Hey all,
So I went to lunch with my sister yesterday at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. I got home and put the leftovers in the fridge at about 5:00 (pm.) This morning, I realized that I didn’t know where the wonton soup was. (This is amazing soup!!) I went outside at about 11:00 am and found that my sister had, for some bizarre reason, left the soup out on the front porch on the table. So the big question is… is it safe to eat?
Here’s yesterday’s weather according to Weather Underground:
Mean Temperature 42 °F
Max Temperature 47 °F
Min Temperature 37 °F
Here’s today’s:
Mean Temperature 41 °F
Max Temperature 46 °F
Min Temperature 36 °F
I’m not exactly sure when the warmest temperature happened. But at about 5:00 last night, it felt pretty cold,and it wasn’t warm this morning. Basically, the soup was sitting outside for 18 hours. Can I eat it?? IT’S WONDERFUL SOUP!! Ahem. All opinions welcome.
Sorry, this is an IMHO answer to a GQ question, but unless someone with professional training in food safety waltzes in, that’s probably mostly what you are going to get:
I’d eat it, but I have a cast-iron stomach and rarely get sick. I certainly wouldn’t feed it to my husband, who is far more prone to GI distress than I am, and certainly not to a child or anyone with a suppressed immune system.
Eat away and enjoy. I leave food out all the time overnight, mostly by accident, but any food sickness I’ve got from restaurant food hasn’t been from unrefrigerated leftovers–it was from food badly prepared/stored before it got to the table.
I’m not a doctor or food scientician. But I have eaten a lot of food.
The soup was in the bad zone from lunch to 5pm, so roughly five hours. Probably a couple of hours outside before it cooled enough(depending on the container). The next day, even if it’s cold, direct sun could warm it back above 40. Moreso depending on what it’s sitting on.
I don’t think it’s ever worthwhile asking people on the internet if it’s OK to eat some food that you suspect may be spoiled, but hope may still be OK.
So 5 people said go ahead, 3 people said no, one on the fence. What now? Eat five-ninths of it?
I think it’s also worth noting, some people are more resilient against food poisoning than others. Like some of the posters above, I won’t even think twice about eating stuff that’s been left out over night.
My GF wouldn’t eat something like that if you put as gun to her head.
I have also noticed, there have been at least two times I can think of where she got sick and I didn’t off of something we both ate.
So my very unscientific theory is, I’m less sensitive to food poisoning because I make a regular habit of eating food that’s been sitting out.
Maybe, or maybe you were just lucky - dose size is relevant - in borderline cases where a foodstuff has a growing population of pathogens, a person who eats more of it, is more likely to suffer problems.
IMO, most cases where one person gets sick and the other does not, are probably cases where the actual contamination event was misidentified - i.e. you both ate the chicken curry in some grotty little cafe, one of you got sick a bit later, and you assume it was the chicken curry, but in fact, it was the sun-ripened prawn mayo sandwich the other person ate the day before - food poisoning can take up to a few days to hit, in some cases.
It’s weird - because I eat stuff without washing it and I eat wild foods straight off the ground, but when it comes to high-risk prepared foods, I tend to err on the side of caution.
The temperatures listed by the OP are pretty chilly, but not as cool as a fridge - what we don’t know, and what is one of the most important factors, is how long it has been at ‘danger zone’ temperatures as it cooled down, and at various points when the sun shone on it, etc - in between the more chilly moments. It doesn’t matter how cold it got - it matters how warm it was, and for how long in total
Also, it depends on how it was stored. A pot of soup that has been simmered with a close-fitting lid on, then left to cool unopened, will sometimes end up effectively being ‘canned’ - a pot of soup that was cooled with the lid off has had plenty of chance for new pathogens to float in on the breeze.
All of this, is why internet advice is pretty useless. Even if all of the facts were enough to make a decision, there’s no way we will get them all.
One thing I will say, pre-emptively (as it hasn’t happened in this thread yet) is that advice to the effect “If it smells OK, it’s OK” is false. If this advice actually worked, food poisoning would be rare.
I think we all assumed it was covered at least from the moment it was forgotten, because yes, if the thing was open all night with birds, bats and insects shitting into it, I imagine anyone would just summarily decide it wasn’t even worth asking if it might be OK.
The question is actually: how long was it uncovered? If it was uncovered for a couple of hours while it was cooling down, then the risk is higher than if it was only opened while it was piping hot.
Here’s an argument for not eating it. If you eat it and get sick, you’ll probably never want to eat that soup again. (I ate something once, got sick - for unrelated reasons - and never ate it again.)
