Last night (Saturday) I was visited by the stomach bug fairy, and I got to spend about four hours in the bathroom being miserable. I’m still chilled and have muscle aches, but the worst seems to have passed.
This year for Christmas, I’m making various edibles for my family: bar cookies, caramel sauce, pickled onions, buckeye candies, and so on. I made the buckeyes yesterday, and I made the bar cookies on Friday.
So here’s my question: do I throw away all the things I made, on the presumption that the bug is something contagious and that I was probably contagious during the week when I made things? If I do that, I’m likely not to be able to give Christmas gifts to most of my relatives, but I’d rather give them nothing than four hours of misery.
Or do I figure that it was probably food poisoning (I ate some deviled eggs yesterday afternoon that had been sitting out for an hour or two), and give the gifts?
If it were I, I’d ditch the food. It was probably food poisoning, but it could have been viral gastroenteritis. And could have been is likely enough, and contagious by shared food, so…well, think of it this way: how bad would you feel if someone got sick and you weren’t sure if maybe it was your food that did it? Consider that the same virus that causes 1 day of symptoms in one person can cause 10 days of symptoms in another, and severe gastroenteritis can lead to dehydration severe enough to require hospitalization.
The food might be okay, might not. Your ethical call as to the next step.
A few years ago my friend and her kid and I think her husband all came down with a stomach bug. Shortly after they were done with it, and my friend “wiped down the house,” a bunch of us met over there to make cookies. We made the cookies and took some home home, and one by one each of us who’d been in attendance came down with this bug. It was the most awful illness I’d ever had, albeit the shortest. I think I got my bout of it that very night!
I didn’t throw away the cookies - but I didn’t give them away like I’d planned. I ate them myself (actually I ate some of them myself then tossed the rest, because my friends apparently suck at making cookies).
I wouldn’t risk it. Especially with no-bake treats like buckeyes. Your germy hands were all over them and now the germs are sitting around being all germy waiting to go on to someone else. Eeew!
