of buying meat at a supermarket, wrongly assuming that meat that is not refrigerated for more than 15 minutes will basically kill you.
Panicking about food poisoning is a moral panic about “bad parenting” and blaming people when it wasn’t widely known what causes food poisoning: not washing your filthy hands, cross-contaimination, and poor hygiene overall.
I’ve lived in West Africa and bought and cooked and safely eaten meat that had sat on a wooden plank lightly covered in flies before I got there to buy it. I survived. Mayonnaise will outlive humanity before it molds or goes bad at room temp.
I’ve read so many horror stories about the American healthcare system that I always imagined it was out of fear of needing medical attention.
In Newfoundland (and I’m assuming other historically fish-based economies) it was really common before refrigeration existed to split your fish (open it like a book on a drying rack) and heavily salt it to store it long term. The drying process could take days with flies swarming around before getting moved to a shack. You’d then soak the fish before cooking to extract some of the salt. It’s no longer necessary but we still do it for the tradition. I’ve eaten it many, many times and never got sick from it, and I can guarantee it was more than 30 mins between the fish dying and it being salted. Especially these days with the codfish population dwindling, it could take a couple hours sometimes to catch all your fish. We kill the fish as soon as it enters the boat so the first fish of the day could be 3+ hours before being treated at all.
That being said, food safety is still important. I’ve seen some people say it’s fine to leave stuff out for a while if you’re cooking it after because it’ll kill the bacteria when you cook it, but that’s not entirely true. I had to take some food safety courses and was considering being an inspector for a while, I can’t remember it all now but the idea was, bacteria can grow after 30 mins at room temperature and while that bacteria can die at 74°C/165°F, it can grow spores during that time that are heat resistant. You’re not gonna die from food that’s been out for 31 minutes but if you often eat food that’s been sitting out for an hour or more, eventually you might get sick. It’s a game of chance, really. I don’t worry about it too much for myself but if I’m feeding others, I try to stick to the rules. If I get sick from my own carelessness, fair enough, that’s on me. If I get someone else sick though, I’d feel awful.
From Nova Scotia. You got me missing fish and brewis.
I only really do it for Christmas now. It’s one of my favourite parts of Christmas though. Christmas Eve we do fish and brewis, Christmas Day breakfast is fishcakes with the leftover salt fish, potatoes, and drawn butter.
Sounds like you’ll all be having a time in a couple months. I wish an early happy holidays to you.
There are some bacteria that when they die, release toxins that are harmful. So cooking alone isn’t enough to render them harmless.
From the Canadian food agency’s website:
Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus cereus, E. coli O157:H7, Clostridium botulinum, Clostridium perfringens and Clostridium difficile.
France/omnivore (with a slight pref for veggies).
When the topic is food here or also on former similar platforms there is always this guy saying “omg you can’t leave your food for 30 minutes on the counter because bacteria you know” and I don’t get where that sentiment comes from. Many people agree and say you will get food poisoning from that.
To me it’s lack of education (fear of bacteria is not a bad thing, over-exaggerating it and forgetting or whole body is made to deal with them and some are even legit part of our body is… excessive), and a cultural thing.
I mean, in the US for example they will even shrink wrap individual fruits because ‘food exposed to the air is bad’ even though fruits have developed their skin just for that purpose, and even though most of the fruits sold over there have been so intensely chemically treated they could last for centuries before starting to decay (there may be hint of sarcasm here, just a hint).
Also, I wonder how many of those ‘worried persons’ systematically wash their hands before they grab any food? The same hands they grab their bacteria saturated phone with all day long, or pick their nose, or scratch their balls (or whatever part of the body they need to scratch), or shake hands with other people (whose personal hygiene and what they do with their hands they have no idea)… The risk is at the very least as high to grab some nasty thing just by not washing one’s hands before eating and preparing something to eat.
On the other, being French, I have no shame in admitting I appreciate some of our cheese that don’t fear being left to… age, attacked by bacteria ;)
My opinion is that food should not be left out in the air without any reason (it’s messy and risky) but depending the food it can. But it certainly is not a matter of leaving it 30 minutes, unless weather conditions are very specific. Never heard that 30 minutes remark, btw.
Thanks for your answer. I exaggerated with the 30 minutes, I will edit the post to make that clear.
