July 4 cookout delimna: my wife always gets sick

In My Humble Opinion
21

I think bringing something is an excellent idea, if they get butthurt, they can deal with it,

I have issues with some forms of fat, it was just slightly before the whole colorectal cancer thing, we had thought it was originally a gallbladder issue [fat digestion/processing issues are a common differential for gallbladder issues] but post treatment, I still have issues with fat content and fat type is also important. Canola oil is always problematic for me, and I tolerate animal fat better than veggie fat though ultra neutral rice bran oil works best for me.

I have learned the immodium thing [though for the upcoming flight/layover/flight thing to Nevada 5th - 12th I am simply not eating solid food for 12 hours before, taking the ‘deathpoo’ combo of 2 immodium/1 lomotil washed down with a dose of kaopectate that I was doing during chemo/radiation to effectively shut down my digestive tract totally til I get to the hotel. Will be repeating it for the trip back.

Sucky for your wife, but unless you have digestive issues, you don’t realize how horrible it can be.

22

Your wife may be having health issues with the self cleaning cycle of outdoor grills.

23

What is it about self cleaning mode that would be able to affect the food?

24

Being incomplete.

25

I’m not familiar with self-cleaning propane grills; how do they operate?

26

Not just propane, but any outdoor grill. I think he’s talking about initially firing the grill to a very high temperature to burn off any food residue stuck to the grating after the previous use. Nava suggests that the problem might be with incomplete heating/cleaning of the grating prior to cooking the current meal, but unless the cooking heat is extremely low, there should be no trouble getting the grating (and the surface of the food) to a safe temperature, even without an incendiary cleaning cycle.

27

Exactly; something like 160 for 15 seconds is sufficient to pasteurize foods, so I’d think that if you get your grill grates up to 300 or so (probably lower than needed for grill marks) before you put your food on, you should be good.

And… what grills have self-cleaning cycles? None that I’ve ever had or used. I suppose it’s possible to fire them up on the highest settings and let it go for a while, but I suspect that’s probably worse for the grill than just brushing the crud off.

28

Count me in with the "bring food for your wife to enjoy; her parents will just have to deal with it" crowd.

29

How big is this cookout? I’ve seen similar question to this online (usually regarding dietary restrictions) and my thought is always, “Who’s paying attention to what other people are eating at a cookout?”

30

If Wife has told the parents how violently ill she gets after their cookouts and they still insist on cooking out, then that’s a bigger issue.

Bottom line, you and Wife stick to your guns. No cookout food, explain repeatedly (in graphic detail) what happens when she eats their cookout food. You’re not risking that again, lather rinse repeat.

31

I’m in the “probably bad food handling” camp - I don’t see propane being significantly different from natural gas, and I’m guessing that many restaurants that serve grilled food use one or the other of those. Although I see you have had a problem with a local restaurant. However, restaurants aren’t immune to bad food handling either.

I think your wife has the right idea - if she thinks she can bring her own food without drama, trust her.

“Sorry, I’m not feeling well” will lead to less drama today, but won’t wash after a couple of events.

“I’m sorry, but I keep getting sick every time I eat grilled foods” will probably be more effective in the long run. But if it’s poor food prep, it may not be the grilled foods, it may be the potato salad. Do y’all eat at their house when it’s not being prepared on the grill?

And… they may counter with “of course, other people’s grilling, but not ours”

At which point your wife will have to say “Actually, the last x times I have, and I just can’t afford to risk it anymore”. Or you can say that for her.

In fact, you should probably be prepared to speak for your wife. The problem we tend to have when dealing with parents is that we regress to our childhood mindset of “Don’t disagree with Mommy and Daddy because they’ll get mad at me” That’s a really hard mindset to overcome for anyone. So it may be up to you to stand up for your wife’s health.

And that may mean just flat out angering them. You may have to ask them “So you think that my wife should risk being sick enough to lose work just to satisfy your idea of what is right in this situation?” IOW, what ivylass said

Good luck, and I hope you have a happy, sickness-free, and drama-free fourth.

