I am not any kind of expert and in no position to give advice, especially about food safety. But FWIW, I’d been making and refrigerating rice for a week or more at a time for many years before learning that you’re not “supposed” to do that. Also FWIW, it’s usually not plain white rice, but white rice cooked with vegetable broth and maybe some dehydrated porcini mushrooms.
My guide for how long to keep it? The sniff test. Sometimes it’s been in there long enough that it starts to smell off, so out it goes. Otherwise, I reheat it in the microwave and enjoy it.
Again, not food safety advice, but it hasn’t killed me yet. As for cooling, in the summer I leave it out until it’s no longer hot – just slightly warm at most – before refrigerating. In winter, of course, there’s the wonderful garage-size natural refrigerator!
I mean, people carry around unrefrigerated rice balls to eat later. Hikers carry rice. Any rice eaten on an airplane has been reheated. Literature on resistant starches involves reheating rice.
The trouble with the sniff test is that most of the pathogens that cause food poisoning are odourless. You have to rely on the assumption (usually tacit) that the other micro-organisms and processes that cause smelly spoilage of the food are progressing at the same rate as the growth of foodborne pathogens.
It’s not a completely terrible rule of thumb; part of the reason we find spoiled food revolting is that it is generally the case that everything progresses in step, but if it were 100% reliable, food poisoning would be very rare, only happening to people who have no sense of smell.
The FDA estimates there are about 63,000 cases of B. Cereus poisoning every year but those cases tend to be mild. 3 deaths have been confirmed from it 1998-2025
Those are all good points. Two things may be of note here. One is that I rarely make plain white rice, and when I do, it’s usually for some one specific purpose and I make only a small quantity and anything left over gets thrown out, not out of caution but just because I’m unlikely to have any use for it in the near term. The type of rice that, for me, is the most versatile is the kind I make with vegetable broth. So it’s possible that the broth itself is a marker of spoilage that otherwise might not be detectable in plain white rice.
Another point worth noting, at least according to my understanding, is that food left unrefrigerated too long is much more likely to develop dangerous pathogens without smelling bad, whereas in general the sniff test (and appearance) is more reliable for properly refrigerated foods, though as you say, it’s never 100%.
But anyway, bottom line is I’ve never worried about rice storage and never been hurt by it.
Refrigeration certainly does alter the development of various different forms of spoilage - I haven’t seen any data on exactly how though.
There is one other point to consider; people are frequently mistaken about the cause of food poisoning incidents and other digestive upsets; some of them may take multiple days to incubate and manifest, others can be nearly instantaneous (interestingly. residual heat resistant toxins from B.cereus is apparently one of the really fast ones and some people have reported onset of symptons while they were loading the fork for the second time, so I am more inclined to believe people when they describe what they did with rice).
But as a general point, when people say they have always done X and it’s been fine, they can be wrong about that - in some cases, doing X last week initiated a foodborne sickness that manifested only today, and they attributed blame to the perfectly safe and fine burrito they ate just this lunchtime.