When I was a kid we brought our lunches to school in metal lunch boxes or brown bags. When we got to class the lunches were put into a cupboard until lunch time. Typically the lunches would be a sandwich, a Thermos of milk, and a snack such as chips, an apple, or a dessert.
This was in San Diego, which could get a little warm, and the school was not air conditioned; and kids might have a 20- or 30-minute walk to school. So lunches would be unrefrigerated for four hours or more. Nowadays we’re warned to eat or refrigerate perishables within two hours, as bacteria can double their numbers every 20 minutes. And yet I don’t remember anyone getting sick from eating unrefirgerated lunches that have been sitting in a relatively warm cupboard for hours. Obviously the Thermos keeps the milk cool, and the balogna (a typical sandwich ingredient in the mid-to-late-'60s) has loads of preservatives in it. But what about the mayo? Or egg- or tuna-salad?
How do today’s safe food handling recommendations relate to the way we handled our lunches when we were kids?
Eggs: Salmonella wasn’t really widespread just yet.
Luncheon meats are high in sodium, a natural preservative.
Milk was usually kept in a thermos and it wouldn’t go bad and cause food poisoning if it warmed up over several hours, but taste wouldn’t be perfect.
Most food can sit around. Food poisoning comes from handling issues… wherein someone puts there e-coli on your food (fecal matter)… or the food has salmonella that was not cooked out.
How often did you really have people bringing egg or tuna salad? My family was pretty food safety conscious and my sandwich options were tomato and cheese, ham and cheese, or PB&J. Actually *warm *tuna or egg salad sounds right nasty to me, although YMMV. I suppose people might have used some precursor to today’s gel-packs.
Just because you, as an elementary school boy, don’t remember anyone getting sick from their lunches, now some 20 or more years later, doesn’t mean much. Obviously a ton of kids at your school got sick for various reasons, as they do in all schools. Food poisoning can take a day or so to kick in. If one of your classmates threw up at night or had diarrhea the next day, would you really have been in on a conversation about why that happened? There was a lot of belief in the “stomach flu” and “24-hour bug” back in those days that was actually food contamination.
The U.S. Government reported that as many as 20% of all chickens were contaminated with salmonella in the late 1990s, and 16.3% were contaminated in 2005.[4] In the mid to late twentieth century, Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis was a common contaminant of eggs. This is much less common now with the advent of hygiene measures in egg production and the vaccination of laying hens to prevent salmonella colonization. Many different salmonella serovars also cause severe diseases in animals other than human beings.
Salmonella was more common in the past. The reason you didn’t hear about food poisoning is because people used to get a lot of “24-hour viruses” and 'stomach flu" that was really food poisoning, but nobody realized it.
You have to realize that salmonella is so virulent that only 99.98% of the people who get it manage to survive, and in healthy school kids it’s just not that big a deal. Infants and elderly, or folks with compromised immune systems might have a problem.
In the past there wasn’t a 24-hour news cycle to ramp up a few dozen cases of diarrhea into a plague.
… And as kids we played outside, in the grass, in the dirt, etc., and got filthy. When it came time to go in for lunch, or play after school (supper), our hand washing was less than ideal. Oh yeah, Mom used a wooden cutting board (eventually she got a better one we made in shop class in high school), and wiped up the kitchen counters after eating using the same sponge she used for household cleaning.
Then there are the cats and dogs and hamsters and ferrets and frogs and turtles, etc., we had as pets and never washed our hands in between playing with them and eating …
Still alive today and quite healthy. Of course, us Baby Boomers probably have stronger immune systems than the Gen-X and Gen-Y since we were also exposed to the flu epidemics of the '50s and '60s, not to mention polio. Natural selection and all that.
In our bird flu and swine flu training, those most at risk are the elderly and the very young (of course!), and Gen-X and Gen-Y. Those least susceptible are your children and Baby Boomers.
Besides, a sandwich sitting out for four hours tastes even better with cold milk!
I’ll need some cites. That smacks of urban myth. If anything, I would bet that improved nutrition, etc, as children would make X and Y’ers have better immune systems. I would also guess that X and Y people tend to be out in the world, at college, travelling, etc, and thus are more likely to be exposed.
This “better immune system due to polio”? I don’t think so.
According to the hygiene hypothesis, children today in first-world countries are more likely to get allergies because their immune systems aren’t strengthened by the diseases that used to be common:
The claim is that only immunological and autoimmune disorders are more common in first-world countries. Furthermore, they have become more common in many countries as they have become cleaner. Immunological and autoimmune discorders are more common in smaller families and in urban (as opposed to rural) families. There are also animal studies showing that cleanliness increases immunological and autoimmune disorders.
If they are controlling for access to medical care and there is a control in place for diagnosis, then I will start accepting the studies.
You are going straight to cause and effect, a syndrome all-too-common when looking at relationships between data.
Maybe wealthier people have more access to antibiotics, and the antibiotics are negatively affecting the bacteria essential to one’s immune system. Maybe it’s a million other things.
You seem to be saying, “I can come up with all sorts of objections that medical researchers haven’t come up with, since obviously I’m smarter than them.” Yes, it’s possible that there are some other factors that cause this effect, since there are enormous numbers of possible factors and only a finite amount of time to test each one of them. Do you really think that medical researchers are too stupid to have tested some of the obvious ones?
Whether it was or not, commercially manufactured mayonnaise uses pasteurized egg products.
Also, eggs are hardboiled. Granted, according to an earlier thread egg whites/yolks harden at 140-150F; is this enough to kill any salmonella present?
Still, other bacteria get introduced during sandwich prep, and spending several hours (before lunch time) at incubation temp may create a substantial population of nasty bugs.
I think that back then - and now - the public (and the guvmint) didn’t hear about individual food poisoning cases unless someone was in bad enough shape to seek professional medical attention. And even when individual cases require treatment, it doesn’t make the evening news unless there’s a pattern of professinally treated illness that suggests a commercially available product is to blame. Most folks (including myself back in '03) just get sick as a dog for 24 hours, take a day off work, and then everything’s fine, and the health department is none the wiser.
So just because you aren’t hearing about the thousands of people every year who get 24 hours of projectile vomiting and nightmarish diarrhea doesn’t mean that keeping your lunch in the fridge before eating is a waste of effort…
I grew up drinking water upstream from this lake (well, a wide spot in a river). I’m just glad I have two arms, two legs, and a single head… My town’s drinking water source was upstream from this location a little bit, but I’m sure the water wasn’t all that much better when it entered the intake pipe of the treatment plant.
Our lunches were kept in our warm lockers half the day. I also don’t recall anyone getting sick from their lunch.
I also don’t know of anyone vapor locking from eating peanuts, cracking their skull because they didn’t wear a bicycle helmet, receiving permanent injuries because the playground was cement, or dying of lung cancer because their folks smoked. Any injuries we did get were easily repaired with a healthy application of Mercurochrome.
Of course, I started grade school back in the mid-60’s before the wimps were allowed to take over the world. Perhaps kids were a little tougher then.
I ate one or the other for years. Mom has said many times she got so tired of making tuna she can barely look at it now. We just put them in a lunch box or paper bag.