32

Slight hijack, but since we are talking about grill safety - I recently replaced some parts on my grill, and since I had it disassembled I took the time to clean out about a dozen years worth of grease and gunk. In that grease and gunk were a noticeable amount of tiny metal wires from grill brushes. I’ve read stories about people getting seriously injured by ingesting these and have been using a wood grill scraper after using the metal brush to make sure there were no metal wires on the grill. But after seeing how many of these little wires were dropping into the grease abyss of the grill I have tossed the metal brush. Now I just use the high heat burn off and the wood scraper. Might try a plastic brush if I feel the need to use a brush.

33

If you wad up some aluminum foil you can use it to scrub off the grates too, and its pretty easy to see if you get any stuck on there.

It works when the grill is hot too, but I wouldn’t do that with a plastic brush. Plastic is no yummy.

34

So latest update despite my protests we came over for another cookout for July 4. FIL this time grilled chicken but kept the grill lid open to reduce the propane absorption into the meat.

So far so good, so my latest hypothesis is my wife just can’t handle grilled hamburger meat (though McDonalds and Wendys does not bother her) or hot dogs (rarely eats anyway). But she usually wins with chicken.

Solution for the next doggie roast? We’ll bring our own chicken, thank you!

As for the poster who said it was all in her head because of propane, almost everytime I’ve had weiners or burgers with the IL, within 20 minutes of coming home I’ve had the drizzlers. Not just in her head!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

35

Yes, but the salient factor there may not be the propane; it may be the in-laws and their food handling and preparation standards.

36

It’s possible you’re experiencing sympathy pains, both ways, especially since you feel ill only after you get home. The nice thing is that if it is, it’s because of true love and compassion for each other.

37

If keeping the lid closed meant that a significant amount of propane was gathering, you’d eventually blow the lid off when that accumulated propane ignites.

McDonald’s and Wendy’s don’t use gas-fired grills, they use gas fired griddles. What’s the difference?

On a grill, the meat is placed on a wire-mesh surface, and the hot gases are allowed to pass through the mesh and directly contact the meat.

On a griddle, the meat is on a broad sheet of solid metal. The hot gases are on the underside of the metal sheet and never come into contact with the food. As far as the meat is concerned, this is no different from cooking in a pan on your stovetop.

The biggest difference between Wendy’s/McDonald’s and your in-laws’ kitchen is likely to be procedure. The restaurants have rigorous food-handling procedures to follow to assure food safety. The burger patties are of a uniform size, they’re kept cold until cooking time, the griddle is kept at a thermostatically-controlled temperature, and the cook time is managed with a timer. The combination of all of these parameters was established through testing and demonstrated to reliably cook the burgers to a safe internal temperature without requiring the preparer to regularly poke at them with a meat thermometer. The restaurants are highly motivated to stick to their establish procedures, lest the health department come down on them.

Your in-law’s kitchen has likely never been visited by the local health department and isn’t following instructions handed down from corporate headquarters, so they get to make up their own kitchen procedures/policies with zero oversight, which may be provide a less reliable degree of food safety. If (for example) the grill runs hot, they may look at the nearly-burned exterior of a burger patty and think “well, that one’s done” even if the interior may still be dangerously pink.

Is the raw meat left sitting at room temperature for any significant time before grilling?

Do your in-laws use a meat thermometer to check the internal temperature of grilled items before serving?

Do they place cooked meat from the grill back on the plate that the raw meat came from, without having washed the plate?

38

If only words had only one meaning for everybody.

39

I don’t think that was the point. The point was that McD’s don’t use a grill in the sense the OP is imagining a grill. Call it whatever you want, grill, griddle, flattop, etc., but it’s not the same sort of grill you’d get at a family cookout, which is directly exposed to the fire source below and, hence, if this propane theory were to hold any water, would require direct exposure of propane to the food itself. This would not happen with a flattop grill a la McD’s, but would with a gridiron grill a la a backyard cookout/barbecue.

For that matter, is there a lot of (presumably) uncombusted propane that can get absorbed into the food when using a grill? I wouldn’t have thought so, but I don’t know. (And, besides, I don’t think they would be using propane, anyway, would they? Natural gas I would assume, which is only a very small %age propane, rather mostly methane.)

40

Most home gas grills are propane fueled (and propane accessories) by tanks you can buy and refill at the grocery store or home center. Fewer grills are tapped into the houses natural gas supply.

We had a grill that hooked up to natural gas when I was growing up, but even when we converted our current house to natural gas recently we still used propane tanks until we could get a new grill.