Just to throw out another related subject to argue about
Bacterial growth is often affected by the pH of the medium. Pizza with tomato sauce would tend to be acidic, and should therefore be a more difficult place for bacteria to survive. Other sauces, especially dairy-based, might allow bacteria to flourish more easily. Toppings could conceivably also alter the rate and quantity of bacterial growth.
Regarding pizza consumption: I’m not too picky… but microwave reheating is out! It’s either cold out of the fridge or reheated in a regular oven.
Microwaves certainly do kill bacteria “directly”, by heating the water in their cytoplasm; they don’t, however, ionize molecules and thus kill by damaging DNA.
On a related note - a few times, I have heard that “microwaving destroys nutrients”, or some variant of that.
This whiffs of crapitude, and stirs in me a mighty urge to tell off the snotty “a microwave is only good for boiling water” people with almost reflexive quickness, but I thought I’d post it to the board first. Are they full of it, or am I? Any takers?
The article says, "The pizza was microwaved … ", which, with the definite article up front, tends to imply that the whole pizza was microwaved. However, 30 seconds or even a minute is no where near enough time to adequately heat up a whole pizza. Since the temperature rise in a microwave oven for a given run time depends on the total amount water in there to heat, some measure of the amount of pizza heated should have been mentioned. I am guessing that it was probably a single slice; but even that is an imprecise measure. The weight of the slice would also have been a relevant thing to mention. Even more relevant would have been to mention something representative of the actual temperature achieved.
Microwaving will destroy some nutrients, but those are the same nutrients that will be destroyed by any kind of cooking at all. And on the other hand, there are some nutrients that can’t be easily digested until they’re cooked.
If you’re such a cheapskate that you would rather risk three or four days of vomiting and GI distress than throw away $3 worth of leftover pizza, then you deserve everything you get.
Once food gets to room temp. you have 4 hours AT MOST of safe eating; 2 hours is better. After that you’re playing bacterial Russian roulette. And as the other poster noted, heat won’t eliminate the bacteria’s waste products.
I use the microwave to sterilize my dish sponges. I put them in wet for two minutes on a turntable on high. After two minutes on the turn table, they’re pretty hot. It gets rid of the mildewy smell.
This was recommended to be done daily by either the CDC or the British equivalent. However, the agency changed its recommendation because the sponges could catch on fire. The changed recommendation was daily sterilization via the dishwasher.
