Regarding the OP, assuming the old bacon was either fried or baked to reasonable doneness, wouldn’t it have been rendered sterile and safe to eat regardless of taste?
Maybe the OP likes flimsy, medium-rare style bacon. Or maybe the raw bacon contaminated a plate that was then used to eat from. Or maybe there was enough licking of spoiled-bacon-slimed fingers to sicken both diners. I don’t know.
(On a related note, I will often come across a particularly succulent-looking morsel of raw bacon as I’m laying the strips out, and will pop that sucker in my mouth. Yum!)
It just seems to me that the heat required to cook bacon, say 300 degrees on up, would neutralize all pathogens within minutes, no?
So back to guessing what happened to the OP, something sloppy could have happened during the prep. Or the eggs were also bad and under-cooked to boot. Also, wouldn’t bad bacon emit a smelly signal right off the bat? How does one cook and eat bacon without noticing that it has spoiled?
Something’s fishy here and it merits further investigation!
In the case of botulinum toxin, however, boiling water will inactivate it within 10 minutes. I imagine that baking or frying temperatures would do it in even less time. Even if the spores survive, they’re harmless unless you let them sit around long enough to bloom and unleash their poison, which I gather is unlikely in an oxygen-rich environment like, say, on a kitchen counter.
Maybe aceplace57 will come back and fill us in on some details. Since pork products in general are safe to eat after cooking beyond 145 degrees, I think we still need to consider that the illness was caused by something else altogether, as some have suggested, or a lapse in safe food handling.
I’m skeptical that fully cooked bacon was the culprit.
My leftover Thanksgiving turkey lasted three weeks, at refrigerator temperature. A couple days ago, I got out the last piece, and it felt sticky to the touch. So I rinsed it off under hot tapwater, cut about half of it up for a stirfry, and ate it with no ill effects. Today I fond the other remaining half, it had gotten sticky again, so I rinsed it again and made a sandwich, on white bread, with lettuce, mayo and plenty of salt, with a glass of milk. That was nine hours ago and I’m fine. So my roasted turkey meat, just in the fridge in a covered plastic container, lasted three weeks and remained perfectly safe to eat.
“Strong off-odors, not slime, indicate spoilage,” says Brian Nummer, Ph.D., a food-safety professor at Utah State University in a Men’s Health blurb about bad turkey.
Horses and zebras notwithstanding, the OP clearly stated that there was no visible mold when the bacon was eaten. It was a week later when the mold was noticed, which should not be too surprising for an opened package five weeks past its expiration.
Maybe I’m assuming too much to think that spoiled meat of any kind would give some obvious clues via smell, appearance, texture and/or taste, but the OP mentioned none of these from the suspected sample of bacon at the time it was eaten. And like all uncooked meats, even fresh raw bacon can be risky, even lethal, if handled inappropriately. We’re splitting hairs here maybe, but that’s the reason I suggested the possibility of cross-contamination upthread.
Note to kayaker, I did some more homework. Although botulism from cooked bacon is unlikely, you’re right that the toxins of some bugs, notably Staph aureus, are heat-resistant enough to perhaps survive a long pan-fry. But this still brings me back to the original issue of eating rotten meat without knowing it.
On a related note, what jtur88 does with his turkey is reckless.
I don’t get this board. Everyone acting like we all don’t eat out of dumpsters like we’re goddamned Kings and Queens. Please. You don’t fool me. A prom night dumpster baby with some paprika and garlic tastes just like chicken and you all know it.
If you grew up in a stye, never wore pants, and only ate chicken shit (ya feeds da pigs da chicken shit, and feeds da chickens da pig shit), you’d go bad quickly too, just like all the other deli-quents.