My question comes from a conversation I had with a friend. A 18 wheelers refrigerator unit went bad and it cost some big amount of money in wasted meat and cheese, but if heat kills germs couldn’t I just take meat that has been at room temperature for a week and cook it?
Also if my car leaks oil, and I keep putting new oil in my car, do I need to get an oil change? I mean old oil is leaving, and new oil is coming in all the time, right?
There are byproducts from the growth of the bad bacteria that are toxic. Even if you kill the bacteria after they’ve had time to spread throughout the meat, you’ll leave their toxic remains in the food.
TL: DR version of SenorBeef’s post: Germ poop. It’s poisonous.
Agree with what others said about the bad meat.
Regarding your car oil.
There are several problems.
you don’t replace your oil filter. That eventually fills up with crap and needs to be replaced.
Most likely, you’re not leaking oil so much as you’r burning it up. That reduces the volume of the oil (meaning you need to add more), but leaves grimey crap in your engine that you need to flush out with a proper oil change.
You should confine thread topics to one per thread. This should have been two separate threads.
tl;dr
No. and No.
That’s certainly true of a minority of spoilage bacteria, and by itself is reason enough not to try it. But there are other reasons.
The first is taste. Spoiled food tastes like, well, spoiled food. Even if you cook rotten meat it will still taste like cooked rotten meat. Cooking won’t remove the rancid fats, the sulfides, the mucous and so forth that make rotten meat or rotten cheese smell like something dead and feel slimy. It may be perfectly safe to eat, but no way in hell is anyone actually going to eat it something that smells like roadkill and has the texture of yoghurt.
The second is the amount of time needed to sterilise food. Normal cooking doesn’t sterilise. What it does do is reduce the amount of any dangerous bacteria on the surface of the food to a level that probably isn’t harmful to humans. While there are still live bacteria, especially spores, on most cooked food, they get digested in the gut before they can cause problems. When the food has had the chance to incubate at room temperature for days the bacterial load can be huge. Additonally instead of the microbes being primarily confined to the surface of the food, it finds its way right through the material. Even if you kill 99.99% of what is there, the ones that survive will be more than enough to make you very ill. To make spoiled food safe to eat, you would basically need to dice it finely and then pressure cook it for half an hour. Since it’s impossible to enforce such a rule, the supplier won’t risk the law suit for when somebody doesn’t do that, and simply throws the food out. It’s safer.
No, reheating meat is definitely NOT considered an oil change.
(IANABiologist but) Spoiled meat is basically meat that has already been eaten, by bacteria. They got to it first. Heating it up might kill them off, but you’re not gonna get the meat back… just their waste products. This is why meat that’s been on the counter too long before being refrigerated should be tossed, too. The microbes are always eating away at it, the cold just slows them down… if they get too much of a head start and reproduce exponentially, the meat’s done for.
On the other side, in 1997 we had a power failure that lasted a week. The house temperature fell to 34 deg F and the freezer rose to about that. This is really not enough for meat to spoil, but it was not a good idea to refreeze it. So we took it (maybe ten pounds) and made a giant stew. We cooked it for hours, froze the results and ate it over the next year. Delicious.
I have heard in a survival situation one can eat rotten meat if you cook it very well*, but you should only do this once as opposed to recooking leftovers a second time, which would increase risk of harm somehow.
Only a week. 
This is just the start of a proper dry aged meat. I assume it was still bagged, so a week would have been a good wet aged time
When it comes to the high end of dining, controlled spoilage rules. Hung pheasant anyone? Forget your pathetic 34 degrees - try a week at 55 degrees.
The poster did state “leaks” and not burning. If the leaks are small, then the situation is not substantially different than any other vehicle without a leak. Maybe a quart in 500 miles is a breakpoint. With a leak more substantial than that, the oil is being replaced so fast that changing it is a waste. An ongoing amount of carbon particles are leaving through the leak. The filter should not plug up for a much longer period of time, say 2-3 times as long as normally for starters. I’d feel safe going forever by just adding top oil in this situation. I’d keep an eye on the filter for rust, which is pretty rare yet still possible. And ultimately, I could just change the filter itself and move on without changing the oil.
An extreme rear main leak on a Taurus would be a common example. The leakage was extreme. You could see it running out. The cost of replacement is also extreme. I topped my neighbor’s car off like this for a year with oil I had available. The oil was always crystal clear like a fresh change. I also had to clean the parking space every two weeks or so with kitty litter. The vehicle is still running somewhere I bet. I hope the owner lives on a dirt road. (Actually, the new owner was a mechanic who was going to repair the engine.)
So you are saying its “dead meat” ?
ISTR hearing that Volkswagen were making engines with 10,000 mile oil change intervals, and that to achieve this, they designed the engine to burn a small amount of oil, and noted in the manual that it should be checked frequently and topped up as needed.
No source, but it seems plausible to me. As noted above, filters are generally fine for much longer than the oil will be, unless there is some problem with the engine that lets contaminants into the oil.
The breaking point when it would be considered an oil change, I would say, is when you are replacing as much oil as the engine holds within the oil change interval, e.g. oil should be changed every 6000 miles, engine (oil) capacity 6 litres, but the car uses about a litre every 1000 miles, so the oil would effectively remain fresh indefinitely, as long as the filter was replaced after say, 10,000 miles.
You could be topping up slightly less, like a litre every 1500 miles, and the oil would stay pretty clean, but there would still be oil in the system for longer than the recommended time.
I would add that none of the above applies in terms of the manufacturer deeming you to have followed the service schedule if it relates to a warranty issue.
If you’re burning that much oil and still have a warranty, you should get the manufacturer to fix it, of course.
Good point, well made. :smack:
For a long while I’ve had a question about meat spoilage.
If I leave raw meat in the fridge for a long time – let’s say 5 days – it will spoil. If I leave cooked meat in there for a long time – let’s say 5 days – it will spoil. If I leave it for 5 days raw, then cook it, can I get another 5 days out of it for a total of 10?
Most carmakers consider 1 quart per 1000 miles to be normal (or at least “acceptable” and so won’t fix it) so if they prescribe 5,000 mile changes, you could very well burn through your crankcase capacity between changes. I’d be pretty pissed if I had a newer car that was burning that much oil and they wouldn’t fix it under warranty, but it could also be an issue with some of the super-long drivetrain warranties they have these days.
Botulinum toxin, the stuff that causes botulism, is stable to 176 F. That’s hotter than the final temperature for most cooked meats. If a food has botulinum toxin in it, cooking it is not necessarily going to make it safe.
You probably can’t get double the time, but you can get more.
If you model bacterial growth as a geometric progression, the highest populations and the most spoilage are going to happen near the date where the meat has gone bad. That’s sort of why meat seems to go bad all of a sudden.
When you cook the meat, you’re drastically reducing the bacterial populations. If you cook it hot enough, you probably kill them all briefly (but they’ll get reestablished from the air, or whatever the meat rests on that wasn’t sterilized, or whatever).
So, if the meat is edible at 4 days and spoiled at 5, you can probably get 8 days out of it by cooking it at day 4.
Note that this is a vast generalization based on some pretty major assumptions about bacteria, none of which have been tested. So don’t go blaming me if you get E. coli.
Wha??? If I buy a new car and after 3,000 miles, it is 3 quarts low on oil, the dealership will say that is within specs and not a problem? I would go nuts if I heard that…