I contracted Salmonella from sprouts and it seems like veggies are a huge source.
http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/ucm261706.htm
Listeria may still be a concern but it is in everything.
For a while I was at a school where the day started at 7:30am and lunch wasn’t until 1pm. Forget food safety, there was almost nothing my mom could pack that wouldn’t get to be gross tasting to me by the time I was eating. It was PB&J or nothing. Thank goodness all this “peanut free zone” crap didn’t exist yet at the time, or I’d have been on the starvation diet.
The baloney sandwich has gone extinct? Replaced by sushi in a bento box?
I second the pantry thing. We didn’t get a fridge until I was 6 or so and the other major difference was that my mum went shopping nearly every day. You didn’t buy fresh food then leave it for days (or even weeks) before eating it, you got it from the corner shop or the butchers/fishmongers etc and ate it that day or the day after.
You could make a case for the fridge being a major innovation for enabling women to work away from home as they could get all their shopping in one go.
How is it ethnocentric to ask the question “How did/does it work in other times and places?” If someone asked “How did those people live like that? It’s so gross! Ugh!”, I’d see your point. But the question is asked in earnest: “My understanding is that the way I live is vital to my health. But I see that it is clearly not the historical norm. What do I not understand?”. That’s not ethnocentric. That’s open-minded.
Here are 245 pages of shut up.
[Curricula
on
Food Safety
Directorate General of Health Services
Ministry of Health & Family Welfare
Government of India
Nirman Bhavan
New Delhi](http://www.whoindia.org/LinkFiles/Food_Safety_food_safety_curricula.pdf)
ETA: 3MB pdf (it’s kind of a dog)
Remember that news is there to sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Which is going to get you to click on a link to a news article or tune in the the news show or pick up a copy of the magazine: “People’s immune systems make school lunch pretty safe, relatively speaking” or “What deadly bacteria was found in your child’s school lunch?” ?
True, bacteria is on our school lunches. Some of that bacteria even causes illness. But bacteria are very much a dose-dependent poison. Enough bacteria to grow into colonies on a petrie dish (and thus be identified) may or may not be enough bacteria to make you sick.
In other words, we have a media trying to scare us by running stories deliberately meant to make us overestimate the risk of foodborn illness from school lunches so that we read their stories and look at their ads. Kids’ lunches today aren’t any more likely to make a kid sick than our lunches did. Will it sometimes happen? Sure, but not a lot.
What country were you in without an icebox? Not trying to belabor the point. I sometime think only USA-centric. :o
I have seen it said that the source of this confusion between safe food guidelines and people’s experiences is because rules for commercial food production are being applied to personal lunch production.
Or the rules for food safety in a factory or commercial kitchen must be more stringent than needed because the risk of contamination could sicken thousands and your customers include those with reduced immune systems etc.
In a home kitchen the risk is much lower(if contamination happens 1-3 people can get sick) plus you know of any medical risks beyond the norm in your own household.
I guess it would be nice to have risk guidelines adapted to both situations, because I ignore the overly restrictive ones all the time(I’m not throwing this away just because it sat out for 30 minutes it still smells fine etc)
I’m in favor of a law requiring the use of air quotes around the term ‘tuna salad’ if it doesn’t contain mayonnaise.
Back when I was in the US, I bought into the “everything must always be constantly refrigerated OR ELSE!” mindset. Then when I started travelling to lesser developed countries, I was shocked to see how long prepared food sits out at (often very warm and humid) room temperature. This house that I’m living in contains about ten people, depending on what day it is. There is always food on the table, and almost always has yesterday’s leftovers in addition to whatever was newly cooked this morning.
I just went to the dining room and took this picture. There are at least three bowls of leftover meat dishes from yesterday’s dinner. It’s about 15:30 now, so there is a good chance that it will still be there in a few more hours when people start showing up for dinner. That’s day-old meat left out in 95°F (34°C) temperatures and well over 90% humidity and nobody will think twice about eating them. You’d think those conditions would qualify as an incubator for unfriendly bacteria, but in the six months or so that I’ve been here, I have yet to know of anyone in the house complaining about being sick from spoiled food.
So yeah, a few hours of room temperature tuna salad isn’t going to be a problem unless it was already on the edge of rotten to begin with.
US Food Safety codes are designed for a large group of unevenly trained individuals who are willing to fudge and safety margins, using food with an unknown history and for the worst case scenario. They are absurdly conservative for the average home use.
The FDA mandates a uniform 4 hour holding time from 40F - 140F, however, bacterial activity doubles roughly every 18F up to ~120F. That means food held at 100F can last twice as long and food held at 80F can last 4 times as long. That means, even with the absurd USDA safety margins, food held even in a relatively warm room should be good for 16 hours.
That looks divine. I’m totally flying to Bangkok now and stealing your food.
On the Internet, no one can see your air quotes. The term you are looking for is “scare quotes.”
This has been your regularly scheduled Internet pedantry break. You may now return to your original programming.
Someone tell me if I’m misremembering…I seem to remember that we left the opened ketchup bottle out, at room temperature. Same with the mustard. This would have been in the 60s and 70s, and I can’t remember if we were supposed to refrigerate the ketchup and mustard but didn’t, or if it was just generally accepted that these condiments didn’t need to be refrigerated.
I keep my ketchup at room temperature, though to be honest it stays fresher when kept in the refrigerator. But I don’t like cold ketchup, so I deal.
(I don’t think either one have to be kept in the refrigerator.)
You’re going to have to beat me to get it! Seriously yum looking.
That is something I try to keep in mind, actually. “What would a housewife in Indonesia do with this leftover food?” “What would my great-grandmother have done?” The answer is, generally, cover it if it’s fly season and otherwise deal. Maybe cultivate a taste for condiments with high levels of vinegar, capsaicin, garlic and other anti-microbial ingredients in them.
I’ve had gastroenteritis once, following a day when I only ate food from a restaurant. While it was absolutely hellish and I have no wish to repeat it, it doesn’t seem to be a realistic risk from the way I, personally, handle food, so I’m not about to change my ways now.
Overprotected parents are like bad drivers and stupid people. Everyone hates them, but no one is one.
OH MY GOD THAT IS SO DEEP AND TRUE.
Thank you. weeps
ISTR that on some handout I got from the sprog’s school that preparing lunches the night before and storing them in the fridge will make them safer when the kid eats it the next day. It has to do with shortening the time that the food will be out of the fridge. When you think about it, when you make a sandwich, the ingredients will be out for a while, and if you make the sandwich that day, you probably won’t put it in the fridge to cool off; it goes right in the lunchbox where it sits until it’s eaten. But if you make the sandwich the night before and let it sit in the fridge overnight, it’ll be cold when you put it in the lunchbox and thus safer at lunchtime. (And they’d prefer it if you didn’t put an ice pack in their lunchboxes. They’re a hassle to clean up if they leak, and I get the feeling that more than one kid has suffered a goose egg at the hands of some other kid thanks to a well-aimed, frozen ice pack. Those things are hard!)