We had a six hour power outage last evening.
This morning WalMart was trashing many foods. Among the foods thrown out were bacon and corned beef.
Where I grew up we had no electricity, no refrigeration. Among our staples, because they would survive the heat of summer, were bacon and corned beef.
I read news stories about food poisoning from produce. WalMart was not tossing produce.
Go figure. Must be regulations or insurance reasons.
Food poisoning from produce comes from food that has been contaminated, not food that has gotten warm. Meat, milk and cheese are required by regulation to be kept within certain temperatures in order to be safe to sell, if the power was out long enough for the refridgeration room to rise above that temp they are required by law to dispose of it.
Ask Metafilter thread about bacon and refrigeration. It sounds like modern American bacon isn’t made the same way as it was back in the day when it didn’t require refrigeration.
I used to work at Burger King. Health regs set a certain length of time that sandwiches were good for. If a sandwich hadn’t been sold in that length of time, we had to throw it away.
Now, the thing is–most people probably wouldn’t consider the sandwich to be all that old when we had to throw it away. A lot of people would cheerfully eat it, and consider that the chance of getting sick was zero. And most of the time, the chance of getting sick would be zero.
But when you serve food to dozens or hundreds of people per day, even a very small chance of something bad happening can translate to people getting sick.