I think you’ve settled your own debate there. I bet you that the vast majority of the other potluckees will be chowing down without ill effect - in other words, you’re the odd one out.
Thanks to the time I’ve spent travelling in Asia, I’ve had food poisoning dozens of times. It’s unpleasant, but very rarely life-threatening*. I’m certainly not that dead. If you take it as an occasional fact of life rather than trying to avoid even the slightest hint of it, you’ll be a lot more relaxed.
Germ paranoia is a growing and worrying thing, as it compromises our immune systems, especially those of children.
*The worst I ever had was giardiasis, which I got from ice cubes not food. It was nasty, but I also lost 20 lbs, so every cloud…
Yeah, after food poisoning my pants fit really well, but I don’t feel like leaving the house to show them off.
I refrigerate all the time but husband doesn’t; he has some secret system I don’t try to figure out. I even refrigrate pizza, I don’t leave it out ever.
My MIL, dear lady that she is, leaves stuff out on the counter to thaw, is sometimes slow to refrigerate leftovers, and occasionally doesn’t even cover whatever she’s putting in the fridge! All of those things give me the heebie-jeebies. On the other hand, she’s 76 and in pretty good health (I don’t think you can blame her arthritis on her food handling.)
As for me, I’m quick to put leftovers of any type, wrapped or in a sealed container, into the fridge. If you get the munchies later, it’ll be there, and the microwave is handy if you prefer warmed munchies. Just wrap it tightly when you’re done!
Years ago, I knew a bar in Quincy, MA. The owners were two irish guys, who sold sandwiches as well. I would see them pake a pice of roast beef, and put it into a slicing machine-it would stay out (at room temp) all day! They would slice off pieces to make sandwiches (which I never would eat). At the end of the day, the roast beef would be back in the fridge. How these guys never killed anybody is a great mystery 9to me anyway).
I am pretty compulsive about refrigerating things. My friends leave leftovers out until they cool, to save fridge energy?, but I put even warm things away asap. They even leave pizza and butter out overnight??
So I would side with the OP and not faintly nutty boyfriend on the fridge question.
As far as the nuttiness of using plates, this I can get behind but only because of my own…specialness. I am compulsive about food and have to have it arranged so I know what’s left and just how much I still get to eat. serving the food and cleaning up all the wrappings is part of the ritual.
We’ll eat burgers and fries, etc. off of the wrapper. But anything with a sauce, like most Chinese, Indian or Italian take-out, we’ll put our individual servings on a plate while leaving the container as the serving dish.
I’d eat stuff left out for a few hours, heck a big holiday dinner can take a couple of hours to consume, and it doesn’t become dangerous that quickly.
One thing I absolutely draw the line at is ice cream, though. The container must never be out of the freezer long enough to get melty. My mom got horrible food poisoning from re-frozen ice cream. My MIL used to intentionally leave the ice cream container out to get soft before serving it, and then later put it back in the freezer. I could not convince her that she was creating a nice bacteria incubator, and would never eat ice cream at her house.
Butter can get rancid - which usually takes weeks - but food poisoning is not a concern. Lots of families leave butter out indefinitely, because they like it soft rather than hard.
I’m half on your side, and half on his side. I usually put takeout food on a plate, because sometimes it’s hard to eat out of the containers. Some food is easier to eat with a real fork (like salad–I can’t eat salad with a plastic fork), but it’s hard to use a real fork with styrofoam containers. I feel just a tiny bit more civilized when I eat my greasy fast food off of real dishes.
Takeout containers aren’t good for reheating food, either, so if I need to heat it, I’ll put it in a different dish before I stick it in the microwave.
I wouldn’t leave food out for several hours and then eat it. Especially fried rice or potato salad–that’s just asking for food poisoning.
A) depends on the food. If it’s packaged individually and doesn’t need to be reheated in the microwave, I’ll eat from the container (hamburgers, sandwiches). If it’s a multiple serving dealie I’ll move to dishes (KFC, chinese) and keep serving from the containers.