South US, but in the mountains where it is much cooler. SO is vegetarian and I am an omnivore but skew vegetarian, especially at home. I leave heated things out to cool from hot to warm before putting in the fridge. About an hour, maybe 2 when I am being forgetful. Anything over that is taking risk. I’ve had a few nasty bouts of food poisoning before so I skew on the safe side.
My mom on the other hand grew up very differently. Lives by the beach in a much warmer more humid climate. She’ll leave moist dump cakes unrefrigerated for days. She’s more homeopathic than me, says the spices have been used for ages to preserve food. She’s not wrong, but you have to throw in a lot more cinnamon than what our Americanized palate is accustomed to. We are very careful about what we eat when we visit, and even then, small bites to try first.
Anecdotal evidence rules! Everyone posting here is alive!
The estimated 420,000 folks who die annually from improper food and water handling refuse to post!!!
Great stuff!…good? Shouldn’t we only take advice from those who survived their own food storage habits?
I’m not, I’m dead. BTW I ate a carrot that had been on the counter for almost an hour.
That’s an incredibly wide category. Any non-anecdotal data on how many of those deaths were people eating their leftovers which they didn’t immediately refrigerate?
Mine’s anecdotal, but back in the '70s I worked with a guy who would eat the contents of an ashtray in bars, as a party trick!
When he died in his 50s, they never blamed the party trick!When he died in his 50s, they never blamed the party trick!
I mean, it wouldn’t make sense to blame the party trick if he was like … ran over by a car.
Okay, but if our standard of evidence is “person did x and died at some point later”, that would apply to every human doing absolutely anything.
Yes but counterpoint I once didn’t do something and I’m still alive.
Northern Europe. Omnomnomnivour.
Sometimes forget to put the lunch boxes in the fridge over night. No problem eating them the day after.
If I thaw meat I don’t have an issue with it being room temperature for a few hours before I cook it. Better than somewhat frozen.
That being said if I ran a restaurant I’d be much more careful. Best way to scare off customers and get the food safety inspector to hit you with his clipboard.
Omnivore.
Bread cools overnight on the counter after cooking then wrapped and stays on the counter.
Butter in a closed container, for however long until it’s all used.
Pizza overnight if it doesn’t have meat
Cut onion, if I cut some for breakfast I will just turn it cut side down on the cutting board if I’m gonna use the rest soon, like at supper same day.
If beans are left out too long I do the "hard boil for 5 minutes.
I do make fermented beverages and pickles, those ferment at room temp for days to weeks.
American/meat-eater
Bread stays out but is wrapped
Butter stays out in a butter bell (that’s not a common thing in America BTW but they should be)
Some sauces and condiments and such that are packed full of salt and vinegar and such stay out
Leftovers and such go into the fridge after a few minutes to a few hours, there’s not exactly a hard rule here, just kind of based on what feels right and whenever we get around to it. Overnight is too long, with few exceptions if it’s been out that long we’d probably throw it out.
One exception to that is if I make stock, there’s a good chance that’s going to sit out for a good while to cool down. It takes a while to get a big pot of liquid down to a reasonable temperature to put in the fridge. I also figure it’s been simmering for several hours, so odds are there’s no bacteria alive in it, so I throw a lid on it to try to keep it that way, especially when I do it in the pressure cooker because it’s basically been autoclaved at that point and it’s staying in a pretty damn close to totally airtight vessel.
Most vegetables and fruits are fine out on the counter for at least a day or two, and some will last weeks or months depending on temperature, humidity, how much light they get, etc. but most of them last a lot longer in the fridge so that’s where they go. Onions, garlic, potatoes, pineapples, and bananas always live outside of the fridge. Other things like apples, citrus, tomatoes, peppers may go either way depending on how fast I’m planning to use them and how much fridge space I have. Cut-up produce always goes in the fridge.
Hello fellow butter bell enthusiast.
I am you, and most of my friends (American) are kind of grossed out by me. Lots of people live by the “expiration” date on the package, regardless of what condition the food is in. Food doesn’t just instantly convert to arsenic the moment the date passes, idiots. Many refuse to even eat leftovers. The amount of food waste is appalling.
Before expiration / best by date: eat without a second thought.
After the expiration / best by date: give it a sniff or a nibble first.
Vegetarian/Germany. I’ll leave food on the counter too as long as I’m still planning to eat it the same day. Never had issues. If I’m planning to only eat it the next day, I’ll refrigerate it.
