Suppose we have food that was at one time edible (this condition is specified to exclude toxic foods like death-cap mushrooms or pufferfish liver).
Isn’t it always safe to eat the food, regardless of how long it’s been sitting on the kitchen counter, provided I cook it enough? I read about a “botulinum cook” temperature: 121 °C (250 °F) for 3 minutes. Is it possible for the food to remain dangerous even after cooking? You might have to cook it for a long time, and it might not taste very good or be very tender, but I am guessing that you can always make it safe to eat.
You can always kill bacteria and other nasties by cooking something enough.
But, you will not eliminate the toxic chemicals excreted by said nasties while they were alive. In the case of botulism, the disease is actually caused by the botulinum toxin, which is produced by the C. botulinum bacteria.
I’ll accept that. I was wrong. But what if I put that old hamburger meat on a rocket and sent it into the sun? I bet that would destroy the botulinum toxin.
Also, prions (the structures that are thought to induce the damage that causes mad cow disease and Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease in humans) aren’t destroyed by simple heat.
Well, you can still thermally denature them if you try hard enough.
The pedantic answer to the OP’s question would be “yes,” although I don’t think a small smear of mineral oxides and carbon dioxide would be very palatable.
The more practical answer has already been mentioned, of course. The metabolites and various excretions of the bacteria rather than the organisms themselves are responsible for food poisoning, and until you reach a temperature at which you can start to physically degrade the molecules involved (at which point your meatballs will probably just be small, blackened smoldering lumps) you shouldn’t consume them.
Then again, you probably shouldn’t consume them after they’re small, blackened smoldering lumps either. YMMV.
Of course, botulism is far from the only type of food poisoning one needs to be concerned with, and I’ve never heard of a single set temperature and length of sustained temperature that’s supposed to make everything safe regardless of the storage history of a food, but generally I think you’ll be much safer with thoroughly reheated leftovers.
More or less agree with threemae. Heat both kills bacteria and denatures toxins. It’s just that you can kill bacteria quickly, but it takes either more heat or more time to take out the toxins. So, it’s true, as others have pointed out, that simply cooking food doesn’t solve both problems. But, both can be solved.
Not necessarily. Your cite mentions only botulin. C. botulinum is hardly the only bacterium out there; it’s not even the most likely–doesn’t it require anaerobic conditions?