B) We leave it out until we are done eating, then into the fridge it goes. Food doesn’t sit out all the time (though we do leave butter out, we have a butter dish and it’s fine… we eat it before it goes rancid and the dish is cleaned regularly). Certain things we do leave out to cool down though, especially things we are freezing (containers of spaghetti sauce for example) because we heard it was better to cool it down than to raise the temp in the freezer.
The three second rule depends on how clean the floor is. At home, where we keep the floor clean? Not so bad. Same with at Grandma’s and the like. Anywhere else? Into the trash.
Here’s something to freak everyone out even more: over here, our supermarkets keep the raw eggs on the shelves, not the refrigerators. Most people refrigerate the eggs when they get home, but there’s no real need.
From what I’ve heard, your friends are right about cooling things off before refrigerating them. I leave small amounts of butter out (you sort of have to judge how fast you’ll eat it, because as others have said, it does go rancid and/or moldy, but that takes weeks). I’m not sure why pizza gets a pass, but I’ve eaten pizza that’s been out for days, and it hasn’t bothered my stomach in the slightest (I would never eat any other food that’s been left out that long).
A friend of mine leaves food out for hours. It drives me crazy. During our last vacation in Canada, I made a chili cheese dip, which consisted of: cream cheese, beef chili that I had made, and cheddar cheese. It sat out all night where people ate it long past the time I found it palatable. (One it congeals, I’m done.) I left it there since I went to bed before everyone else.
The next day my friend was eating it for breakfast. It had sat out all night. She seemed genuinely perplexed by my horror.
As for using dishes for take out food, my bf and I usually use plates for Chinese or Italian take out dinners, even pizza, especially if it’s pizza and wings because you can’t just use paper towels as plates when you have wings. If we get a big salad to split one of use uses a plate and the other uses the container. If we get sandwiches we usually just use the wrappers. So it depends on the food.
As for refrigerating we both will leave things out until they cool off and then we refrigerate but I knew someone who would leave food out all night and eat it in the morning. It was a vet at our emergency clinic. He’d leave stuff like tacos that had meat and sour cream which could easily grow bacteria out all night. Sometimes he would reheat the food, sometimes not. One thing he did a lot was boil some meat, leave it on the stove, then reheat it in the morning and eat it. I have walked by that meat and it smelled nasty, like decomp, and the smell almost made me vomit but he never got sick. My theory is that people that do this sort of thing develop some natural immunity.
I do ‘a’ because I don’t live in a frat house, caveman.
I don’t do ‘b’ because it’s never the case that I eat food, and then find myself eating the same food 3 hours later. But I would leave it out if I wanted to. People are WAY TOO paranoid about food-borne illness.
If we order Chinese, it goes on plates. Since it has sauce, it’s real plates.
Burgers and pizza, paper plates. Well HE uses paper plates for burgers, I don’t. I don’t like all that prep time that getting a paper plate involves. With pizza, it’s paper plates for both of us.
For sandwiches like you get from our pizza place that comes in a bag or in a box, I will eat it out of the bag/box. He will get a paper plate. Usually.
Refrigeration wise - we fridge everything when we’re done. The only thing that’s allowed to sit out overnight is his chili. I HATE chili and refuse to eat it so if he gets sick from leaving it out overnight it’s not MY problem.
If our takeout is Chinese, Indian or Hawaiian, I take what I want from the containers and put it in a bowl. If it’s pizza or something else, we’ll either use plates if there are any clean ones, or eat over the takeout containers.
I’m a little obsessive about putting food in the refrigerator. Perhaps it was growing up in a tropical climate where food spoiled quicker, but I like to put food in the fridge as soon as it’s cooled off.
Sidenote: I keep meaning to print out one of those “How long is it fresh for?” lists and tape it to the fridge.
I think the reason pizza gets a bit of a pass on the food poisoning is because at pizza chains they want to make their recipes as foolproof as possible and so all of the meat is precooked. You don’t have to worry about the stoner on the make line throwing raw hamburger on your pie. If the bacteria doesn’t even reach the restaurant, it certainly isn’t going to multiply on your countertop.
And on the subject of leaving food out at room temp, four hours is the golden rule. The bacteria hasn’t yet hit its stride in exponential growth. Anything after four hours, if there was any bacteria there to begin with, it’s probably gonna get ya.
